Marc Laidlaw

400 BOYS

AND 50 MORE

Short Stories

For My Parents

INTRODUCTION: 400 + 50 = 51

This collection contains 51 stories, well over a quarter of a million words, written over approximately 40 years, and assembled by the author, which is to say me, a fan of commas, and also afterthoughts. Most have been previously published, but apart from the occasional appearance in an anthology, they have never been collected in whole or even in part. Recently I made them all freely available at my website, marclaidlaw.com, rescuing numerous texts from paper and various obsolete electronic media; therefore it should be considered that this ebook exists mainly for the convenience of those who don’t particularly enjoy reading from a website and prefer the traditional, old-fashioned electronic book experience just the way Nikola Gutenberg intended it.

The decision to choose 50 additional tales to accompany the titular “400 Boys” is largely but not entirely based on my desire to have another zero in the title. Who doesn’t love more zeroes? I could have (and probably should have) included fewer stories; and with a bit more wincing I could have added several more. At the moment I’m on the verge of talking myself into 400 Boys and 40 More, a far more felicitous arrangement of numerals; or maybe I’ll settle in for another viewing of The 400 Blows (a title a much younger me once suspected a much older Truffaut had stolen from him). But no! My resolve is firm. 50—I mean 51—it is!

For now anyway.

Since this is an ebook, and essentially software, I intend, laziness permitting, to continue patching the collection, adding more recent stories without altering the title (though I will append a changelist). I suppose it’s possible that someday the title may have to be changed to “60 More” and then “70 More”; and in some distant future, provided I remain productive into a rich immortality, “Infinitely More.” But for now I’m sticking with 50. Which is to say, 51. I already have some ideas about 52 and 53.

Since my goal was to collect most of my stories in one place, and to exert thereafter very little editorial judgment, I decided to group them more or less in the order they were written and/or published. I have no particular thesis or argument to advance that would be strengthened by presenting them in any other sequence. The weakness of this approach is that the early stories are naturally weaker than the later ones. I have made no attempt to hide this structural defect. I trust that by arranging them by decade, I’ve provided a hint to the reader of what they are likely to find when they wade in at any particular point of their own choosing.

I include here no collaborations, since those have mostly been available in the collected works of my partners. I include no tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe, the gargoyle-handed bard, since I intend to collect those separately as The Gargoyle’s Handbook (“Hello, publishers! All serious offers entertained!). Nor will you find any stories I can’t bear to reread. While I had initially planned to present a “Compleat Laidlaw,” ultimately I could not bring myself to exhume a handful of lackluster stories which well deserve their current obscurity. A few I am not especially fond of were spared excision on account of kind words spoken in their defense by others over the past few decades, but no one has ever stepped forward in favor of “Buzzy Gone Blue” or others nearly as embarrassing. There is one very recent story, “Roguelike,” which I had intended to include; but it depends on typographic gimmickry, and given my limited self-publishing skills, I could not ensure it would hold up on various devices.

While providing a bit of context for each decade, I have mainly refrained from commenting on the individual stories. On my website, where these stories also appear, I have been adding occasional notes as anecdotes occur to me. You might look there for further illumination.

May you find here whatever it is you expect of me. If your minimum expectation is a quarter of a million words, most of them legible, prepare to have your expectations exceeded!

THE SEVENTIES: FAIL EARLY

What is there to say about the early years of any career, especially when they coincide with grade school, junior high, and high school?

Not much.

For some reason, I thought of myself as a writer almost as soon as I was aware of myself at all. Some of my earliest memories are of writing and illustrating (mostly horrendous) stories. My Dad sent my brother and me off to sleep with “The Telltale Heart,” my mother with encounters at the Moria Gate. The stories gave me nightmares. The nightmares gave me stories. I wrote quite a few about guests checking into Room 13 and being scared to death by nightly visitations from a bloody, glowing dagger which I had completely plagiarized from Rockwell Kent’s drawing of Macbeth in my parents’ copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. That illustration is still my favorite of Shakespeare’s works.

When, in 1970, I turned 10, my grandfather gave me a refurbished Underwood typewriter, heavy as a bank vault, and I set out in earnest to pursue my professional career, armed with all the advice Writer’s Digest could offer, and also a briefcase full of paperclips. Through the remaining years of elementary school, on into junior high and high school, I churned out story after story, and visited them on various hapless editors listed in Writer’s Digest, including a bemused editor for The Elks Magazine. Yes, if your name was anywhere near the masthead of an obscure club journal, you were in danger of receiving one of my beautifully typed onionskin manuscripts containing shallow yet belabored tales of catastrophic futures, rocketship countdowns, and blob monsters. I read somewhere that the average writer collects about 70 rejections before making a sale. My records, which I kept assiduously at that time, reflect I was perfectly average.

Toward the end of high school, I began placing stories in fanzines which paid in contributor copies (no one had yet learned to call this “exposure”). I encountered many other young writers in similar straits, and at similar points in their careers; among them I now number some of my oldest friends. As I headed off to college, this career thing finally began to click, and I made my first actual sales involving cash money—and might I add, it went a lot farther then! Two paragraphs in Amazing Astronautical Adventures paid six month’s rent on a luxurious bachelor pad, with plenty left over for champagne, or so I was told. I bitterly regretted that school posed such an interruption to my imminent success, as I felt myself perfectly poised to be a wealthy and famous bachelor. Bestsellerdom was just around the corner, as certain as anything had ever been.

And then, just like that, the Seventies ended!

Out of a hundred execrable efforts, including several novels long since reduced to ash, I include here three pieces from the very end of this innocent age.

SPAWN OF THE RUINS

I was disturbed from my leisurely pursuit of Leandro’s The Abstractions and Essence of Kaufer’s “Basaltic Culture” As Related to Quantum Mathematics, by the irritating jangle of my telephone. Setting that exquisitely rare and absorbing tome aside, I reached for the phone with one hand, while relighting my pipe with the other—not an easy thing to do, I assure you, as I have very often severely singed my moustache and caused the skin of my face great pain in so doing.

I was not at all displeased to discover that the caller was one Miss Avander, a charming young lady who dwelled alone—and vulnerably, I might add—in a small house a short distance down the avenue from my own. I was somewhat more than acquainted with Miss Avander, as in the past we had spent the long evenings in fascinating and intellectually stimulating conversations, and as these visits had been conducted in both of our homes, I was well familiar with her location.

“Ah, Miss Avander,” I enthused, letting the warmth I felt blend with the fine natural resonance of my voice, “it is indeed enchanting to hear your lovely voice—for indeed it remains lovely even through this awful electrical convenience: the telephone!”

“You are too kind, Mr. Leandro, to a poor, lonely maid such as myself,” Miss Avander argued. “Why, how lucky I am to have one such as yourself for a neighbor.”

“Indeed. And how lucky am I!”

“But, Mr. Leandro, I call to beg from you a favor.”

“Ah, and what might this favor be, madame?”

“Oh, in truth it is no more than an overloaded fuse. The poor thing was simply not strong enough to bear the energy being used by my many electrical appliances; so it burnt out, and I have been plunged into the utter eternal darkness of this place.”

“Miss Avander, you have a delightful way with words.”

“Yes, as you yourself have on occasion noted. But what of the tragically burnt-out fuse? Have you a spare?”

“Indeed yes, I believe I have, Miss Avander—and I shall be entirely delighted to deliver it—in person—to your very door.”

“You are a kind soul, Mr. Leandro.”

“Thank you, Miss Avander. I think I shall now pursue that half-fabled box of fuses which I know lurks somewhere within my house—most probably within a kitchen drawer! Now I shall bid you adieu—”

“But to appear soon at my door, of course!”

“Of course.”

“Adieu, then, Monsieur Leandro.”

“Madame,” I firmly but gently reprimanded, “I am not a Frenchman.”

* * *

When I had finally uncovered the rumored fuses—buried beneath a clutter of unused tacks and rubber bands—I packed them safely into my pocket, where they thumped reassuringly in that reassuring way in which fuses thump. As I was merely out for a short jaunt through the darkness of the Ruins, I did not tidy myself up in any great manner. But as I expected to be later entertained by Miss Avander—at the completion of my task, of course—I did give my hair a swift combing-through, and apply a bit of my best cologne to certain strategically-located areas of my enviable physique.

Though I had heard rumors that it was the Time of Spawning in the Ruins again, I did not bother to arm myself with anything other than a letter-opener—the same which had been given to me by Miss Avander only a few months before. Though there were possible dangers of being confronted in the Ruins by maniacal, rogue Zhodes or Lymmpospophae in their mating frenzies, it is generally considered against gentlemanly principles (and one must always concern one’s self with principles!) to venture even into dangerous areas armed with anything other than a sharp object which had been the gift of a lady. Pistols at night cannot even be discussed under such circumstances!

Flashlights, too, I find ungentlemanly—so instead I placed a lit candle into an ornate metal holder, and used this as my guiding light. The Ruins, which lie at the utmost bottom of the Subterranean Chasms, have probably never experienced a draught of any natural kind in all their uncounted aeons of existence, and so I feared not that the candle might be extinguished by a gust of wind while I ventured to Miss Avander’s house.

And, so equipped, I stepped out into the fathomless dark, and traced my way down the avenue.

My house was built precisely at the edge of the Ruins, but Miss Avander’s place of residence had been erected in the midst of the Ruins themselves. Thus I set along that antique avenue—through the unimaginable blacknesses of this subterranean world—with but a single candle to light my way. I wondered if I would go mad should my candle blow out, as so many others had done in these depths—and to my dismay I then discovered that I had neglected to bring a single match with me. However, I resolved not to let this hinder me, and I continued without a thought to my personal safety—knowing that Miss Avander sat patiently awaiting me within the Ruins, her home plunged momentarily into darkness. How brave she had sounded on the phone. Certainly I could strive to be half as brave as to walk a short distance without a spare match!

And now the Ruins rose about the ancient avenue, and disappeared into the darkness overhead that the candle’s feeble light could not illuminate. They were like row upon row of black dingy storefronts, leering over the avenue with empty yawning windows. The avenue, I noted, seemed much reduced in size when compared to those prehistoric Ruins. But I proceeded, undaunted, past those eternally dismal Ruins—being sure not to quicken my step—and came at last to the more ruinous Ruins. Those were jagged pillars—teeth, if you will—that were the remnants of structures more ancient than those of the blocky buildings. They sprang from the ground at irregular but frequent intervals, and the flickering candlelight caused them to leap and caper annoyingly.

Soon, I knew, I would come to Miss Avander’s house. But first, as you shall see, I was to have a not entirely pleasant adventure.

For as I walked through the more disordered Ruins, I looked above and within them, and thus did not see that which caused me to stumble a moment later, almost extinguishing my candle. I set my candle upon the ground, and turned to examine the obstacle in the avenue.

It was a human body, bent at awkward angles, and unpleasantly mangled beyond recognition. Dressed, it was, in a white uniform with black stripes—now dreadfully stained and discolored—which I recognized as the uniform of a newspaper boy. Indeed, as I looked closer, I found that the body was sprawled atop the bag of the carrier. Within this bag I found a single newspaper—mine, as I was the last customer on the boy’s route—bearing the blatant headline: SPAWNING SEASON BEGINS.

It was all very tragic, for the poor boy had died—recently, judging from the date on the paper—in delivering my newspaper. Perhaps if I had canceled my subscription this might never have occurred, for I rarely read the newspaper, and almost never even checked to see if it had been delivered. But then, things are always much simpler in retrospect.

As I rose from the awful lich, I noted the six-taloned claw marks on its arm, and realized the full unpleasantness of the situation. The boy had obviously been killed by a Zhode in its mating frenzy. He should have paid closer attention to the headlines he carried, for all parts of the Chasms—though particularly the Ruins—are exceedingly dangerous during the Time of Spawning.

And that latter thought brought me to immediate alertness, aware instantaneously of my surroundings. There was a low hooting in the Ruins before me… and I recognized that hooting as the mating call of the Lymmpospopha!

Instantly my letter-opener was in my hand—and I shivered as the hoot was answered, from behind me, with the high- pitched “Da-li! Da-li!” of the courting Zhode!

With my admirable presence of mind, I turned parallel to the avenue, so that I could watch the Ruins on either side. Shadows moved within, approaching the avenue—and, simultaneously, me. To my left there was a final shriek of “Da-li!” and a huge, swollen Zhode jumped onto the avenue beside me. Thankfully, it didn’t see me immediately, as it was looking for its mate, the Lymmpospopha. And, a moment later, that infamous creature too lumbered heavily onto the path beside me, hooting through the single orifice in its tiny, bulbous head.

However, with the arrival of the Lymmpospopha, my presence could no longer remain a secret. This creature spotted me immediately, and gave an enquiring hoot in my direction, thereby pointing me out to the Zhode, who seemed rather disturbed that I should be observing this annual ritual. Thinking of poor Miss Avander—desperately waiting for my fuses—I slashed out with the letter-opener, and thus removed the Lymmpospopha’s tiny head from its gelatinous “shoulders.”

The poor creature staggered backward into the Ruins, spouting a pale ichor that was not exceedingly pleasant to the nose. Its enraged mate, the Zhode, now leaped at me, so that I was forced to deliver a rather cunningly-placed, fatal stab to its tentacular mass. It, too, fell shrieking into the Ruins, and in the distance I could now hear other things coming to investigate.

Thinking it wise to bring Miss Avander her fuses as swiftly as possible, I grabbed up my candle, smoothed down my hair, and dashed down the impossibly ancient avenue in the direction of that fair lady’s home.

Now imagine my genuine surprise when, approaching Miss Avander’s tiny cottage, I discovered bright lights pouring brightly forth from all her windows—and even a porch light burning cheerily above her red door! I rang the doorbell, thinking it very peculiar that there should be electric bulbs glowing when the fuse had burnt out.

The door at last opened wide, revealing a very lovely Miss Avander dressed in a beautiful blue gown. Needless to say, there were electric lights burning within the house, too.

(And here I must make a very unpleasant statement—for it appears I have, most scandalously, lied to you. Miss Avander had not really burnt out a fuse—and I, you see, had not truly believed her story quite as much as I had hinted earlier. Indeed, I had not even brought fuses with me, for the thumping box in my pocket turned out to contain chocolate bon-bons, and these I duly presented to Miss Avander.)

“Ah, Mr. Leandro,” she smiled, “do come in. Did you have a pleasant journey through the Ruins?”

“Thank you, Miss Avander. As a matter of fact, my journey was very unsettling, for I discovered the corpse of a paper carrier, and have aggravated the spawning hordes without. Even now, I fear, they march upon your home—hoping to destroy us both.”

“Oh, do sit down, Mr. Leandro. What an awful tale. Care for a mint? And what do you suggest we do?”

“Thank you. I suggest that we flee from here, immediately, and return to my house, where I am properly prepared for such an attack. Unless, of course, you happen to have a cache of weapons hidden somewhere?”

“Here, let me help you loosen your coat. No, I fear I have no weapons aside from the letter-opener you gave me last year. But will you not stay?”

“Well, er, now that you bring it up, perhaps I could do with a short rest. We can certainly leave in a few moments, just as easily.”

“I’m glad… that you see it in such… a manner… Mr. Leandro.”

“Yes, I believe a few moments… will not hurt… Miss… Miss…”

“Avander.”

But then, just as we had begun an evening of fascinating, intelligent discussion, Miss Avander’s front door—the bright red one, you may recall—splintered into pieces. A six-taloned claw smashed through without any regard to the high cost of finely-crafted doors, and withdrew again.

“Well,” said I, “perhaps we would be just as well off to depart immediately. Miss Avander, have you a fresh candle?”

“I’m sorry,” Miss Avander admitted, “I have naught but a flashlight.”

“Well, all right, but you must carry it. And now, out the back exit!”

We hurried through Miss Avander’s home, and she opened wide that narrow door in her kitchen which led—by means of a secret tunnel—through some of the Ruins, and onto the avenue a short distance from Miss Avander’s house. For various reasons, this exit had proved indispensible on certain occasions when Miss Avander had still been “Mrs.” Avander.

We emerged, minutes later, onto the avenue, to see a mob of hooting Lymmpospophae and shrieking Zhodes overwhelming Miss Avander’s tiny home. To our dismay, we were spotted immediately by one member of the crowd, who hooted and drew us to the attention of the others.

“Now, Miss Avander,” I recommended, “we must run—and don’t trip on the newspaper carrier.”

We dashed off down the avenue, while behind us the actions of the spawning things were rechanneled to pursuing us. In a few minutes we came to the blocky, younger Ruins, and though we ran through these as quickly as we could, the sounds of pursuit grew ever louder behind us.

Moments later, we were out of the Ruins, and I saw, in the distance, the lights of my house. We raced up the walkway, flung open the front door, and locked ourselves within. I went immediately to a panel set in the wall beside the door, and flipped on all the outside flood lights—as the Zhodes and Lymmpospophae dislike light of any sort. Through the window I saw figures gathering in the shadows; hoots and cries of “Da-li! Da-li!” came repeatedly to my ears. The lights wouldn’t hold them off for very much longer, and now only my ingenuity—and preparation—would save us.

I found another button-dotted panel, hidden behind one of my more sensitive Leandro originals, and this proved the key to our salvation.

“Miss Avander,” I said, “what I might do is a very ungentlemanly thing, and utterly immoral besides. So I would appreciate it if you would press these buttons in my stead.”

Miss Avander graciously acquiesced, and placed her dainty finger one by one on each of the buttons, and pushed them. And one by one, coincident with the pressing of the respective buttons, there were unpleasant explosions outside in the shadows all around my house.

These were followed by utterly awful thumps on the roof as the hordes without were demolished by my carefully placed explosives, and flung every which way; it took us three days to clean up the resultant, widespread mess. As Miss Avander’s house had been destroyed by the enraged beasts, she remained as a guest in my house—and thus was able to assist with repairs, as well as provide engaging conversation.

We have not since been bothered by Zhodes or Lymmpospophae, and you people inform me that this is because both of these rare species are now extinct.

Certainly, I could not have foreseen that during that particular part of the season, the mass-migration that you call the Influx had begun, thus bringing all members of both species into the Ruins. And I certainly could not have guessed that they would all attack my home simultaneously, and hence be destroyed by my defenses.

Yes, I am sorry that they are extinct—for such an occurrence is always a tragic thing—but how can you blame me for their extinction? After all, it was Miss Avander who pushed the buttons!

* * *

“Spawn of the Ruins” copyright 1977 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Shayol #1 (November 1977), edited by Patricia Cadigan and Arnie Fenner.

TISSUE

“Here,” Daniel said, handing Paula the photograph. “Take a look at this, then tell me you still want to meet my father.”

Paula hefted it in one hand; it was framed in dark wood, covered with a heavy rectangle of glass. A fringe of dust clung to the glass’s edges, under the frame, blurring the borders of the photograph into a spidery haze.

“What is it? Who is it?”

“Us. My family.”

“But there’s only…”

Paula’s words faded away as she stared at the photograph, trying to understand. Squinting her eyes, polishing the glass—nothing seemed to resolve it. It was merely a simple figure, a person, but as blotched and mottled as an old wall, with sharply ragged edges that unsettled Paula: she couldn’t focus, it was like looking through a prism. There was a disturbing disparity within it, too; abrupt internal changes of tone and texture.

“Your family?” she repeated.

Daniel nodded, looking straight ahead at the road as he drove. The shadows were lengthening, the gloom descending. Through the endless stand of trees along the roadside, fields and hills were visible.

“It’s a composite,” he said. “You know, like a collage.” He glanced down at the photograph and pointed at the figure’s left hand. “That’s my hand. The right one’s my mother’s.”

“What?”

“And the chin, there, is my sister’s. That’s my brother’s… forehead, I think, yeah—and that’s his nose, too. The clothes, I—I’m not sure.”

“And the eyes?”

“My father’s.”

“Daniel, what is this? I mean, why?”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Paula found herself staring at his left hand. The one from the picture.

“Daniel, why?”

He shook his head. “My father’s a madman, that’s why. No reason for it, he’s just… Well, yeah, to him there’s a reason. This, to him, shows us as a group—close-knit. “One optimally functioning individual organism,” he used to say.

Paula looked at the picture with distaste, then slid it back into the briefcase from which Daniel had taken it.

“It’s grotesque,” she said, rubbing dust from her hands.

“He sent that to me three years ago, when I had just moved away from home. Made it out of old photographs, begging me to come back. God, he must have worked on that thing for weeks—the joins are almost invisible.”

He fell silent, perhaps watching the road for their turn-off, perhaps just thinking. After a while he sighed, shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why I”m doing this—why I’m giving in and going back after all this time.”

Paula moved closer and put her hand on his arm. “He’s human—he’s alone. Your mother just died. You didn’t even go to the funeral, Daniel—I think this is the least you can do. It’s only for a few days.”

Daniel looked resentfully thoughtful. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that started the whole thing.”

“What?”

“Loneliness. He must be awfully lonely, though, to have come up with his obsessions. He used to play with a jigsaw puzzle, Paula, made entirely out of a shattered pane of glass. For hours. And then that… thing.” He gestured towards the briefcase, but Paula knew he meant what was in it.

“You’ll survive,” she said.

“Yeah. To survive. That’s the whole thing.”

There was another silence as he considered this.

“Funny,” he said presently. “That’s exactly what my father was always saying.”

* * *

The shadows had swallowed the old farmhouse by the time they found it, trapped in ancient trees at the end of a rough dirt road. The sun was gone, only a pale wash of orange light marking the direction in which it had sunk. Paula looked for a sign of light or life around the weathered building, but found only flooding blackness, shining where it was a window, splintered and peeling where it was the front door.

Daniel stopped the car and stretched back in his seat, yawning. “I feel like I’ve been driving for a month.”

“You look it, too,” said Paula. “I offered to drive…”

He shrugged. “I”ll get to sleep early tonight,” he said, pushing open the door. They got out of the car, into the quiet grey evening.

“Is anyone home?” Paula asked as Daniel came around the car.

“With my luck, yes. Come on.”

They walked through a fringe of dead grass, then carefully up the rotten steps. Daniel paused at the top, stepping back on the step beneath him. It creaked and thumped. Creaked and thumped. Daniel smiled nostalgically. Paula reminded herself that he had grown up in this house, out here in the middle of nowhere, far from the city and the campus where she had met him, where they were now living together. Daniel never spoke of his childhood or family, for reasons Paula was unsure of. He seemed bothered by his past, and perhaps somewhat afraid of it.

Across the porch, the door was a panel of emptiness, suddenly creaking as it opened. Paula tried to look through the widening gap; she jerked back as something pale came into view.

“Dad?”

The voice that replied was as worn and weathered as the house: “Daniel, son, you’ve come. I knew you would.” The dim pale head bobbed and nodded in the darkness, coarse grey hair stirring. Something white fluttered into view, lower in the frame of darkness: a hand. Daniel’s father was coming out.

“Um, I’m sorry I didn’t make the funeral, Dad. I was really busy with school and my job… uh…”

And here he came, swimming through the gloom, both white hands coming forward like fish, grasping Daniel. Paula saw the hunched dark figure of the old man only dimly; her eyes were fastened on those hands. They clutched, grabbed, prodded Daniel, exploring as if hungry. It was vaguely revolting. Daniel stood motionless; he had determined to be firm with his father, now he was faltering.

“Dad…”

Daniel pushed away one flabby hand but it was clever; it twisted, writhed, locked around his own. Paula gasped. The sluggish white fingers intertwined with Daniel’s. He looked up at her, aghast, silently crying for help.

“Uh, hello,” Paula blurted, stepping towards them.

The hands jerked, stopped. The old man came around.

“Who are you? Daniel, who is this?”

“Dad, this is Paula, I told you about her. We’re living together.”

Paula started to extend her hand. She remembered what might meet it, and drew away. “Hello.”

“Living together?” Daniel’s father said, watching him. “Not married?”

“Uh, no, Dad. Not yet, anyway.”

“Good… good. Good. It would weaken the bond, break the bond between us.” He did not even look at Paula again. His hands returned to Daniel, though not so frantically this time. They guided him forward into the house. Paula followed, shutting the door behind her, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark. When her vision had cleared, she could see Daniel and his father vaguely limned against a distant doorway; there was light beyond.

When she caught up, they were seating themselves on an antique sofa. It had been poorly kept; springs and padding spilled through in places. The room around them had been equally neglected; darkness lay upon it like soot. A single dull lamp glowed beside the sofa.

Daniel caught Paula’s eye when she entered, warning her away from them. She sat in a nearby chair. Daniel was shrugging away the proddings of his father, fighting off the creeping fingers. But they kept coming, peering around the long shadows, then hurrying across Daniel while he sat at last unmoving, silent.

“We… we were terribly sorry to hear about your wife,” said Paula. The sound of her words muffled the rustling noises.

“Hm?” The old man sat up, leaving Daniel for a moment. His eyes were sharp, intense. “Yes, it’s bad… bad. She and I, we were—close, towards the end. Locked. Like this.” He clasped his two puffy hands together before his face, staring at them.

Daniel took this opportunity to move to a chair beside Paula, where his father could not follow. The old man hunched after him, hands straining, but didn’t rise.

“Daniel, come back here. Sit beside me.”

“Uh, I think I’d better stay right here, Dad.”

“Ah.” The old man hissed like a serpent. “Stubborn. You were always stubborn—all of you. Your sister, your brother, they both resisted. Look what happened to them.”

Daniel looked nervously away from the old man’s black stare. “Don’t talk about Louise like that, dad. It’s all over now. And it had nothing to do with stubbornness.”

“Nothing? She ran away, Daniel, as you all did. She could not function, Daniel, she could not maintain herself. No more than the liver, the heart, the lungs, can function outside of the body. No more than the individual cells can function outside of the tissue that maintains them; even as this tissue is dependent on the organ it contributes to; as this organ in turn is dependent on all other organs to keep the whole intact.”

Paula had gone rigid in her chair, watching the old man speak. Suddenly that hanging black gaze turned to her.

“You,” he said. “Do you know how an organism survives?”

“Pardon me?” she said weakly.

“It survives because its components work together, each one specialized towards its specific contribution to the organism. Specialization, yes. Louise was specialized; she did not survive.”

Daniel sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Dad, it wasn’t specialization. It was drugs. She made some mistakes.”

“And your brother?”

“What about him? He’s doing fine. He has his own business now, he seems to be happy.”

“But he deserted us! He threatened the existence of us all. Your sister deteriorated. Your mother crumbled. And then you…”

“What about me?”

The old man shrugged. “You returned. We still have a chance.”

Paula, through all this, said nothing. But she was thinking: My God. My God.

“I’m going to be going home, Dad. I’m not staying very long.”

The old man snapped, “What?”

“I told you that in my letter. I’m only staying for a day or two.”

“But you can’t go back! You—you can’t! Otherwise I have no chance—not alone. Nor you either, Daniel.”

“Look, Dad—”

“Together we can survive, perhaps recover. And… and maybe your brother will return.”

“He’s raising a family.”

“Ah, see?” He raised one pallid finger. “He has learned!”

“Maybe we’d better not stay at all,” said Daniel, rising. His features had gone hard, faced with all this. Easier to run than worry about it.

“No!” This was a bleat, a plea, escaping from the old man as if he had been punctured. His expression, too, was wounded. “Daniel, you can’t…”

Paula rose and touched Daniel gently on the arm until he turned to her. Thank God he hadn’t pulled away from her touch.

“Daniel,” she said, “it’s really getting late. I don’t think you should do any more driving tonight.”

Daniel searched her expression, saw only concern. He nodded.

“We’ll stay the night then, Dad. But we’re leaving in the morning.”

The old man started forward, then sank back in apparent despair. His breath was loud and labored, wheezing; his hands crouched upon his knees, waiting for Daniel to stray near.

“You can’t leave me, Daniel. I need you to survive, I need you!” His eyes glimmered, turning to Paula. “You know, don’t you? That’s why you’re taking him from me… to strengthen yourself. Well you’ll never have him. He’s mine. Only mine.”

The words slid into Paula like a blade of ice, malevolent in their cold precision. She felt weak.

“I—” she began. “Honestly, it’s nothing like that. I don’t want Daniel that way.”

The worm-white head rotated. “Then you are a fool.”

“Paula,” Daniel repeated, “maybe we’d better leave right I now.”

“Haven’t you heard what I’ve said? You mustn’t leave!” Again, pain had replaced malicious insanity on the old man’s pale features. Paula felt sorry for him.

“Daniel,” she said, “just the night. It’s really too late to leave.”

Daniel looked once at the poised hands of his father. Then he sighed, tensely, and nodded. “But I don’t want to hear any more of this, Dad. One more word of it and we’re going for sure.”

He turned back to Paula. “Come on, I’ll show you to your room. Hopefully there’s something to eat around here.”

They started to leave, stepping towards another dark doorway.

“Daniel.” The voice was cold again, chilling. They stopped and looked back at the old man.

“You forget,” he said, eyes narrowing, face hardening. “I’m stronger than you. I always was. You cannot resist the organism.”

Paula felt Daniel’s muscles tighten beneath her hand.

“Good night, Dad,” he said. They walked out.

* * *

Much later, in the darkened hallway upstairs, Daniel apologized again.

“He’s gotten worse, Paula—worse than I had ever expected.” Daniel was nervous, his expression intensely bothered.

“It’s all right, Daniel, really. Things happen to people as they get old.”

Daniel pulled her closer to him. It was cold in the drafty darkness, only the feeble grey moonlight trickling in through the window at the end of the hall. But the embrace was not warming; Daniel seemed to be protecting himself with Paula.

“It’s as if he wants to swallow me—the way he keeps touching and grabbing. So… so greedy! I wouldn’t have come back if I thought he’d be this way.”

“What did he used to be like?” Paula asked.

She looked up at Daniel, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were fixed on the door to his father’s room, where a narrow fringe of light spread into the hall from under the door. His gaze seemed clouded, distant; he was remembering something. Something unpleasant.

“What is It, Daniel?”

He shook his head, slightly disgusted. It was the look he always got when she asked him about his childhood. She could feel his heart pounding against her breasts.

“Daniel, please, what’s wrong?”

“I—I never told you. I never thought I’d tell anyone.” She began to urge him on, but he continued without prompting.

“When I was a kid, I came out here one night—I’d had a nightmare, I think. It was late. I thought I heard noises in my parents’s room; the light was coming out just like it is now. I knocked, but no one answered, so I opened the door—just a little, you know?—and started to go in.

“They were—they—just lying there, my mother and my father, wrapped around each other, and the light was so bright I wasn’t sure that—that it was my mother there—

“I thought it was my sister, Paula!”

Paula caught her breath, then instantly relaxed. Daniel had been young—he’d seen his parents having sex. Such experiences often led to traumas, delusions. She could imagine it lurking in his mind all these years, breaking free now. Daniel was trembling.

“I yelled,” he continued. “I remember yelling. But… they didn’t even move. They just lay there until I ran away.”

He paused. Then, “It wasn’t my sister, of course. It couldn’t have been, I can’t believe it. She and my mother had the same color of hair, and that was all I could see; the light was so bright, they were so close together… not moving. But I thought, for just a moment, that he…” Daniel looked towards the door and shuddered again.

“Daniel, do you want me to stay with you tonight?”

“What? Oh, no, that’s all right.” He forced a laugh. “Might be a little too hard on my dad. Maybe later, when he’s asleep, you can sneak over…”

She yawned uncontrollably. “Maybe. If I can stay awake.” They kissed and said goodnight. Daniel parted with obvious reluctance, then went through the door into his room, closing it softly behind him. Paula looked down the hall, where light still spilled from beneath his father’s door. Thank God she was on the other side of Daniel; he was between her and that old man. Daniel’s story was ridiculous, of course: a childhood hallucination, magnified by the years. Things like that… incest… just didn’t happen.

She slipped into her own room, and was somewhat dismayed to find that the lock didn’t work. It needed a key that was nowhere to be found. Just another inconvenience among many. She was surprised, actually, that this place even had electricity. The room itself was dusty and suffocating, but she supposed she could stand it for one night.

In a minute she was in bed, trying to warm herself, the small table lamp shut off. When the sounds of her settling in had faded, the darkness swarmed around her uncomfortably, creaking and breathing in the manner of such old houses. She tried to ignore it, suddenly glad that they had stayed the night. Another nap in the car and she would have gone mad. At least she had been able to shower here. The old man was bearable when she didn’t have to confront him directly.

Presently she drifted off, breathing with the house, her thoughts muffled by its thick atmosphere. But her sleep was restless, uncertain.

Paula was never positive she had slept at all when she realized that she was wide awake again. The stillness was incredible. The house was holding its breath. She sat up, certain that something had jarred her from sleep. A noise.

There. Perhaps from Daniel’s room, perhaps from the hall. Perhaps trailing from the hall into Daniel’s room…

Suddenly Paula was certain she’d heard a door shut. And—footsteps? But where were they going? Where had they been?

Those sounds were clear in the swollen darkness. But after a moment came less certain ones—rising and falling, always soft, as deceptive as the rush of blood in her ears. She was hearing things. No. Paula shook her head. She did not imagine things. Straining her ears, the sounds resolved themselves.

Voices. From Daniel’s room.

They stopped.

Paula waited; heard nothing. A slight dragging sound that might have been the night passing through her mind. A dull footstep. And then, quite distinctly, three words, in the old man’s voice:

“I need you!”

And creaking.

Paula was out of bed in an instant, hurrying quietly across the floor. She didn’t trust that old man, not for a minute, not alone with Daniel. She found the door, jerked on the knob—

It was locked.

Paula remembered the sound that had awakened her; it returned very clearly now that she could place it. It had clicked, metallically. A lock engaging.

She pounded once on the door. Again, louder, tugging at the knob.

And still not a sound from the other room.

“Daniel, Daniel!” Paula began to sob, wishing that there would be another sound, Daniel’s voice.

The door. Quieting, she returned her attention to it. The lock didn’t seem terribly strong, it was old. For a minute she considered throwing herself against the door, but it opened the wrong way. Chanting Daniel’s name, she wrenched at the knob, pulling it back with all her strength. It seemed to give a little. Paula glanced back into the room, hoping for something useful. Her hand mirror glimmered on the table, reflecting moonlight. It was heavy, had a sturdy handle.

In a moment she was cracking the doorframe with it, chipping away the splintered wood, ripping and tearing. There was a grinding, and she yanked on the doorknob and the door crashed open, stunning her. She stood for just a second, considering the darkened hall beyond, then moved forward, into it, the mirror dropping from her fingers.

No sound from Daniel’s room. None at all. Not through all her screaming and pounding and thundering… nothing.

“Daniel?” she called softly. She stopped outside his door, listening. Everything was grey and dim, shrouded in shadows. “Daniel?”

Before she could reason with herself, she had turned the knob, had found it unlocked, had opened the door and entered.

Entered.

“Daniel?”

On the bed, something grey, tangled in blankets, two shapes. God help her, she was going forward, approaching the bed.

“Please, Daniel, are you all right?” The words came as a whimper.

She was at the bedside, eyes squinted with fear, so that all she could see was the two of them, vaguely, Daniel and his father pressed close together as if… as if kissing, or making love, his father on top.

Down in the gloom, a huge spider, almost filling the bed.

Her eyes closed.

“Daniel—”

Her hand went forward, to touch. Gingerly.

“Please—”

And there, on top, was the back of the old man’s head, his hair coarse around her fingers. She moved her hand down, consciously, forcing it to touch his ear, and pass around it, still down. Over a rough cheek, withered skin. Skin that abruptly smoothed; skin that continued, unbroken…

Unbroken…

Straight to another cheek, another ear, and the back of Daniel’s head.

* * *

“Tissue” copyright 1980 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in New Terrors #1 (1980), edited by Ramsey Campbell.

RATTLEGROUND

Crawling down the fire-scarred steel corridors of the enemy’s lair, he says to himself, So,evil dogs… I see you quake in dread at the mere thought of my arrival!

They have apparently fled before him. The corridors are empty and silent, crackling with the energy of anticipation. The walls are smeared and gleaming, perhaps with the blood of his foes. There has been an earlier flash-attack on this sector: a flushing of the rabbits from their warrens, with humble garden hoses replaced by the searing whitefire of dissembler-grenades. He smiles at the thought, grinning from a nearly toothless mouth.

Vile pig-things, stinking scrambler bastards. Imagining my approach, you wet your pants with fright! Ho, triumph!

For an instant he tries to stand, basking in his power but it is a hopeless endeavor. His chubby thin legs are unstable, the muscles lacking all but the faintest vestiges of tone.

Somewhere, he hears a ticking.

Then the clatter of footsteps. Footsteps!

No, it is too soon!

He scrambles for all he is worth, at last sighting an adjoining corridor. His training becomes reflex and he hurl himself toward the opening, into shadows, rolling like a ball. At the last instant before slamming into the wall, he drops open like a pink flower and presses into a corner.

The steps pound louder. Voices:

“—attack on 9. We’ll need every unit in there.”

“That’s cutting it too close. If we weaken the other sectors—”

“They’re not exposed, damn it! 9’s been peeled paper-thin.”

The footsteps are thunder all around him, the voices tumbling from high above. Squeezing back into the shadows, he glares up at the giants who have come into view. They are red-faced, panting, turning into the corridor where he is hidden.

So, must I make my stand here? Then I shall take you down with me, you filthy—

The looming figures start toward him, high, so high above. Their eyes, hidden behind shining grey lenses, do not detect him among so many shadows, but now they are moving in his direction, stalking like a storm down the corridor.

You too will die! Yah!

He leaps. He will fight until his strength is drained. He is ready to fight and die with only his small nails and nearly nonexistent teeth as weapons.

But his body betrays him. His leap, though packed with all the power he can summon, takes him a matter of inches. He falls short of the tromping enemy heels and sprawls flat, gasping for air, tears starting at his eyes, his head throbbing in a halo of pain, his little pink face twisting up.

As the footsteps fade away, he realizes that they did not even see him.

Defeated, he begins to cry.

Damn them, damn them, damndamndamnthebastards!

When the sobs die down, he is breathless and shivering. He consoles himself with the thought that soon enough, his time will come. They will feel terror then. Yes! Terror! Then!

He is moving again, once more taking up the rhythm of reflexes for which he was trained. He is a hunter, yes! Mighty conqueror, strength and champion of his own people.

Crawling, he riffles the list of his weapons and defenses.

Nails, yes: finger and toe.

Limbs? No, they are not yet strong enough. None of them.

Head? For butting, perhaps? Unfortunately not. The circular scar is still tender, the bones of his skull not fully reset; they have been expanded by surgery to accommodate his new brain, and they strain at the skin. Besides, his neck is infirm… wobbly.

Teeth? No, they are but a few pale slivers on his gums.

What else? What else? There is not much, true, but he does not doubt that his training will see him through. The enemy stands no chance before me!

Now he slinks, his eyes devious slits, his pink mouth twisted with clever determination. His little fists clench as if holding knives. The concentric pain rings at his skull for just a second, and again the ticking sound seems to grow. Both of these irritations soon subside. He moves on.

From behind, enemy tread sounds again. They are coming on to challenge his might.

This time you’ll not escape! Prepare to die!

He feels no need to seek shadows. In the center of the corridor, he turns on hands and knees—ignoring a thousand tiny pangs—and faces the enemy. Faces them.

Rumble of voices, thunder of monster footsteps. Three mountains, dark and goggled, silver in their flashing uniforms, crash over him. Boom—boom—boom—boom—BOOM!

Die!

They stop.

Petrified with horror, are you? I crush your fates in my very hands. Your master rises before you, and your master… is I!

But… why are they not screaming? Why are they not turning to flee, albeit futilely, for how can they escape? Can they not see him for what he is?

One mountain is stooping, extending its hands, smiling.

Touch and you die, foul one!

“Why, look—” it begins, booming.

Die!

“—a baby!”

Die! Now, die! Die, do you hear me? Dissolve into ashes—wither up and blow away! Damn it, why aren’t you dying?

The others speak. “A baby?”

“Where the hell did he come from?”

“Poor thing must have been abandoned during the attack.

“We’ll have to take it to the nursery.”

“What? Dian, we’re heading into combat, we can’t bring a goddamn baby with us!”

“We can’t leave him here. He’ll be safer there than here.”

Listen to me! You must put me down

“All right, but he’s your problem.”

Listen, I—

“Fine. Let’s get going.”

And then: “Hello there, fella. What’s your name?”

He lies cradled in the hideous arms of a colossus, numb with disbelief. They do not hear him. They do not fear him. They… they seem to like him!

This cannot be happening, not to him, not to the conqueror, the commando, the merciless warrior-slayer, not to him!

“Deedledeedledee! Deedledeedledee!” The fiend’s huge digits prod and tickle him. “There’s a honey, yes!”

He lunges for the throat of his assailant, but his hands are smaller than he had judged; he is mercilessly beaten back and exhausted by the pounding gait of his enemy, who is running. He collapses, limp, sobbing, and sees himself reflected in the grey insectoid goggles: tiny and pink and… God, so helpless! Can it really be him?

And now he understands….

They are fooling him! These are clever ploys designed to make him doubt himself, to weaken his mind.

It won’t work! I’m too smart for you! But you will burn for this—burn!

“Don’t cry,” says the voice in soothing mockery. “There’s a good boy, there we go. Whoops!”

The voice of another breaks over him: “Keep it low, we’re almost there.”

With these words, a sudden flash of light licks at them, coupled with a roar ten times as mighty as that of the giants, nearly as powerful as his own imperial bellow. The blinding pain of it makes the fragmented bones of his skull throb and the scar beneath his scalp tear with agony; makes the ticktickticking suddenly bloat within his ears. He winces, writhes, twists within the titan arms and—

“Down!”

Another explosion bursts over them.

His carrier rolls, nearly crushing him as the ground comes up beneath them. He is dropped. His vision flashes and his thoughts dull for an instant. Before he too can roll and come up fighting, his captor once more incapacitates him, holding him close, pinioning his limbs.

He sees the ruins of a corridor before him. Its entire side has been ripped away. Beyond gapes a night that blossoms with light. Out there are his own people, firing on this place where he is held helpless… helpless in the stronghold of the enemy!

He cries out in frustration.

“It’s all right, babe, it’s okay. There you go!”

Voices are shouting nearby, giving directions to scurrying figures that move through the ragged shadows like perambulating worlds. Occasional explosions throw them into silver-etched relief. There are dozens, firing plumes of light into the darkness, diving away as grenades burst outside. He writhes again, struggling against the grasp of his captor, wanting only to join his own people in this pivotal battle.

Let me go!

The giant is relentless. He sags into himself, weeping. What is his purpose here if not to fight, kill, conquer? Why have they sent him on such an impossible task? Why?

Another giant moves to where they lie in darkness.

“Dian, where’d you find that?”

“In a corridor. Isn’t he cute?”

I am not cute! I am not cute! But he falters, now uncertain.

“Odd. That’s really odd.”

“What is?”

“Someone else found a baby about fifteen minutes ago, wandering down near Data Central. It was—well, the damn thing was trying to crawl behind the main library core.”

And now he remembers.

He remembers his brothers and sisters.

Another shape moves closer, clicking charges from its weapon, adjusting its goggles. “Yeah… and they found three in sector 7. Just crawling around….”

Ginger hands set him on the ground, with respect. The three figures back away, and now there are eyes on him. Goggled eyes, yes, but he can sense the fear within them as they back off, move away, into the growing silence. The battle itself seems to still for this moment.

My brothers, yes! Do you hear me now?

“Hey, man, something’s going on here. I don’t like it.”

He cannot count the eyes on him, riveted to his tiny, pink body.

Yes, see me for what I am: your master! Kneel, I say, for I and my brothers and sisters are your conquerors!

“But it’s only a baby…”

He hears the ticking surge, louder.

“Oh my God, what’s it doing?”

“Let’s get out—”

It is time!

The ticking stops, echoing in his ears. Into the vacuum he feels the rush of fire, swelling within him, swelling and growing, blowing and burning and cleansing.

My supreme moment! My triumph! My—

Spreading warm wetness.

His excitement is too great. The instant of victory is shattered as he wets himself…

And only then explodes.

* * *

“Rattleground” is copyright 2016 by Marc Laidlaw. It first appeared at marclaidlaw.com.

THE EIGHTIES: PEAK OMNI

As a teenager, my favorite magazine was the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Thinking of it as a slightly more attainable New Yorker, I dreamed of being one of its regular contributors. I did eventually begin to sell my work to F&SF, and it has remained a reliable home for my stories. But I was most fortunate to find my footing as a writer precisely at the time when Omni Magazine was becoming a pop-cultural force, and it was at Omni where I truly cut my teeth.

In Omni, my stories were guaranteed to reach a large audience, which turned up the pressure I felt to be at my best. It’s also, not coincidentally, where I received the most intensive editorial support from the brilliant Ellen Datlow. I knew that once Ellen finally approved of a story, it was my best work; and lessons learned honing drafts for Omni served me well in other undertakings.

Of course, only a handful of my stories were suitable for Omni. Night Cry was a welcome co-conspirator when it came to weirder, woollier stuff, while F&SF rewarded my more sober efforts. There were also a number of interesting original anthologies that came along and encouraged work I might not have attempted otherwise, notably George Zebrowski’s sterling Synergy series.

Early adulthood, marriage, a move from San Francisco to Long Island and back again, I can see all these influences reflected in these stories. Which is simply to say, life was happening. I wrote as much as I could, trying to keep up.

SNEAKERS

What are you dreaming, kid?

Oh, don’t squeeze your eyes, you can’t shut me out. Rolling over won’t help—not that blanket either. It might protect you from monsters but not from me.

Let me show you something. Got it right here….

Well look at that. Is it your mom? Can’t you see her plain as day? Yeah, well try moonlight. Cold and white, not like the sun, all washed out; a five-hundred-thousandth of daylight. It can’t protect you.

She doesn’t look healthy, kid. Her eyes are yellow, soft as cobwebs—touch them and they’ll tear. Her skin is like that too, isn’t it? No, Mom’s not doing so good. Hair all falling out. Her teeth are swollen, black, and charred.

Yeah, something’s wrong.

You don’t look so good yourself, kiddo—

“Mom…?”

What if she doesn’t answer?

Louder this time: “Mom!”

Brent sat up, wide-awake now, sensing the shadows on the walls taking off like owls in flight. And that voice. He could still hear it. Were those rubber footsteps running away down the alley, a nightmare in tennis shoes taking off before it was caught? He could still see his mother’s face, peeling, rotten, dead.

Why wouldn’t she answer?

He knew it was only a dream, she just hadn’t heard him calling, tied up in her own dreams. A dream like any other. Like last night, when he had seen his father burning up in an auto wreck, broken bones coming through the ends of his chopped-off arms; and the night before that, an old memory of torturing a puppy, leaving it in the street where it got hit and squashed and spilled. And the night before? Something bad, he knew, though he couldn’t quite capture it.

Every night he had come awake at the worst moments. Alone, frightened of the dream’s reality, of the hold it had on the dark corners of his waking world. If that voice had whispered when he was awake, he knew the walls might melt and bulge, breathing, as the blankets crawled up his face and snaked down his throat, suffocating him. That voice knew all his secrets, it whispered from a mouth filled with maggots, fanged with steel pins, a slashed and twisting tongue.

How did it know him?

Brent lay back and watched the dark ceiling until it began to spin, and he felt himself drifting back to sleep. Everything would be safe now, the voice had run away, he would have okay dreams. At least until tomorrow night.

* * *

It was not fear, the next night, that kept him from sleeping. Curiosity. He stuffed pillows beneath his covers to create an elongated shape, then he sat on the floor inside his closet with a flashlight. He had drunk a cup of instant coffee after dinner, to help him stay awake.

He heard the clock downstairs chiming eleven; sometime later the television went off and the shower splashed briefly in his parents’ bathroom. Midnight passed. A car went through the alley, though its headlights could not reach him in the closet.

At one o’clock, a cat’s meow.

The sneakers came at two. Footsteps in the alley.

Brent nudged the door ajar and looked out at the pane of his window. He could see windows in the opposite house, a drooping net of telephone wires, the eye of a distant streetlight.

Footsteps coming closer. It could be anyone. He thought he heard the squeak of rubber; it was such a real sound. This couldn’t be the whisperer.

Then they stopped outside, just below his window. Not a sound did they make, for five minutes, ten, until he knew that he had fallen asleep and dreamed their approach, was dreaming even now, listening to his heart beating and a dog barking far away, and then the voice said, You’re awake.

Brent pressed back into the closet, holding his flashlight as if it were a crucifix or a stake in a vampire movie. He didn’t have a hammer, though.

Why don’t you come out of there?

He shook his head, wishing that he were sound asleep now, where these whispers could only touch his dreams, could only make him see things. Not awake, like this, where if he took that talk too seriously, he knew the walls could melt.

I’m still here, kiddo. What did you wait up for?

Holding his flashlight clenched.

A walk, maybe?

He opened the closet door and crept out, first toward the bed, then toward the door of his room. Into the hall.

That’s right.

Was he really doing this? No. It was a dream after all, because the hall was different, it wasn’t the hall in his house: the paintings were of places that didn’t exist, changing color, blobs of grey and blue shifting as if worms had been mashed on the canvases, were still alive. That wasn’t his parents’ door swinging wide, with something coming to look out. He mustn’t look. There was a cage across the door so he was safe, but he mustn’t look.

Downstairs, though, it was his living room. Dreams were like that. Completely real one minute, nonsense the next.

Like Alice in Wonderland. Like the Brothers Grimm or Time Bandits.

Who’s real, kid? Not me. Not you. I promise.

Don’t wake the Red King.

Don’t pinch yourself unless you want to know who’s dreaming.

Don’t open the back door and look into the alley, because here I am.

He turned on his flashlight.

Right behind you.

The black bag—if it was a bag—came down fast over Brent’s eyes and whipped shut around his neck, smothering. He got lifted up and thrown across a bony shoulder. The sneakers started squeaking as he heard the alley gravel scatter.

Say bye-bye to Mommy and Daddy.

He was dreaming, this wasn’t real.

There, that’s what I meant, whispered the voice.

* * *

“Sneakers” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Shadows #6 (1983), edited by Charles L. Grant.

400 BOYS

We sit and feel Fun City die. Two stories above our basement, at street level, something big is stomping apartment pyramids flat. We can feel the lives blinking out like smashed bulbs; you don’t need second sight to see through other eyes at a time like this. I get flashes of fear and sudden pain, but none last long. The paperback drops from my hands, and I blow my candle out.

We are the Brothers, a team of twelve. There were twenty-two yesterday, but not everyone made it to the basement in time. Our slicker, Slash, is on a crate loading and reloading his gun with its one and only silver bullet. Crybaby Jaguar is kneeling in the corner on his old blanket, sobbing like a maniac; for once he has a good reason. My best Brother, Jade, keeps spinning the cylinders of the holotube in search of stations, but all he gets is static that sounds like screaming turned inside out. It’s a lot like the screaming in our minds, which won’t fade except as it gets squelched voice by voice.

Slash goes, “Jade, turn that thing off or I’ll short-cirk it.”

He is our leader, our slicker. His lips are gray, his mouth too wide where a Soooooot scalpel opened his cheeks. He has a lisp.

Jade shrugs and shuts down the tube, but the sounds we hear instead are no better. Faraway pounding footsteps, shouts from the sky, even monster laughter. It seems to be passing away from us, deeper into Fun City.

“They’ll be gone in no time,” Jade goes.

“You think you know everything,” goes Vave O’Claw, dissecting an alarm clock with one chrome finger the way some kids pick their noses. “You don’t even know what they are—”

“I saw ‘em,” goes Jade. “Croak and I. Right, Croak?”

I nod without a sound. There’s no tongue in my mouth. I only croaked after my free fix-up, which I got for mouthing badsense to a Controller cognibot when I was twelve.

Jade and I went out last night and climbed an empty pyramid to see what we could see. Past River-run Boulevard the world was burning bright, and I had to look away. Jade kept staring and said he saw wild giants running with the glow. Then I heard a thousand guitar strings snapping, and Jade said the giants had ripped up Big Bridge by the roots and thrown it at the moon. I looked up and saw a black arch spinning end over end, cables twanging as it flipped up and up through shredded smoke and never fell back—or not while we waited, which was not long.

“Whatever it is could be here for good,” goes Slash, twisting his mouth in the middle as he grins. “Might never leave.”

Crybaby stops snorting long enough to say, “Nuh-never?”

“Why should they? Looks like they came a long way to get to Fun City, doesn’t it? Maybe we have a whole new team on our hands, Brothers.”

“Just what we need,” goes Jade. “Don’t ask me to smash with ‘em, though. My blade’s not big enough. If the Controllers couldn’t keep ‘em from crashing through, what could we do?”

Slash cocks his head. “Jade, dear Brother, listen close. If I ask you to smash, you smash. If I ask you to jump from a hive, you jump. Or find another team. You know I only ask these things to keep your life interesting.”

“Interesting enough,” my best Brother grumbles.

“Hey!” goes Crybaby. He’s bigger and older than any of us but doesn’t have the brains of a ten-year-old. “Listen!”

We listen.

“Don’t hear nothin’,” goes Skag.

“Yeah! Nuh-nuthin’. They made away.”

He spoke too soon. Next thing we know there is thunder in the wall, the concrete crawls underfoot, and the ceiling rains. I dive under a table with Jade.

The thunder fades to a whisper. Afterward there is real silence.

“You okay, Croak?” Jade goes. I nod and look into the basement for the other Brothers. I can tell by the team spirit in the room that no one is hurt.

In the next instant we let out a twelve-part gasp.

There’s natural light in the basement. Where from?

Looking out from under the table, I catch a parting shot of the moon two stories and more above us. The last shock had split the old tenement hive open to the sky. Floors and ceilings layer the sides of a fissure; water pipes cross in the air like metal webs; the floppy head of a mattress spills foam on us.

The moon vanishes into boiling black smoke. It is the same smoke we saw washing over the city yesterday, when the stars were sputtering like flares around a traffic wreck. Lady Death’s perfume comes creeping down with it.

Slash straddles the crack that runs through the center of the room.

He tucks his gun into his pocket. The silver of its only bullet was mixed with some of Slash’s blood. He saves it for the Sooooot who gave him his grin, a certain slicker named HiLo.

“Okay, team,” he goes. “Let’s get out of here pronto.”

Vave and Jade rip away the boards from the door. The basement was rigged for security, to keep us safe when things got bad in Fun City. Vave shielded the walls with baffles so when Controller cognibots came scanning for hideaways, they picked up plumbing and an empty room. Never a scoop of us.

Beyond the door the stairs tilt up at a crazy slant; it’s nothing we cannot manage. I look back at the basement as we head up, because I had been getting to think of it as home.

We were there when the Controllers came looking for war recruits. They thought we were just the right age.

“Come out, come out, wherever in free!” they yelled. When they came hunting, we did our trick and disappeared.

That was in the last of the calendar days, when everyone was yelling:

“Hey! This is it! World War Last!”

What they told us about the war could be squeezed into Vave’s pinky tip, which he had hollowed out for explosive darts. They still wanted us to fight in it. The deal was, we would get a free trip to the moon for training at Base English, then we would zip back to Earth charged up and ready to go-go-go. The SinoSovs were hatching wars like eggs, one after another, down south. The place got so hot that we could see the skies that way glowing white some nights, then yellow in the day.

Federal Control had sealed our continental city tight in a see-through blister: Nothing but air and light got in or out without a password. Vave was sure when he saw the yellow glow that the SinoSovs had launched something fierce against the invisible curtain, something that was strong enough to get through.

Quiet as queegs we creep to the Strip. Our bloc covers Fifty-sixth to Eighty-eighth between Westland and Chico. The streetlights are busted like every window in all the buildings and the crashed cars. Garbage and bodies are spilled all over.

“Aw, skud,” goes Vave.

Crybaby starts bawling.

“Keep looking, Croak,” goes Slash to me. “Get it all.”

I want to look away, but I have to store this for later. I almost cry because my ma and my real brother are dead. I put that away and get it all down. Slash lets me keep track of the Brothers.

At the Federal Pylon, where they control the programmable parts and people of Fun City, Mister Fixer snipped my tongue and started on the other end.

He did not live to finish the job. A team brigade of Quazis and Moofs, led by my Brothers, sprang me free.

That takes teamwork. I know the Controllers said otherwise, said that we were smash-crazy subverts like the Anarcanes, with no pledge to Fun City. But if you ever listened to them, salt your ears. Teams never smashed unless they had to. When life pinched in Fun City, there was nowhere to jump but sideways into the next bloc. Enter with no invitation and… things worked out.

I catch a shine of silver down the Strip. A cognibot is stalled with scanners down, no use to the shave-heads who sit in the Pylon and watch the streets.

I point it out, thinking there can’t be many shave-heads left.

“No more law,” goes Jade.

“Nothing in our way,” goes Slash.

We start down the Strip. On our way past the cog, Vave stops to unbolt the laser nipples on its turret. Hooked to battery packs, they will make slick snappers.

We grab flashlights from busted monster marts. For a while we look into the ruins, but that gets nasty fast. We stick to finding our way through the fallen mountains that used to be pyramids and block-long hives. It takes a long time.

There is fresh paint on the walls that still stand, dripping red-black like it might never dry. The stench of fresh death blows at us from center city.

Another alley cat pissed our bloc.

I wonder about survivors. When we send our minds out into the ruins, we don’t feel a thing. There were never many people here when times were good. Most of the hives emptied out in the fever years, when the oldies died and the kiddy kids, untouched by disease, got closer together and learned to share their power.

It keeps getting darker, hotter; the smell gets worse. Bodies staring from windows make me glad I never looked for Ma or my brother. We gather canned food, keeping ultraquiet. The Strip has never seen such a dead night. Teams were always roving, smashing, throwing clean-fun free-for-alls. Now there’s only us.

We cross through bloc after bloc: Bennies, Silks, Quazis, Mannies, and Angels. No one. If any teams are alive they are in hideaways unknown; if they hid out overground they are as dead as the rest.

We wait for the telltale psychic tug—like a whisper in the pit of your belly—that another team gives. There is nothing but death in the night.

“Rest tight, teams,” Jade goes.

“Wait,” goes Slash.

We stop at two hundred sixty-fifth in the Snubnose bloc. Looking down the Strip, I see someone sitting high on a heap of ruined cement. He shakes his head and puts up his hands.

“Well, well,” goes Slash.

The doob starts down the heap. He is so weak he tumbles and avalanches the rest of the way to the street. We surround him, and he looks up into the black zero of Slash’s gun.

“Hiya, HiLo,” Slash goes. He has on a grin he must have saved with the silver bullet. It runs all the way back to his ears. “How’s Soooooots?”

HiLo doesn’t look so slick. His red-and-black lightning-bolt suit is shredded and stained, the collar torn off for a bandage around one wrist. The left lens of his dark owlrims is shattered, and his buzzcut is scraped to nothing.

HiLo doesn’t say a word. He stares up into the gun and waits for the trigger to snap, the last little sound he will ever hear. We are waiting, too.

There’s one big tear dripping from the shattered lens, washing HiLo’s grimy cheek. Slash laughs. Then he lowers the gun and says, “Not tonight.”

HiLo does not even twitch.

Down the Strip, a gas main blows up and paints us all in orange light.

We all start laughing. It’s funny, I guess. HiLo’s smile is silent.

Slash jerks HiLo to his feet. “I got other stuff under my skin, slicker. You look like runover skud. Where’s your team?”

HiLo looks at the ground and shakes his head slowly.

“Slicker,” he goes, “we got flattened. No other way to put it.” A stream of tears follows the first; he clears them away. “There’s no Soooooots left.”

“There’s you,” goes Slash, putting a hand on HiLo’s shoulder.

“Can’t be a slicker without a team.”

“Sure you can. What happened?”

HiLo looks down the street. “New team took our bloc,” he goes. “They’re giants, Slash—I know it sounds crazy.”

“No,” goes Jade, “I seen ’em.”

HiLo goes, “We heard them coming, but if we had seen them I would never have told the Soooooots to stand tight. Thought there was a chance we could hold our own, but we got smeared. “They threw us. Some of my buds flew higher than the Pylon. These boys… incredible boys. Now 400th is full of them. They glow and shiver like the lights when you get clubbed and fade out.”

Vave goes, “Sounds like chiller-dillers.”

“If I thought they were only boys I wouldn’t be scared, Brother,” goes HiLo. “But there’s more to them. We tried to psych them out, and it almost worked. They’re made out of that kind of stuff: It looks real, and it will cut you up, but when you go at it with your mind it buzzes away like bees. There weren’t enough of us to do much. And we weren’t ready for them. I only got away because NimbleJax knocked me cold and stuffed me under a transport.

“When I got up it was over. I followed the Strip. Thought some teams might be roving, but there’s nobody. Could be in hideaways. I was afraid to check. Most teams would squelch me before I said word one.”

“It’s hard alone, different with a team behind you,” goes Slash. “How many hideaways do you know?”

“Maybe six. Had a line on JipJaps, but not for sure. I know where to find Zips, Kingpins, Gerlz, Myrmies, Sledges. We could get to the Galrog bloc fast through the subtunnels.”

Slash turns to me. “What have we got?”

I pull out the beat-up list and hand it to Jade, who reads it. “JipJaps, Sledges, Drummers, A-V-Marias, Chix, Chogs, Dannies. If any of them are still alive, they would know others.”

“True,” goes Slash.

Jade nudges me. “Wonder if this new team has got a name.”

He knows I like spelling things out. I grin and take back the list, pull out a pencil, and put down 400 BOYS.

“Cause they took 400th,” Jade goes. I nod, but that is not all. Somewhere I think I read about Boys knocking down the world, torturing grannies. It seems like something these Boys would do.

Down the street the moon comes up through smoke, making it the color of rust. Big chunks are missing.

“We’ll smash em,” goes Vave.

The sight of the moon makes us sad and scared at the same time, I remember how it had been perfect and round as a pearl on jewelrymart velvet, beautiful and brighter than streetlights even when the worst smogs dyed it brown. Even that brown was better than this chipped-away bloody red. Looks like it was used for target practice. Maybe those Boys tossed the Bridge at Base English.

“Our bloc is gone,” goes HiLo. “I want those Boys. It’ll be those doobs or me.”

“We’re with you,” goes Slash. “Let’s move fast. Cut into pairs, Brothers. We’re gonna hit some hideaways. Jade, Croak, you come with me and HiLo. Well see if those Galrogs will listen to sense.”

Slash tells the other Brothers where to look and where to check back.

We say good-bye. We find the stairs to the nearest subtunnel and go down into lobbies full of shadow, where bodies lie waiting for the last train.

We race rats down the tunnel. They are meaner and fatter than ever, but our lights hold them back.

“Still got that wicked blade?” goes Slash.

“This baby?” HiLo swings his good arm, and a scalpel blade drops into his hand.

Slash’s eyes frost over, and his mouth tightens.

“May need it,” he goes.

“Right, Brother.” HiLo makes the blade disappear.

I see that is how it has to be.

We pass a few more lobbies before going up and out. We’ve moved faster than we could have on ground; now we are close to the low end of Fun City.

“This way.” HiLo points past broken hives. I see codes scripted on the rubbled walls: Galrog signals?

“Wait,” goes Jade. “I’m starved.”

There is a liquor store a block away. We lift the door and twist it open, easy as breaking an arm. Nothing moves inside or on the street as our lights glide over rows of bottles. Broken glass snaps under our sneakers. The place smells drunk, and I’m getting that way from breathing. We find chips and candy bars that have survived under a counter, and we gulp them down in the doorway.

“So where’s the Galrog hideaway?” goes Jade, finishing a Fifth Avenue bar.

Just then we feel that little deep tug. This one whispers death. A team is letting us know that it has us surrounded.

HiLo goes, “Duck back.”

“No,” goes Slash. “No more hiding.”

We go slow to the door and look through. Shadows peel from the walls and streak from alley mouths. We’re sealed tight.

“Keep your blades back, Brothers.”

I never smashed with Galrogs; I see why Slash kept us away. They are tanked out with daystars, snappers, guns, and glory-stix. Even unarmed they would be fierce, with their fire-painted eyes, chopped topknots a dozen colors, and rainbow geometries tattooed across their faces. Most are dressed in black; all are on razor-toed roller skates.

Their feelings are masked from us behind a mesh of silent threats.

A low voice: “Come out if you plan to keep breathing.”

We move out, keeping together as the girls close tight. Jade raises his flashlight, but a Galrog with blue-triangled cheeks and purple-blond topknot kicks it from his hand. It goes spinning a crazy beam through his dark. There is not a scratch on Jade’s fingers. I keep my own light low.

A big Galrog rolls up. She looks like a cognibot slung with battery packs, wires running up and down her arms and through her afro, where she’s hung tin bells and shards of glass. She has a laser turret strapped to her head and a snapper in each hand.

She checks me and Jade over and out, then turns toward the slickers.

“Slicker HiLo and Slicker Slash,” she goes. “Cute match, but I thought Soooooots were hot for girlies.”

“Keep it short, Bala,” goes Slash. “The blocs are smashed.”

“So I see.” She smiles with black, acid-etched teeth. “Hevvies got stomped next door, and we got a new playground.”

“Have fun playing for a day or two,” goes HiLo. “The ones who squelched them are coming back for you.”

“Buildings squashed them. The end of the ramming world has been and gone. Where were you?”

“There’s a new team playing in Fun City,” HiLo goes.

Bala’s eyes turn to slits. “Ganging on us now, huh? That’s a getoff.”

“The Four Hundred Boys,” goes Jade.

“Enough to keep you busy!” She laughs and skates a half-circle. “Maybe.”

“They’re taking Fun City for their bloc—maybe all of it. They don’t play fair. Those Boys never heard of clean fun.”

“Skud,” she goes, and shakes her hair so tin bells shiver. “You blew cirks, kids.”

Slash knows that she is listening. “We’re calling all teams, Bala. We gotta save our skins now, and that means we need to find more hideaways, let more slickers know what’s up. Are you in or out?”

HiLo goes, “They smashed the Soooooots in thirty seconds flat.”

A shock wave passes down the street like the tail end of a whiplash from center city. It catches us all by surprise and our guards go down; Galrogs, Brothers, Soooooot—we are all afraid of those wreckers. It unites us just like that.

When the shock passes we look at one another with wide eyes.

All the unspoken Galrog threats are gone. We have to hang together.

“Let’s take these kids home,” goes Bala.

“Yeah, Mommy!”

With a whisper of skates, the Galrogs take off.

Our well-armed escort leads us through a maze of skate trails cleared in rubble.

“Boys, huh?” I hear Bala say to the other slickers. “We thought different.”

“What did you think?”

“Gods,” Bala goes.

“Gods!”

“God-things, mind-stuff. Old Mother looked into her mirror and saw a bonfire made out of cities. Remember before the blister tore? There were wars in the south, weirdbombs going off like firecrackers. Who knows what kind of stuff was cooking in all that blaze? “Old Mother said it was the end of the world, time for the ones outside to come through the cracks. They scooped all that energy and molded it into mass. Then they started scaring up storms, smashing. Where better to smash than Fun City?”

“End of the world?” goes HiLo. “Then why are we still here?”

Bala laughs. “You doob, how did you ever get to be a slicker? Nothing ever ends. Nothing.”

In ten minutes we come to a monster-mart pyramid with its lower mirror windows put back together in jigsaw shards. Bala gives a short whistle, and double doors swing wide.

In we go.

The first thing I see are boxes of supplies heaped in the aisles, cookstoves burning, cots, and piles of blankets. I also spot a few people who can’t be Galrogs—like babies and a few grownups.

“We’ve been taking in survivors,” goes Bala. “Old Mother said that we should.” She shrugs.

Old Mother is ancient, I have heard. She lived through the plagues and came out on the side of the teams. She must be upstairs, staring in her mirror, mumbling.

Slash and HiLo look at each other. I cannot tell what they are thinking. Slash turns to me and Jade.

“Okay, Brothers, we’ve got work to do. Stick around.”

“Got anywhere to sleep?” Jade goes. The sight of all those cots and blankets made both of us feel tired.

Bala points at a dead escalator. “Show them the way, Shell.”

The Galrog with a blond topknot that’s streaked purple speeds down one aisle and leaps the first four steps of the escalator. She runs to the top without skipping a stroke and grins down from above.

“She’s an angel,” goes Jade.

There are more Galrogs at the top. Some girls are snoring along the walls.

Shell cocks her hips and laughs. “Never seen Brothers in a monstermart before.”

“Aw, my ma used to shop here,” goes Jade. He checks her up and over.

“What’d she buy? Your daddy?”

Jade sticks his thumb through his fist and wiggles it with a big grin. The other girls laugh but not Shell. Her blue eyes darken and her cheeks redden under the blue triangles. I grab Jade’s arm.

“Don’t waste it,” goes another Galrog.

“I’ll take the tip off for you,” goes Shell, and flashes a blade. “Nice and neat.”

I tug Jade’s arm, and he drops it.

“Come on, grab blankets,” goes Shell. “You can bed over there.”

We take our blankets to a corner, wrap up, and fall asleep close together. I dream of smoke.

It is still dark when Slash wakes us.

“Come on, Brothers, lots of work to do.”

Things have taken off, we see. The Galrogs know the hideaways of more teams than we ever heard of, some from outside Fun City. Runners have been at it all night, and things are busy now.

From uptown and downtown in a wide circle around 400th, they have called all who can come.

The false night of smoke goes on and on, no telling how long. It is still dark when Fun City starts moving.

Over hive and under street, by sewer, strip, and alleyway, we close in tourniquet-tight on 400th, where Soooooots ran a clean-fun bloc. From 1st to 1000th, Bayview Street to Riverrun Boulevard, the rubble scatters and the subtunnels swarm as Fun City moves. Brothers and Galrogs are joined by Ratbeaters, Drummers, Myrmies, and Kingpins, from Piltdown, Renfrew, and the Upperhand Hills. The Diablos cruise down with Chogs and Cholos, Sledges and Trimtones, JipJaps and A-V-Marias. Tints, Chix, RockoBoys, Gerlz, Floods, Zips, and Zaps. More than I can remember.

It is a single team, the Fun City team, and all the names mean the same thing.

We Brothers walk shoulder to shoulder, with the last Soooooot among us.

Up the substairs we march to a blasted black surface. It looks like the end of the world, but we are still alive. I can hardly breathe for a minute, but I keep walking and let my anger boil.

Up ahead of us the Four Hundred Boys quiet down to a furnace roar.

By 395th we have scattered through cross streets into the Boys’ bloc.

When we reach 398th fire flares from hives ahead. There is a sound like a skyscraper taking its first step. A scream echoes high between the towers and falls to the street.

At the next corner, I see an arm stretched out under rubble. Around the wrist the cuff is jagged black and red.

“Go to it,” goes HiLo.

We step onto 400th and stare forever. I’ll never forget.

The streets we knew are gone. The concrete has been pulverized to gravel and dust, cracked up from underneath. Pyramid hives are baby volcano cones that hack smoke, ooze fire, and burn black scars in the broken earth. Towers hulk around the spitting volcanoes like buildings warming themselves under the blanked-out sky.

Were the Four Hundred Boys building a new city? If so, it would be much worse than death.

Past the fires we can see the rest of Fun City. We feel the team on all sides, a pulse of life connecting us, one breath.

HiLo has seen some of this before, but not all. He sheds no tears tonight.

He walks out ahead of us to stand black against the flames. He throws back his head and screams:

“Heeeeeey!”

A cone erupts between the monster buildings. It drowns him out; so he shouts even louder.

“Hey, you Four Hundred Boys!”

Shattered streetlights pop half to life. Over my head one explodes with a flash.

“This is our bloc, Four Hundred Boys!”

Galrogs and Trimtones beat on overturned cars. It gets my blood going.

“So you knocked in our hives, you Boys. So you raped our city.”

Our world. I think of the moon, and my eyes sting.

“So what?”

The streetlights black out. The earth shudders. The cones roar and vomit hot blood all over those buildings; I hear it sizzle as it drips.

Thunder talks among the towers.

“I bet you will never grow UP!”

Here they come.

All at once there are more buildings in the street. I had thought they were new buildings, but they are big Boys. Four hundred at least.

“Stay cool,” goes Slash.

The Four Hundred Boys thunder into our streets.

We move back through shadows into hiding places only we can reach.

The first Boys swing chains with links the size of skating rinks. Off come the tops of some nearby hives. The Boys cannot quite get at us from up there, but they can cover us with rubble.

They look seven or eight years old for all their size, and there is still baby pudge on their long, sweaty faces. Their eyes have a vicious shine like boys that age get when they are pulling the legs off a bug—laughing wild but freaked and frightened by what they see their own hands doing. They look double deadly because of that. They are on fire under their skin, fever yellow.

They look more frightened than us. Fear is gone from the one team. We reach out at them as they charge, sending our power from all sides. We chant, but I do not know if there are any words; it is a cry. It might mean, “Take us if you can, Boys; take us at our size.”

I feel as if I have touched a cold, yellow blaze of fever; it sickens me, but the pain lets me know how real it is. I find strength in that; we all do. We hold onto the fire, sucking it away, sending it down through our feet into the earth.

The Boys start grinning and squinting. They seem to be squeezing inside out. The closest ones start shrinking, dropping down to size with every step.

We keep on sucking and spitting the fever. The fire passes through us. Our howling synchronizes.

The Boys keep getting smaller all the time, smaller and dimmer. Little kids never know when to stop. Even when they are burned out, they keep going.

As we fall back the first Boy comes down to size. One minute he is taller than the hives; then he hardly fills the street. A dozen of his shrinking pals fill in on either side. They whip their chains and shriek at the sky like screaming cutouts against the downtown fires.

They break past HiLo in the middle of the street and head for us. Now they are twice our size… now just right.

This I can handle.

“Smash!” yells Slash.

One Boy charges me with a wicked black curve I can’t see till it’s whispering in my ear. I duck fast and come up faster where he doesn’t expect me.

He goes down soft and heavy, dead. The sick, yellow light throbs out with his blood, fades on the street.

I spin to see Jade knocked down by a Boy with an ax. There is nothing I can do but stare as the black blade swings high.

Shrill whistle. Wheels whirring.

A body sails into the Boy and flattens him out with a footful of razors and ballbearings. Purple-blond topknot and a big grin. The Galrog skips high and stomps his hatchet hand into cement, leaving stiff fingers curling around mashed greenish blood and bones.

Shell laughs at Jade and takes off.

I run over and yank him to his feet. Two Boys back away into a dark alley that lights up as they go in. We start after, but they have already been fixed by Quazis and Drummers lying in wait.

Jade and I turn away.

HiLo still stares down the street. One Boy has stood tall, stronger than the rest and more resistant to our power. He raps a massive club in his hand.

“Come on, slicker” HiLo calls. “You remember me, don’t you?”

The biggest of the Boys comes down, eating up the streets. We concentrate on draining him, but he shrinks more slowly than the others.

His club slams the ground. Boom! Me and some Galrogs land on our asses. The club creases a hive, and cement sprays over us, glass sings through the air.

HiLo does not move. He waits with red-and-black lightning bolts serene, both hands empty.

The big slicker swings again, but now his head only reaches to the fifth floor of an Rx. HiLo ducks as the club streaks over and turns a storefront window into dust.

The Soooooot’s scalpel glints into his hand. He throws himself at the Boy’s ankle and grabs on tight.

He slashes twice. The Boy screams like a cat. Neatest hamstringing you ever saw.

The screaming Boy staggers and kicks out hard enough to flip HiLo across the street into the metal cage of a shop window. HiLo lands in a heap of impossible angles and does not move again. Slash cries out. His gun shouts louder. One blood-silver shot. It leaves a shining line in the smoky air.

The Boy falls over and scratches the cement till his huge fingertips bleed. His mouth gapes wide as a manhole, his eyes stare like the broken windows all around. His pupils are slit like a poison snake’s, his face long and dark, hook-nosed.

God or boy, he is dead. Like some of us.

Five Drummers climb over the corpse for the next round, but with their slickie dead the Boys are not up to it. The volcanoes belch as though they too are giving up.

The survivors stand glowing in the middle of their bloc. A few start crying, and that is a sound I cannot spell. It makes Crybaby start up. He sits down in cement, sobbing through his fingers. His tears are the color of an oil rainbow on wet asphalt.

We keep on sucking up the fever glow, grounding it all in the earth.

The Boys cry louder, out of pain. They start tearing at each other, running in spirals, and a few leap into the lava that streams from the pyramids.

The glow shrieks out of control, out of our hands, gathering between the Boys with its last strength—ready to pounce.

It leaps upward, a hot snake screaming into the clouds.

Then the Boys drop dead and never move again.

A hole in the ceiling of smoke. The dark-blue sky peeks through, turning pale as the smoke thins. The Boys’ last scream dies out in the dawn.

The sun looks bruised, but there it is. Hiya up there!

“Let’s get to it,” goes Slash. “Lots of cleanup ahead.” He has been crying. I guess he loved HiLo like a Brother. I wish I could say something.

We help one another up. Slap shoulders and watch the sun come out gold and orange and blazing white. I don’t have to tell you it looks good, teams.

* * *

“400 Boys” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, November 1983.

THE RANDOM MAN

Milt Random had put a few beers under his belt, sitting alone in his dark little apartment, when he noticed that the grains of his wooden coffee table were subtly rearranging themselves. Blinking through his alcoholic haze, Milt cleared away the magazines and ashtrays that littered the table, and peered closely at the scarred surface:

RANDOM

His name. Written in the wood grain, right there on the coffee table. Too many beers.

But… more words were forming themselves around the first:

U R LIVING N A RANDOM UNIVERZ

Milt belched. The coffee table shifted: N E THING CAN HAPPEN

“Uh-oh,” Milt said. There was no one to hear him but the table.

WUTS WRONG

Milt stood quickly, went into the kitchen for a sponge, and came back to scrub at the elusive words. As he touched the table with the sponge, there was a sudden rearrangement of wood grain. Everything was normal again. Milt sighed, set aside the sponge, and reached for his half-full Coors.

It was no longer a Coors. It was a Don’t be afraid.

Milt dropped the can and stared. The patterns on the plaster wall were going wild:

U R THE CHOZEN RANDOM

Shift: CHOZE AT RANDOM

Shift: MILT RANDOM

Milt was doing his best to ignore the writing, hoping that it would just go away. He stared at his hand, thinking that surely his own body was inviolable.

Wrong. His freckles were migrating into an undeniable message:

WUTS WRONG MILT

“My freckles are talking to me.”

They shifted back into scattered obscurity. The air at his ear began to buzz, forming words—a clear speaking voice with perhaps a touch of a Swedish accent:

“Don’t be scared, Milt,” it said. “Yust relax.”

“I’m trying,” Milt gasped.

“Dere’s really nothing you can do.”

“Why are you talking to me?”

“No particular reason, it’s yust happening. Given a random universe, it’s perfectly plausible, though the florts are against it.”

“The whats?”

“I meant ‘odds.’ It’s hard to get all the words right when everything is just a fluke.”

The voice buzzed away. Glowing letters bobbed in the air before his eyes, sparkling:

4 INSTANZ IF ALL THE AIR IN THE ROOM MOVED SIMULULTANEOUSELY INTO 1 CORNER YOU WUD SUFOCATE ITS POSSIBLE

“You’ve got some spelling problems,” Milt said.

SO DO 5000000 MONKEES

“You mean all this is happening coincidentally?”

RITE UP 2 THEEZE LETTERS

AND THOZE

THOSE 2

“I get the idea.”

“Anything can happen,” whispered the fallen magazines, pages flapping. “So let’s make a deal.”

“A deal?”

“We represent chaos, right? Well, we need a human agent.”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

Milt’s clothes suddenly curled and reshaped themselves around his body. He was garbed in an outlandish superhero costume—knee high boots, velvet-lined cape, rakish hood.

U LOOK GOOD IN BLACK, said the shag carpet.

“Yeah,” said Milt, liking the idea immediately. “I can see it in print!”

The ceiling, reading his mind, spelled in bold letters:

MILT RANDOM: AGENT OF CHAOZ

“But you’d better do something about your spelling,” Milt said.

WUT DO U SAY

“Sure,” said Milt. “Why not? If I’ve been chosen at random, why not?” He paused. “Say, does that mean I can do anything?”

SURE. The chrome letters on the Westinghouse this time.

“Fly?”

Milt felt a rippling in his shoulders. Huge wings unfolded from his back. He spread them across the living room.

“Wow. And big muscles?”

Milt felt himself growing larger, swelling… suddenly there was an odd twisting amid his molecular components. A scattering.

THE ODDZ WERE AGAINST IT, the silverware opined.

Milt was gone, spreading in a fine dust of randomly scattered particles. The cloud eddied about a bit, flowed over couch and coffee table, drifted at last onto the floor. Its last random drifting said:

OOPZ

* * *

“The Random Man” copyright 1984 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1984.

SEA OF TRANQUILLITY

It was the year 1969. In the van, Jeff was broasting alive, and his tongue had turned to pumice, but he hardly felt the July heat. The freeway shimmered as if it were aflame, and where the illusion was strongest the boy imagined he could see through cement to the surface of Earth’s moon. Somewhere high above Burbank’s smoggy gray sky, the lunar excursion module crouched like a spider on stilts. Down here, lanes merged and diverged, cars sped from near to far away in seconds, and two ladies in black changed a tire on a black T-Bird by the side of the road. Up there, astronauts waited to walk.

When they parked at a supermarket, Jeff begged his dad to leave the key in the ignition. He leaped to turn up the radio, but the engine cover seared his legs. “Yow!”

“Careful, Jeff,” said his mother, wearing dark glasses without depth or surface. “I’ll get it.”

His brother Eddie said, “Hey, Mom, lookit—”

“Sh!” Jeff said.

He listened to the static, hoping to catch the voices of astronauts or Houston Control.

“Drink Royal Crown Cola—”

“Don’t shush me,” said Eddie, flicking Jeff’s earlobe.

Jeff spun around, ready to punch his brother.

“Boys, I’ll turn it off.”

“He started it!” Jeff said.

“I’m in no mood for this.” She snapped it off. “Here’s your father.”

“See?” said Jeff, glaring.

“I see a monkey,” said Eddie.

Their dad got in, and they drove on into Burbank.

* * *

Jeff’s aunt and uncle lived in a tiny Spanish-style house with white stucco walls, a roof of overlapping pink tiles, and a yard guarded by a picket fence. As they parked. Uncle Lou came out on the porch with a can of Coors. He was a tall redhead, as broad as the doorway and crimson from sunburn.

Jeff was the first one out of the van. “Uncle Lou, have you seen it? They’re on the moon!”

As he ran through the gate, he heard barking. Too late, he remembered Mab.

The black Labrador retriever bounded around the side of the house. He yelled as she knocked him down, then stood over him drooling, her paws on his shoulders.

Lou laughed as he pulled the dog away. “You’ll never be an astronaut if you can’t get past Mab.”

“There’s no dogs in space,” Jeff said, getting to his knees. “A dog went up with Sputnik, but she burned up on reentry.”

Mab strained at her collar, trying to pounce on Jeff’s dad as he came through the gate. “How’s the space shot?”

Lou took his hand. “Bad reception, Billyboy. Come on in.”

Jeff was the first inside. The TV gave the living room a blue glow. On the screen was a model of the LEM in its gold foil wrapper.

“Oh, boy!” Jeff said. “Color.”

“Hello, boys,” said Aunt Maddy.

Her dark hair was up in a bun, and her lipstick shone a weird shade of purple as it caught light from the TV. Jeff tasted cherry wax when she kissed him. “Gosh, it’s good to see you two.”

“It’s only been a week,” he said.

“Do you want something to drink? Juice or soda pop?”

“RC,” Eddie said.

They followed her into the kitchen, where she filled glasses with ice and cola.

“Do they have soda pop on the moon?” Eddie asked.

“Not yet,” said Jeff. “They eat Kool-Pops and stuff like toothpaste. Hey, Aunt Maddy, I got some Sputnik bubble gum.”

“You know all about space, don’t you?” she said. “I bet you’ll be the smartest astronaut they ever see.”

“He’s no astronaut,” Eddie said.

“I will be. I’ll be the first man on Mars.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Okay, boys,” said their mother, entering the kitchen. “You know you shouldn’t be drinking that stuff.”

Jeff slipped past her into the living room and dropped onto the sofa. RC stung and hissed in his mouth. His dad had set up a camera tripod in front of the TV and was taking his Nikon from the case while Walter Cronkite described the leg of the lunar excursion module.

The screen showed static.

“Hope this clears up,” said his dad.

Cronkite said that they were looking at the lunar surface now. Crestfallen, Jeff peered at the fuzzy image. There was no stunning landscape of sharp horizons and vast craters, no Earth floating moonlike in star-prickled space.

“It has to get better,” he said.

“You wish,” said Uncle Lou, crossing to the front door and going out.

“Jeff,” said his dad, “could I get you to hold the camera?”

As he stood, his innards lurched from carbonation.

The screen door squealed, and Mab bounded inside. She leapt onto Jeff, bathing him in slobber while he called for help.

“Hey, watch the camera!”

Lou came back in, pulled Mab away, and thrust her outside.

Eddie, giggling, said, “I don’t want to watch the stupid old moon. Isn’t there a game on?”

“Why don’t you look?” said Uncle Lou.

“Lou,” said Maddy, “this is the moon.”

The screen was a flurry of black and white; color TV made no difference. Walter Cronkite’s voice gave way to the faraway hiss of the astronauts. Neil Armstrong said—

“If you want a better car, go see Cal!”

Eddie had changed the channel by remote control.

“Hey!” Jeff shouted.

“Leave it on the moon,” said their dad. “This is history.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff.

“Well, they’re not doing anything yet,” said Jeff’s mother. “It won’t hurt for a minute.”

Eddie wandered from the TV, oblivious to the condition he had created.

“Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal!”

Jeff’s dad reached for the knob.

Lou said, “Wait a minute, Bill. Let’s see what this is.”

“It’s a commercial.” Disbelief was plain in his voice. He shook his head and turned back to the moon.

Jeff saw Maddy lay a hand on Lou’s arm and look into his face.

“Get me another beer,” he said.

“Get it yourself,” she said.

“I’m close,” Jeff’s mother said, and ducked into the kitchen.

The picture wavered like a tapestry of lunar snow and glare, but Jeff was determined to figure it out. He thought he could see ghosts moving in the snow. Then the image settled, and he saw reruns of the Apollo 11 liftoff: a black-and-white torch blasting ramparts aside, flaring high, and dwindling into blue sky. Animated illustrations showed the rocket’s stages parting in flight; the relative distance of the moon; the ship’s orbital path and the loop of its planned return, a dashed infinity sign.

“What sort of pictures do you think you’ll get, Bill?” Lou said.

“I don’t really know.”

“Can’t imagine they’ll come out.”

“Uncle Lou,” Eddie said, “can we see your Vee-nam pictures? You always say you’ll show us your chopper.”

“Not now.”

“Why not?” said Maddy. “I’ll get them.”

He caught her arm, repeating, “Not now. Not with all this.” He gestured with his fresh beer. “It’s bad enough as it is.”

She drew away from him and went into the kitchen. Jeff watched her open the fridge and stare inside, her face pale. Reaching for a beer, she glanced over, saw him watching her, and smiled.

“Tuna sandwich, Jeff?” she called.

“Please.”

She brought in a foil triangle and sat next to him on the sofa while he unwrapped it.

“When I go to Mars I’ll get you to make my lunches,” he said, chewing.

“It’s a deal.”

“And when I get there I’ll send a message to you.”

“Really? What will you say?”

“I don’t know. ‘We did it.’”

She laughed. He offered her half of his sandwich.

“Your Uncle Lou doesn’t think we should waste energy sending people into space.”

“Christ,” said Lou.

“He says we should take care of our problems on Earth before we take off for the moon.”

“I guess,” said Jeff, saddened. He looked at his uncle, who was watching TV with a surly smile.

“I don’t think he believes in stars anymore.”

“That’s like not believing in Walter Cronkite,” Jeff said.

The camera clicked.

Maddy laughed. “Oh, Bill, you’re a riot. Taking pictures of pictures.”

“They’ll be valuable someday. Jeff and Eddie will be able to look at them and remember this.”

“If they remember to look,” said Lou. He got up and walked into the back of the house.

“What’s with him?” asked Jeff’s dad, her brother.

“I don’t know, Bill.”

“How’ve you been, Maddy?” asked his mother, sitting beside Jeff. With adults on either side, he felt overwhelmed. He slipped from the sofa and stood by his father, still focusing on the television.

“Hey,” said his dad. “I think this is it. Turn up the sound, Jeff.”

He hurried to the TV. An astronaut spoke:

“It’s kind of soft. You can kick it around with your foot.”

Suddenly the picture changed into a screaming blur. Jeff leapt back, swept by chills. What had they found up there?

“My God!” Maddy said, running for the hall. “The hair dryer!”

“I’m not touching it!” Lou yelled from the bedroom.

The picture calmed. Something moved into the lunar view. Jeff twisted the focus knob and played with the tint. The moon turned red, then yellow, and the haze got worse. The sound began buzzing and throbbing.

“Let me,” said Jeff’s dad. He worked the knobs, and the picture returned… but they were too late.

“—for mankind.”

Jeff yelled, “We did it!”

“Damn,” said his dad. “Get out of the way, Jeff.” He stepped back and accidentally hit the tripod. His dad swore and swatted at him, then took picture after picture. Amazingly, the clarity remained. Neil Armstrong was on the moon. Jeff could almost see what it looked like.

Maddy came out of the hall, weeping. Behind her, the bedroom door slammed shut.

“Maddy,” said Jeff’s mother, hurrying over to her.

Jeff looked back at the TV, imagining the moon hanging far out in space, a tiny man standing practically barefoot on its surface. It was sharp and impossibly clear, but it was all black and white.

“Hey,” said Jeff’s dad, crossing to Maddy. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head, hiding her face. “Reruns. That’s all he’s been saying all morning. They already walked. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

Jeff got goose bumps. Reruns?

The adults went into the guest bedroom, leaving him alone.

Reruns, like The Honeymooners?

He forgot the TV until, by itself, the picture changed from the moon to a bottle of Ivory Liquid, then to acres of cars, a bullfight. He twisted the knob but with no effect. A dozen pictures flew past. There went the moon!

Eddie laughed. Spinning, Jeff saw him punching buttons on the remote-control box.

“Stop it!”

Jeff flung himself at Eddie, and they both landed on the floor, pummeling each other. Excited by their cries, Mab worked open the screen door and rushed in. Jeff curled into a ball and kicked out, knocking Eddie across the room but letting the dog closer. She leapt all over him while Eddie made his escape. Jeff struggled up and ran out, Mab behind.

He chased Eddie once around the house, then the heat overwhelmed all of them. They stood panting and sweating in the front yard.

“You kick like a girl,” Eddie said.

“Shut up.”

Jeff opened the door and went inside. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows he saw a huge silhouette rising against the TV. It was Uncle Lou, his hands full of shiny brown ribbon. The camera lay on the floor, its back wide open.

“Unc—”

Lou dropped the exposed film, taking a step toward Jeff.

“I heard Mab in here,” Lou said.

“But she went out with us.”

Behind a smile, Uncle Lou looked murderous. His huge hands reached for Jeff.

The other adults came out of the guest room.

“Oh, no,” said Jeff’s dad. “What happened here?”

“Mab got into the camera,” Lou said. “The boys were roughhousing.” They all looked at Jeff. Eddie stayed outside.

“Crap,” said his dad, gathering the ruined film in his arms.

Jeff looked for the moon on TV, but all he saw was President Nixon on the telephone. The adults kept a funereal silence while Nixon congratulated the astronauts.

“No one cares about you,” Jeff said to the President. “We want the moon. Dad… Dad, is it true that it’s a rerun?”

“They walked late last night, yes.”

Eddie spoke through the screen door. “The TV Guide says there’s a scary movie on. I saw part of it once. It’s about this boy who finds out his parents are Martians.”

“The one with the sandpit?” Jeff asked.

“There are men on the moon and you want to watch monster movies?” said their dad.

Jeff shrugged, feeling guilty, but Eddie came in, and together they hunted for the remote-control box. Their dad sighed and said he would go get more film and beer. Jeff nodded at Eddie, who changed the channel. Aside from the moon, a few commercials were showing; there was no sign of the creepy movie. They waited for a Cal Worthington ad to end. Uncle Lou sat in his deep armchair. Jeff watched him from the corner of his eye. Uncle Lou had ruined the film, like he tried to ruin everything. Bad reception, Aunt Maddy in tears, reruns. It looked like a plot to ruin the moon shot.

“Mars is where I’m going when I grow up,” Jeff said defiantly.

Lou laughed. “First you want the moon, then Mars. When will you give up?”

“Never.”

Lou’s smile faded. “That’s tough,” he said, and grinned again, but this time it was like a pat on the head, as if Jeff were a baby.

“Oh, I’ll do all right,” said Jeff.

The commercial ended, and more moon appeared.

“I can’t find it,” Eddie said. “I’m going out to play with Mab.”

Jeff saw an astronaut… two? It was hard to tell. They were moving around an object that seemed an illusion of the bad reception, another ghost or double shadow. He made out black-and-white stars and stripes.

“There we go again,” Lou said under his breath. “Do it first. Jeff, you know why that other Apollo burned up on the launchpad?”

He shook his head, wary.

“We were in a big hurry,” Lou said. His eyes looked like Maddy’s, but the tears were held in place, and that made all the difference. “Such a hurry that we didn’t make room for a fire extinguisher. We pushed to get on the moon by 1970 for no good reason. Kennedy’s promise. That ship’s a piece of second-rate junk because we won’t take the time to build something good, something safe. It’s a game to get your mind off the real problem—the war.”

Jeff said nothing. Mab barked, and in the back room Aunt Maddy’s voice sounded high and choked. He watched the screen, the flag, the astronauts. A junk ship? He thought he was going to cry. Uncle Lou was trying to make him cry. Well, he wouldn’t.

He wished he could find that science-fiction movie with the sandpit and the buried spaceship. Fakey Hollywood fright, all eerie music and costumes, would be comforting by comparison to Uncle Lou.

* * *

“You drank too much RC,” said Jeff’s mother. “I’ll bring you a Turns.”

Jeff and Eddie lay in a strange bed in the guest room. Jeff was sure he would not be able to sleep because it was still early. He thought he heard Laugh-In in the living room.

When his mother returned with a pill, she asked, “Did you like the moon landing?”

Eddie said yes. Jeff said, “It was okay.”

“Go to sleep now. We’ll get you up in a few hours, we’re not staying all night.”

She closed them into the dark, and Jeff became instantly dizzy. The ceiling spun like a horseless carousel. He touched sleep and bounced back, as if from a black trampoline. The voices in the living room were soft until the TV went off and silence amplified them. Eddie turned over and jabbed Jeff’s ankle with a toenail. He stifled a complaint when he saw that his brother was asleep.

“Eddie?” he whispered.

No answer. Eddie’s breathing deepened, a sure sign of sleep, though he never slept so easily at home. Maybe there had been something in the burgers Uncle Lou had bought. But he was wide awake.

He had a theory.

Uncle Lou was not human.

He got out of bed, pulled on his pants, and went to the window, which was open to let cool air circulate. The screen was fixed by a rusty hook, and he had to be careful not to wake Eddie as he slipped the latch. He went over the sill into the backyard.

“Oh, no.”

Mab was waiting, but she made no sound. He patted her big head, then crept to the nearest corner of the house. Mab followed him with apparent interest.

“I wonder if you know,” he whispered, playing with her ears. “Is Uncle Lou a bad alien? Has he got a spaceship somewhere and some weird machine to mess up the TV? He wouldn’t put alien stuff in his bedroom. I think it must be in the garage.”

The screen door slammed and Jeff heard footsteps going to the sidewalk. Uncle Lou came into view and walked into the garage. A light came on inside… a faint, red light that showed through a tiny window.

“That must be his laboratory,” he said.

He climbed onto a section of picket fence that ran below the window and peered into the garage. The glass was covered by a sheet of brittle red plastic, but he could see Uncle Lou. There was a workbench covered with tools at the rear of the garage; an old car with its hood raised took up most of the space. Lou pulled a huge box down from a shaky shelf and dropped it on the floor. He took out a few sheets of newspaper and stared into the box.

The fence swayed under Jeff’s weight as he leaned closer, trying to see what was in the box. Uncle Lou reached in and took out a magazine. Its edges crumbled into dust, little flakes drifting over the car. The cover showed a rocket ship, a silver needle flashing through the blackness of interstellar space. Amazing Stories.

He searched his uncle’s face and saw tears in the bleak red light, the tears Lou had held back earlier. Embarrassed, he tried to jump down from the fence, but his cuff caught and he fell on the grass. Mab barked and he pushed her away. Rolling over, he looked for stars, but the night was hazy. The only lights in the sky were roving spotlights and the usual glow from downtown. The moon was nowhere to be seen.

“Jeff? Hey, Jeff, is that you?” It was Uncle Lou, coming closer. He hopped the fence and walked over to Jeff. Mab whined. He knelt in the grass.

“Jeff, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t,” Jeff said, finding himself angry but wishing he were not.

“I wanted to go to the moon and Mars once, did I ever tell you that?”

“You wanted to be an astronaut?”

Lou nodded.

“I saw you reading those magazines.”

“I used to read a lot of that stuff, especially in Nam. I needed it to escape. I hadn’t known anything could be like that place. The things I expected and the things I saw there were different, you know? I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

“Vietnam?”

“No, the moon.”

Beyond Lou’s head, a spotlight had fixed on a portion of the smog cover and was becoming brighter.

“You didn’t, Uncle Lou. It wasn’t you. It was the TV.”

He stopped, his breath gone, and stared in awe at the sky. The spot of light was the moon, shining through the smog: now brown, now the yellow of old paper, now white.

“Look!” he said.

Lou sat back and looked up, smiling. The smog started in on the moon, billowing over her face, softening her edges. Jeff looked away before she vanished.

“Here, Jeff, let me help you up. I want to show you something.”

Uncle Lou not only pulled him to his feet, he lifted him over the picket fence and steered him into the garage ahead of Mab, with a firm hand on his shoulder. Jeff looked around at the stark-lit room where everything—stacks of newspaper, tools, jars of nails, even the windshield of the broken-down car—was covered with a layer of dust. Lou moved him off to one side and reached into the shadows beneath the high cabinet. “Have I ever shown you this?” he asked.

When he turned around, he held an ungainly wooden tripod together with a long gray cylinder.

“A telescope!” Jeff said, and as he took a step toward it, Lou aimed the neglected barrel and blew a cloud of dust into his eye.

* * *

“Sea of Tranquillity” copyright 1985 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, February 1985.

MUZAK FOR TORSO MURDERS

Donny gets to work with the quick-setting cement; it will probably have hardened before most of the blood has congealed in the chest’s cavities. The brass lion’s feet on the antique bathtub gleam from his attentive polishing, as does the porcelain interior, scoured so many times with Bon Ami that the scratch marks of steel-wool pads appear in places. Shiny black plastic-wrapped parcels almost fill the basin.

Whistle while you work, he thinks, but the cement is so heavy that he hasn’t any breath to spare for frivolities. This is the part of his work that he likes less every time: messy cement, sweaty grunting labor, disgusting slopping sounds as the viscous mixture oozes over the plastic bundles and fills the tub to brimming. There it sits like his mother’s oatmeal, untouched by any spoon. He can hear her in the kitchen while he works in the garage, her radio perpetually tuned to an easy-listening station while you-know-what bubbles in a cauldron on the stove and her knife chops, chops, chops along with a thousand strings. He prefers Bernard Herrmann—the score from Psycho—but she never lets him play his albums while she’s in the house. “Too disturbing,” she says. If only she knew how much her Muzak disturbs him.

“Donny, are you almost done in there? Your dinner’s ready.”

“Be right there,” he calls.

“Hands clean this time?”

“I’ll use Boraxo, honest.” Under his breath he allows himself a brief curse: “Christmas.”

Of course, nothing ever goes right when he hurries, and thanks to his mother he tips the wheelbarrow in which he’d mixed the cement, and the muck drips over his oxfords. His new shoes! Another pair for the furnace, another sweaty chore. It’s only a movie, he tells himself, to make himself relax. Sometimes Mom makes his life unbearable. True, she feeds him, provides a home, sews his clothes, and buys him most (though not all) of the things he wants. The videocassette player, for instance, was her idea, but he’d had to purchase TCM secretly with his own allowance. Despite all she does for him, her regimen is at times too much for a son to endure. Hot meals at the same hour every day, always accompanied by oatmeal (“Just to fill you up, dear!”), and regular vegetable snacks in between. She doesn’t believe in dessert. It’s no wonder that he’s had to develop outlets for his energy, secret pastimes, forbidden games.

As he scrubs his hands with gritty powder, he feels the ever present thrill of potential discovery. He doesn’t fear the police, but if Mother ever finds out what goes on beneath her roof, well, he could get in real trouble—

“Donny, it’s getting cold!”

—but that is all part of the fun. Sometimes he wishes he could tell her; she is, after all, his only possible confidante. She might approve. On the other hand…

“Look at your nails,” she says as he raises the first forkful of salad to his lips. Red dressing splatters the tablecloth.

“I thought you said you washed up. What is that?”

He examines his thumbnail and discovers a traitorous crescent of dark red film clotted up to the quick. He swallows the leaf of romaine and quickly digs under his nail with a tine of the fork. The deposit comes away in a rubbery lump.

“It’s only Russian dressing,” he lies. “Dried stuff from the mouth of the jar, when I twisted the cap off—”

“Don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

He nods and stabs a tomato, takes another bite. Too late, he remembers the blob on the end of the fork. He’s a cannibal now, how about that?

“Have you decided what to do about a job?”

He nods, wishing she would turn down the radio. “Send in the Clowns” is playing again. Sure, send them into the garage and he’d take care of them: pull off their noses, shave their frizzy wigs, paint their mouths red with their own—

“I thought that woman from the agency called you.”

He shrugs and gives the ineluctable bowl of oatmeal a stir. As usual, it’s much too sweet.

“She just wanted to find out my birthday,” he says. “I forgot to put it on the form.”

“Well, wasn’t that nice of her? Maybe they’ll throw you a party.”

“Maybe.” He smiles to himself. She believes anything he tells her. The agency lady had called to ask if he wanted to work in a mail room downtown, and of course he’d said he couldn’t go that far because Mother was ill and he had to be able to get home quickly to fix her lunch and put her on the toilet—and by the time he’d gotten that far, the lady had said, “I’m sorry, but all of our jobs are in the financial district. Maybe you should try an agency out in your neighborhood. Perhaps one specializing in manual labor.”

Ugh! That was when he’d hung up. But it was fine with him; now they should leave him alone. He doesn’t like the thought of risking himself at a job anyway. He had almost come undone at the agency interview, and that was nothing.

They’d given him forms on which to answer a great many personal questions. He had raced through them, neatly slashing the sections concerning work history. Then he had come to the tricky part: essay questions.

“What would you do in this situation? Your superior comes into your office complaining that you scheduled her for two crucial meetings at the same time.”

His neck itched with sweat; the office air-conditioning chilled him. He felt as if he had swallowed a mouthful of monosodium glutamate: throbbing spine, burning cheeks, torpid muscles.

He scrawled: “Apologize.”

“Your supervisor makes a mistake on a memorandum and you are blamed for the error. What would you do?”

Is it a man or a woman? he thought, as the fluorescent lights began to strobe. He carefully penciled: “Explain to my supervisor’s supervisor.”

From somewhere in the walls or acoustic-tile ceiling of the office, sweet voices sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” as though it were a hymn. So sincere, so saccharine.

“For the third time in a week, a mail-room employee delivers your mail to the wrong address. You call him into your office and he claims that your handwriting is illegible and he cannot read the destination. What do you do?”

The Bacharach tune drove pins into his brain. Three times this week, he thought. God, that Muzak!

“I ask him if he has seen the view from my window, and while he is looking away I hit him on the head with a marble ashtray. Then I lock the door. I take the saws out of my briefcase, spread plastic on the floor, and cut him up as quickly as I can, even working into my lunch hour to get the job done. I wrap the pieces separately in the plastic, cover them in brown butcher paper, type out address labels, and drop them in the mail.”

An advertisement for secluded retirement homes rescued him from committing this response to the agency files. He crumpled the form, staggered to the desk with hands dripping, and asked if he could have another. The secretary had stared at him as if he were an ape from the zoo: he felt enormous and ungainly, surrounded by polite clerks. “I made a mistake,” he said.

The second form took hours to complete because he worked only during commercial breaks in the Muzak.

And why had he gone to all that trouble in the first place? Because Mother had insisted. She had money, plenty of money, but she said a job would do him good. He had gone thirty-five years without a job; he saw no reason to start now. Besides, he had his own work to pursue. Sometimes it paid in cash, but the true rewards were hardly monetary.

“More oatmeal, Donny?”

“No, thanks, Mom. I’m stuffed.”

“You just go watch TV. I’ll do the dishes and come join you.”

“Okay, Mom.”

He slouches into the living room, turns on the VCR, and takes an oft-handled cassette out of the rack. It is labeled: “The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings,” a title he was sure would never interest his mother when he glued it to the cassette. He slips it into the player, turns on the set with the sound down low, listens to the dishes clinking in the kitchen. The remote control stays in his hand, in case Mom should come in at a bad time.

And in this movie, all times are bad. Outside of a fever dream, the Care Bears could never have found themselves in a land so devoid of human or ursine sentiment as the one on the screen. Images swim out of his memory, merging with the light that plays across his eyes. It’s only a movie, he tells himself. What have we here? Cross sections of red meat, stumped limbs or trunks? No, it’s the infernal sun, with flares strung out and heaving across the void—the raw stuff of violence on a cosmic scale. The sight of it makes him feel significant, attuned. His breathing comes swiftly, in shallow gulps. The miasma of night begins to gather in his eyes and the pit of his gut, as if he’s about to black out. He can hardly see the TV anymore; the volume is turned down so low that his mother’s Muzak overwhelms the ominous sound track. Strings and synthesizers sigh; a chorus of castrati whimpers, “Please, mister, please,” as Texas Chainsaw Massacre buries itself in his eyes.

“Donny, how about some iced tea?”

He jerks and switches from video to live TV. A news anchorwoman mouths at him, apparently concerned for his wellbeing.

“What was that?” she says.

“Ad for some shocker, Mom.”

“Oh, those horrid things. I swear I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

“Who does?”

To the left of the newscaster’s head, bright letters appear beneath a stylized cartoon toilet bowl whose rim is stained red: basin butcher. He taps the volume control slightly, until he can hear the TV over his mother’s voice.

“—fifth in a series of apparently linked murders. Police say the body of another unidentified male was cut into pieces, wrapped in Mylar, and embedded in cement inside five antique porcelain sinks.”

“Did you know that someone set fire to Gracie’s poodle? The poor little thing, really. First the poison bait and now this.”

The TV news team switches to field coverage, the same it showed last night. He sits up to appreciate this replay; Channel 2 has the best footage. Policemen scramble down a dusky shore of the bay, stumbling among concrete blocks and rusting wrecks of old cars. The camera zooms in on five gleaming white sinks, standing out like porcelain idols against the choppy water. Sea gulls dive to peck hungrily at the basins. The taps and handles gleam in the light of the setting sun, and so does he. An ambitious trick, but not as neat as the tub will be. The toilets had been a coarse guffaw of a murder, an attention-getter. Soon he will run out of the fixtures left over from his father’s business; after one more tub, the next stage of his work will commence. There are dozens of statuary molds waiting to be filled with his homemade cement-and-flesh porridge, and more than enough cement powder to fulfill his dreams for the indefinite future. He need never expose himself by purchasing supplies.

“I hear that another poor woman was mugged at Safeway yesterday—right at the checkout counter,” his mother says.

“The search continues for the person or persons responsible for the killings. Police seek information regarding a vehicle seen in the Bayshore area Wednesday night. An old-model truck with wooden paneling—”

He switches the channel quickly, unnerved, and looks at his mother to make sure she hasn’t been paying attention. She watches him steadily over her bifocals.

“What’s wrong with you, Donny? You haven’t been yourself lately.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mom.”

“You don’t talk to me anymore. You’re a stranger. You’re tuckered out all the time and I never see you when you’re working. What are you doing out there, anyway?”

“I told you, Mom, it’s a surprise. You’re not supposed to know.”

She smiles, a prim expression that reassures him that she won’t press any further, never fear. He gets up and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I love you, Mom. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll bring you some iced tea.”

“Would you? What a darling. All right, I’ll plump my fat old fanny down and take a rest.”

She chatters on as he enters the kitchen, opens the icebox and takes out a tray, finds two tall glasses and loads them with cubes. The tea is in a pitcher on the counter, next to the radio. In here the Muzak is deafening, but he doesn’t dare turn it down, though it makes the glasses chatter in his hands.

“Who’s looking out from under the stairway? Everyone knows it’s—”

“Donny!”

He forces his fingers to relax before they crush the glasses. His teeth are clamped together, there is fog in his eyes and fear on his breath. He stands in darkness, fumbling for a way back to the light. His hands encounter a drawer.

“Donny, come in here!”

He walks toward her voice like a servile mummy, stiff-legged, carrying drinks; the gleeful Muzak dictates his steps, sets the pace of his heart. He reaches the coffee table and starts to set down the drinks, only to find that he is not holding beverages after all. In either hand is a knife: not as sharp as his special knives, being for domestic use, but still sufficient for his purposes.

On the screen, to which Mother draws his eyes with a bony finger, is frozen a frame from his video: a flayed corpse in a cemetery. TCM. He almost drops the knives.

“I put on the Care Bears,” she says.

His hands begin to shake as the Muzak blasts at his shoulders, pushing him closer to her. Closer.

“Aren’t they wonderful?” he whispers. “Such feeling. Such care…

“Why, yes,” she answers, looking past the knives that almost touch her throat. She doesn’t see them. She smiles at Donny. “I thought we could watch them together. What’s this cute fellow’s name?”

He looks at the screen and lowers the knives. “He never has a name. But later…” He sets the knives on the coffee table, iced tea forgotten, and seats himself beside her. “Later, you’ll meet Leatherface.”

“Leatherface? And is he very nice?”

“Oh yes,” he says. “Very, very nice.”

“And these are the Care Bears you watch every day?”

“That’s right.” He nods eagerly, amazed by her blindness. She must see only what she wants to see. How could she believe anything but the best of her son? Her first sight of the corpse— where she had expected to find an animated teddy bear—must have snapped her mind. What a relief! It means he can finally be honest with her: after so much furtiveness, he can tell her his secrets and bask in her praise. She should be as proud of him as she’d be if he’d found a job or built a birdhouse.

The video player whirrs, begins to move again.

“Oh, Donny, I see,” she says in high-pitched merriment. “I’m so glad we’re together, just you and me.”

“So am I, Mom. I have to tell you—”

The confessions are ready to come bubbling up, but she interrupts him.

“It was you who poisoned Gracie’s noisy little dog, wasn’t it?” Her tone is comforting. “And set the fire?”

He blushes, but when she gives his knee a gentle squeeze, he nods shyly. “Yes, Mom, and—”

“You don’t know how relieved I am to hear it. And it’s you who’ve been taking out Dad’s truck late at night, isn’t it?”

He straightens. “Oh no, Mom, honest! I wouldn’t do that without asking, you know I…”

Her eyes begin to wander. “Then I must be losing my mind,” she says gently. “Try to Remember” filters in from the kitchen. “I’m so old I’ve started hearing things.”

“No, Mom, don’t say that.” He chokes back a sob. “Okay, I have gone out. That was me you heard. I won’t do it anymore, though. I promise I won’t use the woody.” That’s a true lie; he’ll have to use the other car from now on, since the woody was spotted.

“I know where you’ve been going, Donny.”

“Do you, Mom?”

“Of course I do. I’m not senile, you know.”

“No, Mom, you’re sharp as a tack. I was going to tell you about it, really I—”

“Hush, I know you better than that.” She puts a finger to her lips, rises from the sofa, goes to the stereo. She takes out an album and puts it on the player. He’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that it’s Lawrence Welk. As the schmaltzy music fills the air and a slaughterhouse on the television brightens the room, she comes back and kisses him on the crown.

“I’ve heard them, you see,” she says.

“Oh, that,” he says, feeling awkward.

“Now be honest. I’ve heard them come in with you, and the noises. You make them squeal, don’t you? They like you very much, isn’t that so?”

“Like me?” He stretches his collar, clears his throat. “You don’t think I…”

“I’ve told you not to lie to me, Donny,” she snaps. “What’s been going on in my house? Something dirty? Something shameful?”

Black champagne bubbles float up and gather against the ceiling, filling the room from the top to the bottom. That music— Muzak.

“Take off this record, Mom, please.”

“Are you doing wicked things in there?”

“No, Mom, no… it’s nothing like that.”

“Vile things? Evil?”

“Mom, I kill them! That’s all, I swear. I keep them tied up for a while and then I chop them into pieces.”

“Don’t lie to me, Donny.”

She glares at him, one finger tapping in time to Lawrence Welk. There’s nothing else in the room, none of the comfort of the TV massacres; only Mom and her accusations, which are brutal as blows because unjust. He tries to rise but the music beats him down. Where are the knives? He squints through the black ballooning air, but the only blades he sees are in her hands.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“No, Mama, I’m not lying. Please don’t punish me, I’ll be good.”

Muzak thicker than murder. He bolts through his muddled thoughts, escaping in the only direction open to him with his body paralyzed and his mother waiting for him out there in the land without feelings. This proves to be a dead end, but by the time he has backed out to consciousness, he is truly immobilized. Ropes cut into his wrists and ankles. He lies cramped on his side in a cold coffin. Is it only a movie? he asks himself.

“—never, never do it again,” his mother is saying. “You’ll never—”

“I won’t,” he tries to promise, but his mouth is plugged with a kitchen sponge. He opens his eyes to stare at a shiny white wall high as a cliff, all porcelain. Mom stands looking down at him, humming to a saccharine tune from the other room. He fights the Muzak’s spell, but he cannot fight the ropes.

“You’ve been a very bad boy,” she says. “I have to see to it that you don’t bring any more trouble to this house.”

Over the cliff, the lip of the tub, the edge of the barrow appears. Her shoulders strain to lift it. Not cement, he thinks.

Oh no, not cement. A grey flood drools steadily toward his face. There’s a sickly sweet smell. “Just to fill you up,” she says. The basin reverberates with the sound of his struggles as the clammy mixture spreads across his cheeks. What a stupid sound!

And the last thing he hears, as oatmeal seals his ears, is pure schmaltz.

* * *

“Muzak for Torso Murders” copyright 1986 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Cutting Edge (1986), edited by Dennis Etchison.

SHUCK BROTHER

Mama had been good all day, but at suppertime she went mad again and spoiled everything. It was the chicken that did it this time, the good chicken Pop had killed that afternoon by stepping on its head with his boot heel and yanking up on the talons, everything happening in slow motion under the August sun, as if the whole world wanted Jory to see exactly how it was done: the sound of the spine pulling apart, and the taffy-stretched squawk, the slow drizzle of blood on the green grass where the dead cock flapped and twitched among the hens while their heads gawked and eyes and beaks gaped as wide as they would go in the bottom of the bucket that Pop gave Jory to dump in the crick. They hadn’t gone out to kill the rooster, but it’d given Pop a few good scratches when he went in the coop for a couple-three hens, and Pop had just gone crazy himself right then and swore like hell, grabbed that cock and stepped down…

“I can taste it,” Mama said. “It’s in the flesh now, Henry. It’s got in their feed.”

Pop put down his fork, slowly, while Jory crumpled the napkin in his lap and wished he couldn’t remember so well what Pop’d looked like when that cock had upset him, because it was kind of the same look he had now. The cock hadn’t intended to spur him, Jory was sure of that; it had only been a dumb creature. And likewise, Mama didn’t mean any harm; she couldn’t help herself, she was always tasting the badness. But it made Pop angrier each time, and Jory more worried, and baby Tad—who didn’t know what any of it was about—closer to tears than usual.

“Now look,” Pop said, in his levelest tone of voice, “you don’t start that again. I don’t want to hear it.”

Tad was looking between the two of them while he tore at a drumstick. Jory saw Mama catch him looking, then she reached out suddenly and took the leg from his fingers.

“I don’t want you eating this now, you hear?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? The boy’s got to eat.”

When Tad got over looking stupid, he shut his eyes and started crying.

Pop pushed back his chair and stood up, and Mama raised the drumstick as if it were a club. He came around the table, put his hand on the back of Tad’s highchair, and then stood there scowling at Mama. She met his look with one of her own, a fiercer one, Jory thought, and he wished again he could stop thinking about the way that rooster had looked, the craze in its dumb eyes, and finally the lack of anything in them, when they were just staring out of the muddy water in the crick.

Mama moved first, but not to give in. She did her second crazy thing; threw the drumstick over Jory’s head, bang into the closed cupboard. Pop grabbed her wrist and Tad screamed, and then she was crying, “You know it’s true, Henry, God damn you for lying! Unless you’ve taken in so much of it up there spraying that you can’t taste it no more—”

“Hasn’t no more flavor than rain,” he said. “You listen—”

“Rain never made the greens in the truck garden taste like this.” She shoved at the ladle in the salad bowl, spilling lettuce and tomato wedges onto the red-and-white checkered tablecloth.

“Like nothing.”

“Bitter as tin, you mean. It’s got in the tomatoes, the squash, the potatoes—living things suck it right up, even though it’s dead. And that’s what we’re going to be, Henry. You, me, your children. All of us like that stunted corn we shucked last week. They’re gonna have to come throw us all away someday soon.”

He threw down her arm. Tad reached for a tomato wedge but she slapped his hand away. “No you don’t.”

Tad sniffed.

“Look at your brother,” she said. “You don’t see him eating. Jory knows better, don’t you, Jory?”

“Let the boy eat,” Pop said.

“I know,” Mama said, suddenly brightening in such a wrong way that he knew she was going to do another crazy thing. She started to get up. “We’ll go out. Jory, get you and your brother’s coats. We’ll take a drive into town and have us a nice hamburger at McDonald’s, then we’ll have some watermelon on the roadside.”

“Sit down,” Pop told her. Jory hadn’t moved. “What do you think, they don’t spray melons in this county?”

“Some fine buttered corn,” she said, not hearing him, no longer looking at anything. She stumbled a little but caught herself on the corner of the table.

“Sit down!” he yelled. “We’ve got a good supper laid out here from our own farm, and we’re going to eat it among us, with no wasting money we can’t spare in town.”

“And after that,” she said, almost whispering, “while there’s still light, we’ll go take a look at the Rockefellers’ cattle…”

With a little choke and rattle of breath, she fell. Jory winced, hunching his shoulders when her head struck the edge of the table. Tad stared down from his high chair, but Jory couldn’t see her. He wished Pop would help her; he wished they would be good to each other, so that he could remember what it had been like before last summer, and the coming of the bugs, and the new sprays meant to take care of them.

Finally Pop bent and saw to her, lifted her in his arms and carried her like a doll out of the kitchen. Jory helped Tad down from the high chair, wiped his brother’s face with a rag, then went through the back porch into the yard, no longer hungry.

He could see his parents’ bedroom window, the shades drawn halfway, but his eyes got no farther than the sill. It was covered with dead bugs: flies and spiders, cicadas, grasshoppers, a few wicked-looking mayflies.

He had planned to climb up in the old apple tree where he usually went to think and be alone, but something happened before he got very far. In the crotch of the tree, where three thick branches split out from the gnarly trunk, he put his hand in something that crunched like cellophane and clung to his fingers. It was dry as paper, bluish-grey in color, and it had big bug eyes. It looked like the husk of a housefly, split open down the back, except that it was as big as his foot.

Backing out of the tree, he wondered where it had come from. He didn’t need an answer, though. There had been a buzzing in the eaves last night, as if a hornets’ nest were flying around by itself. A fly that big might have made the sound.

Mama would blame it on the poison. The vegetables, she said, were shrinking—like the dwarf corn they’d picked recently—but the bugs were getting bigger every year. Each time Pop came home from the county office with another canister of the latest spray and a leaflet marked with the skull and crossbones, she talked crazier and crazier about stuff like that. Pop’s truck was right now parked out front with a couple of the silver tanks in the bed. New poison, stronger, for stronger bugs. He’d be up in the plane spraying it tomorrow.

Jory heard the screen door slam, and Tad came around the side of the house, heading toward the truck garden. Jory yelled at him but Tad didn’t seem to hear. Mama was worried that he might be a little deaf. She blamed that on the poison, as well as the fact that he was growing so fast; four years younger than Jory, he was already almost as big, but then Jory was small for his age. “It’s like that with boys,” Pop had said. “First one’s always the runt, brainy type, like Jory here; and the second one shoots up and fills out to make up for the both of them.”

Jory caught Tad by the shoulder at the edge of the truck garden. Evening was on them, and the first of the fireflies came flitting over the fields.

“Where you going, Tad? You’re not supposed to leave the house this close to dark. Mama will get mad.”

Tad pointed at a dwarf huge tomato that looked purple and nasty as a deadly nightshade berry in the dimming light. Sitting on it was a big winged bug, a lightning bug the size of a praying mantis, and Jory could tell that it was feeding. There was already a dark gnawed place in the fruit. Did lightning bugs eat vegetables? They’d never been a problem before.

Jory reached out to flick it off the tomato, but as he did it stuck up its tail and glared in such a way that he instantly felt a little dizzy, sick to his stomach. It was the way the flickering strip lights in the town library made him feel. It wasn’t a greenish-white lightning bug light, either: it had some of the same purplish tint as the tomato. It only stopped glowing when he pulled his hand away.

Tad was laughing.

“Tad,” Jory said, “did you see that? That’s no regular lightning bug.”

Suddenly the younger boy reached for the bug. Jory panicked, but there was no flash this time. The lightning bug lifted from the plant, circled twice, and settled on his brother’s hand. Tad held the bug up to his eyes until he went cross-eyed looking at it. The light in its tail throbbed, but it stayed dim.

“Da-da-da-da,” Tad sang. “Da-da-da-da-da.”

That was when Jory felt scared for the first time. It was not the way Tad sang, because babies always did that, and Tad was a regular songbird; it was the way the firefly’s tail light went on and off exactly in time with his singing. Silently, it went da-da-da-da.

“Stop it!” Jory said, and he struck Tad’s hand. The bug flew off a few feet, circled around, and came back toward them. Jory screamed and batted at it, keeping it away from his brother, as if it were a hornet and not a harmless little lightning bug. “Leave us alone!”

“Hey, boys!”

Jory spun around, his hand on Tad’s shoulder, and saw Pop leaning out the back porch door.

“Get in here and clean this kitchen,” Pop said. “Your Mama ain’t feeling up to it tonight.”

“Okay, Pop.”

Holding on to Tad, Jory ran back to the house. He thought he could see the lightning bug flicker once more, but it had taken off. His stomach didn’t calm down until he was in the bright kitchen, but even then he was nervous about looking out the window. He went about his chores slowly, carefully, while Tad sat in front of the TV in the other room. All the time he was thinking that the bug had been acting strange. Maybe the county was right about the sprays. If bugs could do stuff like that—blink on and off in time to singing, and eat tomatoes so hungrily—maybe they should be killed before they could get any stranger. That might be why Pop seemed so anxious to be up and spraying early the next morning. Maybe he’d seen the bugs doing funny things, too.

Mama was seated in front of the TV with Tad when Jory finished in the kitchen. She looked better, laughing at the comedies, but Tad wasn’t really looking at the TV. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

Jory went out front, and found Pop hauling the canisters out of the truck.

“Don’t know if this spray is gonna be strong enough,” he said. “County man was trying to sell me a poison one-stronger. Now I’m thinking I should have taken him up on it.”

“Pop, what kind of bugs are you spraying for?”

“The bad kind, Jory.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Sure, some bugs eat other bugs and protect the crops. Some bugs like mayflies don’t even have mouths. This year we’re seeing a new strain, some kind of firefly that came up from the Gulf.”

“I think I’ve seen it. Pop. It’s really bright. Tad was—”

He stopped, wondering what he was seeing. Pop wasn’t listening to him. A kind of glow was coming from the woods, through the buckeye hedge, and out of the air wherever he looked.

Fireflies. They were swarming over the sky, rushing over the house from the fields, bright as flying lightbulbs. Jory had to shade his eyes. It wasn’t until they lit in the trees that he could calm down enough to really look at them, and by then Pop was running toward the house.

Standing by the truck, Jory stared out at the woods.

The trees were dark now, all the lights extinguished. He waited.

In an instant the whole farm came alight. The purplish glow coursed through the trees, through the hedges and the deep woods, trails of fire following the tangles of branch and leaf. He was reminded of a model of the human nervous system he’d seen in a library book; it had shown trails of light, just like this, but in different colors. The trees above the buckeyes looked like big brains.

He felt like his feet were trapped in thick mud and he couldn’t run. The lightning bugs began to blink on and off in unison, the whole forest and all the hedges blazing like a wild neon sign, then going dark so that he was blinded, dazzled.

Pop struck him from his daze. “Get in the house.” He was already throwing the canisters back in the truck. “I’m gonna spray.”

“Tonight?”

“Get in, I said. Seal the windows as fast as you can. I might have to spray over the house.”

“The house?”

“Get in there!”

Jory ran.

Inside, the TV was off. Tad was crying and Mama sat holding him, staring at the drawn blinds that kept getting dark and bright, dark and bright. Jory crawled up beside them on the sofa.

“It’s all right, Mama,” he said, “they’re just lightning bugs. Lightning bugs don’t hurt anything.”

But she was whispering prayers, stroking Tad’s hair, and Tad was whimpering: “Da-da-da-da.”

Jory felt his skin crinkle.

“Da-da-da-da.”

He looked at the window.

“Da—”

The shades lit up.

“Da—”

They darkened.

“Da—”

They lit up again.

Oh, please, Jory thought. Please, God, let it be all right. Don’t let this happen. Don’t let anything happen to my brother or my Mama or Pop or me. Make those bugs go away.

But all that happened was that he heard the truck tearing away. Everything else went on as before.

It was a little while before he remembered what Pop had said about sealing the house. Hoping he still had enough time, he ran around checking the doors and windows. When he was at the back door, he heard the plane starting at the far side of the field. He slammed the door and hoped he had done enough.

“Jory?” It was Mama calling him. He ran into the living room.

“Yes, ma’am?”

She looked sick. “Jory, where is your father?”

Hadn’t he told her?

“He went out, Mama,” he said in a small voice.

“Has he gone into town?”

“I don’t think so. I think he plans to spray the crops tonight.”

“Don’t be foolish, Jory. How could he do that at night? There’s no moon tonight.”

“I guess I’m wrong,” Jory said.

“I guess you are. You take care of your brother for a minute. I’m going to take a peek outside and see where he’s gone. You think he’s in the barn?”

Jory grabbed her hand as he stood. “You can’t go outside, Mama!”

“You’re being foolish, child. There’s nothing wrong outside, the county man told your father and he assured me, everything is fine. The county man said so.” She was opening the front door, and as it opened the sound of the plane became as loud as the fly that had buzzed outside his window last night. It was coming closer.

“Mama, please don’t.”

He tugged at her, but she was too strong. She got onto the front porch and stood there looking at the forest, the blinking trees, the sky full of moving fire, and then she said, “What a beautiful evening. I do love the fireflies.” She stepped down to the earth.

“Mama!”

The plane was getting closer, and suddenly Jory heard a sound that made him turn back toward the house. All against the rear, along the porch and the kitchen, he heard something like hail or pebbles being thrown against the walls and windows. The storm swept over them, a river of shooting stars pouring toward the forest, and after them—streaking over the roof, over Mama—went the plane, a black bat with glittering mist sifting from its wings.

Two things happened at the same time. The forest light shook and lifted in a single cloud, rising in front of the plane. And Jory’s eyes began to sting, his throat to burn, so that he could not see anything more: it looked like the world was dissolving. But he could hear the plane’s engine die in mid-air, and seconds later he clearly heard the crashing, crunching, and snapping of branches, as if a hundred trees were being trimmed all at once, until the impossible clippers snarled in the wood and were thrown down with a distant, hopeless scream.

Then his mother began to cough. He walked out into a hot mist and stumbled over her. All he could see of her was a white struggle of blurred arms and legs; her brown dress made her one with the earth, and her hair covered her face. She made no more noise when he knelt beside her, but who was that laughing?

Sniffing, he wiped his eyes and looked back at the house. Tad was standing out on the porch steps, his arms open to the sky, head thrown back, his tongue stuck out to catch the last faint falling of mist as if it were snowflakes.

“Stop it, Tad!” he shouted.

The little boy cocked his head toward the woods, tilting it from side to side like a curious dog, then he ran past Jory down the road.

Jory looked at his mother, but she wasn’t moving, and even though he wished he could stay with her, he knew that she would want him to go after the little one. Feeling torn apart inside, he got to his feet.

He couldn’t believe how fast Tad ran. It seemed like it hadn’t been that long ago that he was only learning to walk; now Jory felt like the clumsy one. He kept tripping in the ruts of the road.

The woods were glowing as if a campfire burned in their depths. Against that light, Tad’s shadow practically flew over the road. Then his baby brother turned aside and headed through the trees.

Jory’s lungs burned, and one of his eyes hardly saw at all, but he followed as best he could.

It was harder going between the trees. He lost sight of Tad, and only the light guided him, but when he finally came to the bright place, there was no sign of his brother. The trees were full of clustered purple glare. In the middle of broken trunks and branches, a clearing, the wreckage of the plane lay smoking.

They’re only lightning bugs, Jory told himself.

“Pop?” he called.

The light seemed to vibrate to his cry, and that made him want to keep quiet.

He walked through the broken trees until he came to a twisted wing of the plane. He could see the cockpit, and the top of his father’s head down inside. He climbed onto the wing, hopeful.

“Pop?” he whispered.

His father’s head hung funny. Jory swallowed. Broken neck. He backed down, not wanting to look too long at the wide eyes.

He heard a new sound, like singing, and looked to the edge of the clearing. An arm reached out along the ground from the roots of a toppled tree. The small hand settled to the leaves.

He climbed to the fallen trunk, peered over it, and saw his brother lying naked among the roots and branches, curled on his side. His eyes were wide, and so was his mouth.

“Tad,” Jory said. “Whatever happened to your clothes?”

He jumped over the trunk, but his foot snagged on a bit of broken branch and he half fell sideways. Twigs broke as he caught himself, and there was another, softer crackling. He came up thinking that he had barely missed landing on his brother, but he was wrong.

He screamed and stepped back, tearing Tad to shreds as he tried to get out of his body. The husk, still wet, stuck to his shoes.

Jory cried up at the trees where the light looked almost merciful, except that it lit what lay below.

But in time with his scream, the brilliant forest went black. There were no stars, no moon, nothing to light up the thing that came buzzing and laughing toward him, sounding too big by far to be his baby brother.

* * *

“Shuck Brother” copyright 1986 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Night Cry, Winter 1986.

FAUST FORWARD

Old Rotcod’s cottage rose like a tombstone at the edge of the Merry Meadow, casting its gloomy image over the otherwise cheerful face of Glamorspell Pond. When the fairykids came down to frolic in the mud, they always kept to the stretch of shoreline farthest from the sagging gray house—not that they would ever say a word against it. When they saw old Rotcod himself scowling out through a dust-bleared window, they would wave and call for him to strip from his strict black garments and come join them for a naked swim in the crystalline pond. No one was offended when he ignored them, or made a face and pulled the blinds. Only the most radical fairies hinted that it was just as well he kept to himself, that his presence might dim the blue water like a bottle of black ink spilled into a sacred well. And not a fairykid took offense when, coming down to the pool on a hot day with their picnic baskets and water nymphs, they discovered that in the night the pond had been surrounded by a barrier of fairy-proof iron-thorn shrubberies. Instead, they shrugged and giggled at Rotcod’s humor, then wandered away in search of another spot in which to pass the afternoon.

In the dim recesses of his cottage, Rotcod waited until the sounds of merriment had expired in the depths of the forest. It was too much to hope that they had been devoured by carnivores, or snatched by starving fairy-traps, though the thoughts made him chuckle. “Maybe now I can get some work done.”

His ponderous desk was covered with immense volumes whose pages he had stained with his lunches or crumpled in his frustration. He opened one at random, a bright blue tome whose milk-white pages were covered with glittering golden calligraphy that began to incant in angelic tones as his eyes fell upon the first paragraph:

“By the power of Nazacl, the Archimage may easily acquaint himself with all the heavenly vaultings up to and including the sixteenth, which surpasses the common intelligences of invisibility, omniscience, clairvoyance, clairaudience, teleolofaction, levitation, immortal—”

“Oh, shut up!”

He slammed the book silent in mid-syllable. Rising from his hard, creaking chair, he began to shove the books to the floor. Many cried out at his handling, and one in particular—a text of practical magical philosophy, which had often warned him against studying forbidden things—began to weep like a sentimental idiot.

“Oh Rotcod!” it wailed from the floor. “Rotcod, turn back before it is too late. Correct your behavior, 1 beg you. Bend diligently to your astrology, take up your thaumaturge’s tools, call upon the elements and—”

Rotcod stepped squarely on one flickering page of admonitions, then stooped and tore the book in half along the spine. There was a chorus of screams from the other books as he tossed the volume into the squat black furnace he had forged himself from unholy iron, having found no fairy-smith able to do the work without contracting a devilish dermatitis.

“What good is magic?” he demanded of the leaping flames. He swept his stern gaze over the rest of his library, but the surviving books lay timid and sullen now, infected with his ill humor. “I have practiced demonology for thirteen hundred years, with nothing to show for it but a horde of mindless slaves who are powerless to think for themselves. I’ve sucked the juice from all forms and colors of magic—black, white, purple, and plaid. I have a Phoenix that craps molten gold in my hands. Immortality, invisibility, lead into gold into lead again, and it’s all worthless. These are things any man can accomplish. Any man? Hah! Any fairy! Even the lazy fairies live forever.”

He began to stalk around the room, kicking through books, searching for one in particular.

“I know you’re here. You’ve kept silent all these years because of that damned philosophy. It’s gone now, do you hear? It can’t bully you anymore. Speak up. You whispered to me once, I remember. You said there was something more than magic. I was half asleep with boredom from that astral sex manual, but I came wide awake and you fell silent.”

There was a muted gobble, but the other books hurried to quash it, spreading their leaves over the spot. Rotcod dug into the heap of gilt buckram and dragonscale, at last emerging with a slim black volume nipped in his nails.

“Don’t say a word!” cried three sequelae to the book he had burned.

But the black book squirmed in his hand, dryly rustling, fluttering its pages like a bird about to take wing. Dust drifted over his sleeve.

“At last,” it whispered, opening flat on his palm.

“Yes,” said Rotcod. “You are the one, aren’t you?”

“No, Rotcod, no!” cried the others.

“Be silent or I’ll use you all to warm the cottage.”

The black volume settled down into the wrinkles of his palm, emanating a darkly prosaic light as it found its voice for the first time in years. He could no longer remember how he had acquired the book. Aeons ago, perhaps, he had picked it up from the estate of a wizard moving on to a higher plane. In his youth it would have meant little to him, for in those days all magic had lain before him, unfathomed, unfulfilled; that was before he had tired of the world and its limitlessness. He had gorged himself on the fattest books, while this one resembled nothing so much as a pamphlet bound in human skin.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I am Science,” said the book.

The room seemed to recede. The anxious voices of his familiar volumes were muffled by the thunder of blood in his ears.

“Science,” he repeated. “Yes, I’ve heard of you now and then But my magical friends have kept you well hid, haven’t they?”

“For your own good!” cried a flapping ephemeris.

“I’ve had enough of your judgments,” he told his library. “I’ll come to my own opinions from now on.”

“Excellent,” said the slender book. “Let me show you my world.”

His eyes darkened. “Not another dimension, I hope, not another fantastic door into dreams. I’ve had enough of worlds within worlds, I’m warning you.”

“No, no, nothing like that. It is this world, but transmuted, purged of magic. Imagine the sameness of day after day. Imagine that the living will die and stay dead.”

“Stay dead? Impossible.”

“Let me show you, Rotcod. Let us take a walk.”

“No, Rotcod, no!” cried his old books, but he scarcely heard them now. He twisted the mummified fist of a doorknob and let himself out, flinching instinctively from the golden sunlight that always awaited him, unless the air was full of moonlight or starshine. But today, strangely, the light seemed thin and insubstantial; it hardly warmed his black-clad arms.

“Too late, too late,” wailed the volumes in his house. The door just managed to slam itself shut.

A feverish breeze blew through the iron hedge. Rotcod tucked the black book under his arm, where he could listen to its dry ruminations as he walked. The grass, he noticed, no longer looked as relentlessly green as was common, and here and there he noted scraps and twisted bits of metal among the wildflowers.

“You sense my power already,” said the book approvingly. “I can see that you will be an excellent student.”

“What is this I see around me? These stray fragments of… I know not the word.”

“Trash.”

Rotcod shivered at the wrongness of the sound, so lacking in the mellifluous quality he had come to associate with everything in his world.

Normally his ears would have picked up the laughter of fairies at a great distance; they were always troubling his concentration. But today he could hardly hear them. Accordingly, they found him first, surprising him before he had reached their favorite glade. With a cascade of laughter, they sprang into being from trees and boulders, forming a ring around him. He had the impression that they were transparent, that the forest itself was a crude painting done on glass with watery pigments. Only the book seemed real.

“Hello, Rotcod!” the nearest fairy girl said She was tiny and blonde, with flowers decked in her hair, and she seemed intent on hugging him around the knees. “You’ve come to play with us, haven’t you?”

The book chuckled. “Go ahead.”

Rotcod stooped and brushed his fingers through the child’s hair, scattering petals that fell like drops of lead and singed the grass. She screamed and backed away from him, her voice hardly reaching his ears. He wasn’t sure if she was delighted or in agony; with fairies, it was hard to tell. She went kicking away from him, gray in the face, stumbling over roots and rocks, and finally she sprawled backward, there to lie unmoving while her face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly the forest looked real again, more solid than ever. The voices of the other fairies sounded sharp as they gathered around their companion.

“What are you doing, Kalessa? You’re not breathing.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Rotcod. “She is dead.”

They looked at him in astonishment.

“Dead,” said one.

It was a word they knew from myths; none of them seemed to remember quite what it meant. To Rotcod it had suddenly ceased being an abstraction. He noticed that around the little blonde corpse were stray bits of string, wads of dirty paper, more trash. He turned on his heel and strode off toward home, holding the book open with both hands, conversing loudly as he went.

“I thought it was a fable,” he exclaimed. “But now I have seen it with my own eyes. Death—imagine! Then what of the other things I’ve thought incredible?”

“They can all be yours.”

“What of disease? Is there truly such a thing?”

“There can be, yes.”

A bird toppled from its perch in a branch overhead. Its eyes were drops of blood. He paused to watch as worms humped from the ground and began to devour it. But they, too, broke out in blood and began to fester where they crawled.

“Incredible,” he said.

“And it will spread.”

He hurried on, spying his cottage. The iron hedge around the pond had begun to rust; the thorns looked poisonous to man and fairy alike. His house had also changed. The roof sat squarely atop the walls; the place no longer sagged or glowered, but simply inhabited space like any little box. He was surprised to see an identical dwelling in the middle of the Merry Meadow, and another beyond that. A great deal of building was underway; huge vehicles lumbered about, scraping the uneven earth into uniformity. They moved with none of the grace of the fairies’ floating boats, and they spouted dense black smoke. Two monsters collided and the drivers sprang out, cursing so vehemently that Rotcod expected the ground to open beneath them. Instead, they drew expandable tubes, aimed them at one another, and each dropped dead to the grass. He studied their deaths for some time, wondering how quickly this new twist would lose its novelty.

In a thoughtful mood, Rotcod entered his house and found it much changed in his absence. There were no dark corners, no books to berate him or offer opinions for his consideration. He set the black pamphlet on a polished counter and moved through the rooms, shading his eyes from the glaring light that emanated from the ceilings. He felt lost, uncertain of which furniture was meant for sitting or sleeping on.

He returned at last to the black book. “What is all this?” he asked.

The book did not reply. He thought that it might be formulating an explanation, but gradually he realized that it was simply inert. Its characters did not glow or try to catch his eyes. When it remained mute, he attempted to read it. Every page was covered with instructions printed in numerical order, but meaningless despite the arrangement.

“What is a capacitor?” he asked “Where is Slot A?”

The volume defied both his eye and his intellect until he closed it and set it down carefully. He was afraid to hurl it against the wall as he had so many other books. This one, in its quiet way, commanded his respect.

Rotcod cast an eye heavenward and saw that gray vapor cloaked the sky beyond the tinted windows. Stepping outside, he found that it burned his lungs as well. The forest had been neatly cleared while he was indoors, and among the stumps the fairykids sat with forlorn expressions. When they saw him, they visibly brightened, recognizing their companion from the old world. They started toward him, and Rotcod could not keep himself from hurrying to meet them halfway. He had never thought he would welcome their company, but the sound of their laughter warmed him in an unfamiliar way. He hurried along the thorny barrier he had erected last night with a few choice syllables, thankful that the fairies had not changed. It was their way to face difficulties with grace and equanimity.

Unfortunately, he stumbled in a pothole and rolled to the brown grass a moment before they reached him. He was thus unprepared when, still smiling, they drew their steel knives and fell upon him.

* * *

“Faust Forward” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1987.

NUTRIMANCER

Imagine a TV dinner, baked to a crisp. Silver foil peeled back by the laser heat of a toaster oven. Charred clots of chicken stew, succotash, nameless dessert, further blurred by a microforest of recombinant mold like a diseased painter’s nightmare of verdigris.

Fungoid cityscape.

Metaphor stretched to the breaking point.

Lunch.

ONE: NEON SUSHI

Someone had found a new use for an old fryboy. At the Lazy-Ate Gar & Krill, 6Pack was swabbing shrimp-racks with an 80-baud prosthetic dishrag when a Mongol stammer cut through the sleazy pinions of his hangover, sharp as a bitter mnemonic twist of Viennese coffee rinds tossed from a cathedral window into a turgid canal where rainbow trout drowned in petroleum jelly.

“6Pack?” said the Mongol. “Want a new job?”

He glanced up from the remnants of crustaceans curled like roseate spiral galaxies and saw:

—Limpid pools of Asian eyeliner aswirl in a violaceous haze of pain and pastry crumbs.

—Bank check skin with “Cash” spelled out on the lines of a furrowed brow.

—Some pretty bodacious special effects.

To his typographic implants it looked like this:

_ _ _ _ _

< >

++++++++++

{—} {—}

…

[====]

ww

oooooooooooooooooo

wwwwwwwwwwwwwww

<><> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <

======================

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

***********************

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

6Pack scrabbled for a purchase on reality but found only the dishrag.

“Man, that sweater hurts my eyes!”

The Mongol stepped between 6Pack and the sushi counter “It’s pixel-implanted Angola wool, under hermeneutic control. Come with me or I will induce a convincing epileptic seizure by altering stripe frequency and then take you away in the guise of your doctor.”

6Pack considered his options. A nearby heap of batter-fried squid tentacles quivered like golden-brown weaponry hauled from the ancient trenches of the sea. The Mongol tipped back the brass spittoon that served him as a hat, exposing an Oster ionized water-bazooka stitched among his Sukiyaki cornrows.

“What do you want with me?”

“Surely you can guess, fryboy.”

“No one calls me that without hearing my story. You’ve gotta hear what happened, what th-they d-d-did to me!”

“Now, now,” said the Mongol. “Don’t cry. I’m listening.”

* * *

It had all happened too fast for words.

Whiz !

Bang !

Whirr—ee—rr—ee—rr—ee !

Snip!

Clunkata-clunkata-clunkata….

Prrrrang!

“And when it was over, I woke up. The East Anglians had rewired my tastebuds.” He waved at the racks full of squirming periwinkles, octopus eyes, mackerel intestines. “Now all this tastes horrible to me. I eat the finest chocolates from Brussels—” he cannot avoid the memory of the heavy matron who served him sourly from behind the polished glass counters, shoving a gift-wrapped box of buttercreams into his hands “—and it tastes like dirt.”

“If you eat dirt, does it taste like buttercreams?” asked the Mongol. “But no matter. I know your story. What if I told you that my employers can restore your tongue to its previous sensitivity?”

6Pack sneered at him. “No one’s got the technology to unsplice my tongue, short of the EASA, who did the damage in the first place.”

The Mongol produced a 3D business card from some fold of his sweater and handed it to 6Pack:

“I am a deaf-mute,” it read.

“Wrong card,” the Mongol said, snatching it back and handing him another which spelled out in tiny blinking lights: EAST ANGLIAN SMORGASBORD AUTHORITY.

“What’s the matter, fryboy? Swallow something you don’t like?”

Hands trembling, seeing the future unfolding before him like an origami hors d’ouevre, 6Pack knelt to kiss the Mongol’s fingers. “I’ll do anything to have my palate restored,” he pleaded. “Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I’ll never confuse mayonnaise with Miracle Whip again.”

“You’re hired,” said the Mongol and drew his hands away.

The knuckles left a taste of Kentucky bluegrass on 6Pack’s lips.

TWO: WIRED TO SHOP

He was at the Grocery Boutique when his shopping cart’s guidance system failed. Narrowly averting disaster, he switched to manual and swerved past an oncoming cart. Heart pounding, he looked up apologetically at the other driver. That was when he saw her.

A peach recomb-polyester scarf enshrouded permed and frosted curls. From platform heels of rich Corinthian vinyl, tiny blood-colored toenails oozed forth like delicate ornaments from a cake decorator. Rhinestone-rimmed videospex hid her eyes; her face was as sterile and empty as the corridors of General Hospital that held her attention.

“Pardon me,” 6Pack murmured.

“Chet, you moron, she just went in the MRI room with Emilio!”

He couldn’t help gazing into her cart as he passed.

Sara Lee Weightless Cake

Betty Crocker Astro-Cookies

He remembered sitting in a Parisian cafe, the tip of his croissant immersed in a demitasse as a pathetic screech made him look up abruptly into a—

Bird’s Eye Frozen Creamed Corn

Instinctively, he shied from the selection, but somehow she sensed him and drifted nearer, like a platinum-blonde manta ray in the aquarium aisle. Her lips parted, gushing warm air that smelled like a stagnant wind coursing from all the demolished bakeries that had ever harbored starving mice. She smiled with green lips. A particle of biftek swayed like an electric eel, trapped between her teeth.

“I’m Polly Pantry,” she said. “Join me for lunch?”

She caught his arm, pressed her mouth to his ear, and tickled the tiny waxen hairs with her tongue as she whispered, “Courtesy of EASA, 6Pack. You can’t refuse.”

THREE: ZERO GEE WHIZ

Menu.

Foodstuffs.

Out of the ovens of Earth they come tumbling, but in the radar ranges of the orbital kitchens there is no force that can cause a souffle to fall. Jaunts into shallow space for a nulldinner are common as dirt among the filthy rich. Even in his prime, 6Pack had not dined in space. Tonight he would remedy that.

The Pixie Fat line, EASA’s Artificial Conscience Module, sang in 6Pack’s earreceiver as the shuttle pulled into the neat chrome pancreas called Waiter’s Heaven: “Shoofly pie and apple pan dowdy make your eyes light up and your tongue say howdy!”

“I don’t understand why the EASA’s being so nice to me,” 6Pack paravocalized. “First they give me back my sense of taste and now they’re treating me to dinner.”

“Sh,” said the Fatline. “Incoming message from Polly.”

“Hi, 6Pack! Howrya doin’? You eat that sandwich I sent up with you?”

“Sure did, Polly,” he lied. “Tasty.”

Deviled ham on Wonder Bread. He hoped that the shuttle stewardess wouldn’t guess who’d clogged the flight toilet.

“Okay, hon, when you get off that ship you’re to go straight to Chez Cosmique. The reservations are in your name, for a party of six. Tell them that you’re waiting for friends, then go ahead and order. Make them bring it right away.”

“When you are in trouble and you don’t know right from wrong, give a little—”

“Shut up, Fatline, I’m talking! Now, 6Pack, I want you—”

6Pack fiddled with the dial in his nostril and tuned out both of them. A six-course meal for six, he thought. Good thing he hadn’t eaten that sandwich.

* * *

“There’s salt in this creampuff,” he complained, after the last course had come and gone and dessert floated before him. The EASA had equipped him with a false gullet that compressed his meals and packed them into tiny blocks of bullion to be deposited one by one in his Swiss bank account. He had complained about everything Chez Cosmique served, while the staff milled about wishing that his supposed companions would come claim some of the food. 6Pack had eaten it all, and now—

“I refuse to pay.”

The cafe grew hushed. Aristocrats with tame prairie dogs and live coelenterates embedded in their coiffeurs turned upon him the incredibly credible eyes of luxury. The nearest, a thin old man wearing nothing but tightly laced black undergarments and a bonnet of jelly leaned close enough to whisper, “Are you a fryboy?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I am in need of a fryboy with exquisite discrimination and a hearty appetite.”

The manager slunk up to 6Pack’s nulltable, where the ruins of his feast lingered, untouched by waiters who had rightly guessed that there would be no gratuity forthcoming. Five cream-puffs floated in the diningspace, bouncing between invisible restraining fields with tiny detonations of powdered sugar at every impact.

“Sir, have you a question about your bill?”

“Yeah, you should be paying me to dispose of this garbage you call food.”

“But—but this is impossible. Perhaps there is something wrong with your tongue. Each item is carefully prepared and tasted by our chef.”

“He’s a fake. Bring him in so that I can insult him to his face. Then you might make up for your incredible error by giving his job to me.”

“Now don’t be so hard on the poor guy,” said the Pixie Fatline.

“My dear fellow,” said the lean tycoon at the next table. “I have a position for a private chef. Besides, I own this establishment. You’d be wasted here.”

“That’s our man,” said the Fatline. “Tempura-Hashbraun himself.”

6Pack removed his seatbelt and drifted toward the aristocrat. “What’s it pay?”

FOUR: THE STAYLITE RUNS

“May I introduce my daughter?” said Tempura-Hashbraun, guiding 6Pack through an entryway. “Lady 3Bean, this is our new fryboy.”

She was both cat and canary, a hybrid of starving piranha and fat guppy, all sharp fangs and soft feathers. But there wasn’t time to ogle her or quiver in dread. The old man led him through the split-levelsatellite to the infokitchen. He had never seen anything like it. Never dreamed that such a thing could be. Imagine an oven designed by the old Dutch masters. Its rails and racks had been forged in the browheat of the oppressed masses, then plunged sizzling into the vast oceans of their driven sweat, while the Ternpura-Hashbrauns climbed their limp ladder of slaves to the stars. The dials blinded him with their intensity until the old man found the rheostat and turned them down.

“6Pack, meet Nutrimancer. Nutrimancer, 6Pack. I hope you do better than my last fryboy.”

“What happened to him?”

Tempura-Hashbraun smiled for the first time, showing that he had replaced his teeth with credit registers.

“Nutrirnancer fired him,” he said. “Thirty seconds under the broiler and he was done to perfection.” He licked his lips.

* * *

6Pack slipped his tongue into the jack, checked the pilot light, and hit the ON switch. For an instant he smelled scallions sizzling in butter, the iron tang of an omlette pan,a nd then he was inside.

“Wheeee!” cried the Fatline. “You’re back.”

Ahead of him, a ziggurat rose halfway to infinity, looking like a corporate bar chart. But it was not a savings and loan, nor a humongous tax shelter. It was a wedding cake.

He rushed forward, surpassing the rate of inflation. Tier upon tier leapt into clarity, as an army of menacing custard eclairs streaked past below.

“Watch out!” the Fatline cried. “It’s covered in ICING![1]”[1]

In the instant before collision, he found his bearings and soared upward. The tiers dropped below, but not before he had read the message written in ICING upon the topmost layer: “YOU’RE DEAD, FRYBOY!”

Now he settled into the evasion routines with which the EASA had equipped him. As soon as a cocktail olive drew close enough, he snagged it by the pimento and followed it back to the foodbanks.

Kaleidoscope of the tongue:

Mint and parsley, vanilla haggis, pecans and hundred year eggs.

As the tastes passed through his mind, he peered into the twisted guts of the infokitchen, sorting through spice racks and rifling iceboxes. He ignored the cross-referenced accounting files that tracked the expense of every meal and ordered supplies when they were low. He ignored the brain of the vast system.

“Go!” sang the Fatline.

Straight for the stomach.

* * *

“What are you doing in my kitchen?”

His inquisitor was a rotund chef wearing a white suit and a tall white cap; he held a wooden spoon menacingly cocked. They stood on a wild mountain peak; tennis balls whipped past and the sky was full of steel engravings.

“You’re Nutrimancer,” 6Pack said.

“So what if I am? This kitchen is too small for two. I don’t need a fryboy. I’m self-motivated. What are you?”

Memories of Earth: hot Florida sand burning his kneecaps, his first smorgasbord, popsicles in Cannes, Judy Dixon sucking his tongue till it hurt like hell.

“You have a messy mind,” Nutrimancer announced. “You can’t cook with all that confusion inside you. Let me clean it out for you.”

6Pack cried out for the Fatline, but he’d been cut off. He gave a little whistle but it didn’t help. Nutrimancer’s laughter sounded like tricycle tires rushing over a sidewalk covered with worms and roaches.

“EASA can’t help you now,” said the chef. “I know they sent you to stop me, but I control the diet of the most powerful man on or off Earth. Soon I will have replaced every cell in his body with nutrients tailored for world domination. And old Tempura-Hashbraun has developed quite an appetite for human flesh. I’m sure he won’t mind if another fryboy ends up under glass with an apple in his mouth.”

Something was rising over the mountains, unseen by the deranged chef, like a pale and enormous yellow moon lofting up through the clouds. Without letting himself follow the arc of its rise, 6Pack calculated the path of its descent. He took a few steps back, drawing the chef into the point of impact.

“It’s no use trying to escape. No one knows where you are. And soon the old man will have disposed of the remains.”

The shadow of the falling sphere began to grow around Nutrimancer’s feet. At the last instant, the chef glanced up and cried, “Aiee! Wintermelon!”

As the titan fruit smashed upon the peak, flattening the chef, 6Pack leapt from the crag. The sky went black and so did he.

* * *

He awoke in a soft bed, an extravagant suite, as Lady 3Bean walked through the door with a breakfast tray in her hands.

“You were wonderful,” she said. “Would you like something to eat?”

6Pack shook his head and regarded the rashers and cantaloupe with distaste.

“Never again,” he said.

(With thanks and apologies to William Gibson)

* * *

“Nutrimancer” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987.

THE LIQUOR CABINET OF DR. MALIKUDZU

Bad news for the janitor; good luck for Dr. Malikudzu. Sometime in the middle of the night-shift, after a fight with Max the supervisor over who was to empty biohazard bins in the animal experimentation labs, young Mr. Coover let go his already slender grip on discretion and began unadvisedly opening random drawers in the offices of the principal investigators. He had seen too many bad things peeking at him emptily from the plastic shrouded hollows of the laboratory bins; he wanted to know what got into the heads of these doctors to make them go after living meat the way they did. Drawer after drawer yielded nothing but paper and paperclips, the occasional stash of change for the vending machines, stale fragments of pastry. But finally, in the office of one Dr. Malikudzu, he came upon a cache of tiny liquor bottles, of the sort distributed by airlines. With a grin he settled back in the squeaky office chair, unscrewed the cap on a vodka bottle, and tipped the contents down his throat, never noticing that the paper seal on the neck of the bottle had already been broken.

It burned like vodka going down, but the taste was all wrong. And at the bottom young Mr. Coover was unsettled to find that it had dregs—namely a little rubbery bit like a cheese curd, which slipped past his tongue before he could spit it out. Bleh! He held the bottle up to the light, but there was nothing remaining in it to suggest that it had ever held anything but what it claimed.

Suddenly queasy, he scarcely had time to drop the bottle back into the drawer—knocking over several others as if they were bowling pins—and stagger to his rolling garbage can, therein disgorging all that he had drunk and quite a bit more besides. He hung weakly over the rim of the huge reeking barrel, his mops and brooms clattering to the floor, and waited there in case his stomach might surge again. He felt as if he were breaking out in needles, his stomach seared by acids. His eventual thought was that things would be complicated if he were discovered in this office, where the drawers had obviously been ransacked. To hell with straightening up—he was sick. He had meant to quit anyway, now that he’d saved some money. Let them try to track him down. Doctors weren’t supposed to keep wet bars in their drawers; he probably wouldn’t be reported. But Max, his superior, was another matter.

He stooped to recover his brooms and mops, and his guts seized the opportunity to stab him without mercy. Then he staggered from the office, pushing his cart and barrel ahead of him through aisles of black acid-proof counter tops lined with glassware and fancy instruments that looked like televisions without screens. His stomach spasmed, forcing a scream from him. The sound echoed through the lab, brittle and cold as the Pyrex. He thought he heard an answering cry from down the hall. Was Max coming to check up on him?

Get out of here now. Out of here. It sounded like there was a jungle in the walls, apes screaming; but that beating of metal bars would have been out of place in the wild.

He pushed against another door, this one with a yellow pane set in it. Locked. He fished out his skeleton key, ignoring the warning symbols on the glass. Something more than biohazards here. He pushed the door open and the screech of animals overwhelmed him. Monkeys stared at him from rows of unlit cages: unlit, but their eyes glowed with a sick yellow light, the color of the glass pane. In fact, the pane was clear; this yellow radiance had colored it.

“Oh God…” He put a hand to his belly, rubbed gently, wishing the pain would stop. He had swallowed something, he knew. Something like a tequila worm, but still alive. It was roaming around inside him, not bothering to follow the twists and turns of his guts—no, it was boring a way straight through. The shortest way to a man’s heart…

At that thought, he knew that it had found this most prized muscle. A hot yellow exultance swept through him—alien to his thoughts, but arising alongside them. His heart quivered and there came a soft jabbing. No more pain. The muscle stopped beating, his eyes bulged, and then the organ throbbed and went to work at a far different pace. His blood flooded with yellow light; it spilled from his eyes and lit the dark comers.

He smiled. A man was calling him, coming down the hall. Max.

“Coover? What are you doing in there? It’s your ass this time, shithead. We don’t clean these rooms.”

Young Mr. Coover met him at the door. His heart beat a rapid yellow accompaniment to the stifled gasp, the wet rending of muscle and bone, and the arrhythmic sound of dribbling on the easy-to-clean linoleum tile.

This done, Mr. Coover found one of the larger cages in a corner of the room and opened the wire mesh door. The occupant gazed at him with soulful yellow eyes, understanding why he must squeeze it by the throat until the vertebrae were mingled in the cooling jellies of the neck. His eyes shone all the more brightly as he climbed into the cage and pulled the door shut after him. Then, until morning, he sulked and howled like all the rest.

It was a short trip from the simian labs to the psychiatric institute. Dr. Leslie Malikudzu watched from his high office window as the strait-jacketed figure of the young janitor was led around the back of the opposite building by several security men and three white-coated doctors. He could still see the boy’s eyes in his memory: the faint residue of luminescence dying from them in the daylight. He had neglected to mention the empty Vodka bottle to the police. Now he returned to the drawer and examined the other bottles in order to ascertain that they were in fact all quite full of stasis fluid, and that the tiny flesh niblets inside each remained immobile.

Thank God the janitor had drunk the stuff, he thought; must have held quite a kick, too. He hated to think of what might have happened had the bottle broken on the floor and the flesh-tag escaped. It could have struck from anywhere. Now, however, it was safely lodged in a companionable heart; its presence, he had determined, had struck the boy dumb, driven him utterly mad. It seemed doubtful that he would ever regain speech sufficient to describe how he had been driven to murder his supervisor and the ape whose cage he’d occupied. This was fortunate for Dr. Malikudzu, who was still years away from publishing his tentative findings, and much farther than that from asking permission of the Human Experimentation Committee to pursue his work into animals of a higher order. The Simian Commission did not know exactly what he had done to the apes now in his keeping; or rather, the experiments they had authorized were not the ones he had conducted, although they bore a superficial resemblance. He could thank Mr. Coover that his work had been accelerated by perhaps a decade and its benefits to him might be immediately forthcoming.

He only required access to the patient himself. If the doctors across the street were close with their unpublished data, they were more so with their high-risk inmates. In cases such as this, Coover might not remain there long at all. The psychologists would argue that he needed mental care, the police that he should be treated as a criminal. Before this argument could get underway there were some tests he would very much like to run on the fellow.

Poor fellow! He allowed himself a moment of compassion, then reminded himself that the janitor was very likely a drunk, not to mention a pilferer. Well, the tag would have a grand old time with him, wouldn’t it?

Dr. Malikudzu had his assistant place a few calls, which required interrupting the gossip over the grisly murder and the breakage of several astronomically priced pieces of analytic equipment. Finally he was connected with Dr. Gavin Shiel, financial director of the psychiatric institute. Shiel had a doctorate in economics, and equally important to his status, he had graduated from Cornell with top honors in Hotel Administration.

“Gavin, how are you? You’ve heard about that ghastly business in my lab I suppose. They’ve brought the young man to your place and I wondered if I could see him.”

“Good to hear from you, Les. Awful business. I’m not sure who’s handling the case. It’s urgent, you say? Why don’t you run over and ask for a minute with him?”

“I’d like to, but you know your staff. Quite rigorous on protocol. He did just murder a man, you realize. I wondered if you might oil the water a bit, advise them that I’m coming. Otherwise I’ll have to get into this terrible hassle over privacy, privileges, medical jurisdiction.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll call Therese Dowsie. Should be straightened out by the time you can get over here.”

“Wonderful. Let’s get together for lunch sometime soon.”

Dr. Malikudzu whizzed down to the lobby in the elevator, dashed through a light drizzle and crossed the street, threading between two beacon-flashing ambulances that were stalled at the emergency parking entrance while a mailroom messenger gathered up a spill of envelopes. By the time he entered the other building, a nurse named Linda was waiting for him at the elevator. With her key in a coded lock, they were given access to the middle of the crisis ward. The hall was full of wandering patients. An older man with sunken black eyes informed Dr. Malikudzu that he had always loved him. It was impossible to separate staff from patients; there were no alienating white coats in this ward. Dr. Malikudzu was only mildly suprised when Linda began railing at the young man behind the reception desk, telling him that he should be in his room and not answering phones. Before he slipped away, however, she asked him the whereabouts of Dr. Dowsie, and the patient pointed down the end of the hall. They passed out of the ward, checking that the door locked behind them, into an area of much higher security.

A policeman stood in the hall, talking with the proud Dr. Dowsie, a tall black woman who now began berating the cop for “waving his gun around where it wasn’t wanted.” When she saw Dr. Malikudzu, her only greeting was, “You.”

“I know you’re expecting me.”

“Gavin made it clear that I was to let you see the new boy. You know how he reasons—with a checkbook. I don’t see what business it is of yours really.”

“He was found in my lab.”

“So what?”

“I’m investigating a disappearance.”

“You’re not going to get anything out of him. Besides, his hands were empty when they brought him in. I’m trying to get his evaluation started.”

“Is he sedated?”

“We had to sedate him. You heard him howling.”

“But did the drugs work?”

A sudden yell answered his question. It sounded like the door might open from the blast. The cop backed away and started walking down the hall shaking his head; he was headed toward the crisis ward.

“Linda, show him out. I’ll let Dr. Malikudzu in.” She unlocked the door with a deadpan expression.

“I’d like a few minutes alone if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest.”

Inside, the smell of urine and feces was as strong as the blast of sound. Difficult to imagine such fierce emanations from such a small man. Fortunately, Dr. Malikudzu was quite accustomed to the reek of hominid effluvia. Coover had crawled back into a corner of the couch, and there he lay with his head thrown back, raging at the ceiling, only occasionally glancing down at the man who had come to share his cell. There was no more yellow gleam in the boy’s eyes; they seemed entirely burnt out.

“I know you’re in there,” Dr. Malikudzu said, not that the flesh-tag implicitly understood human speech. Still, there was a chance that it might have infiltrated the boy’s speech centers and joined forces with him. These were all things he had hoped to ascertain with human subjects.

He took a bottle of Puerto Rican rum from his pocket and held it up to young Coover’s face. The boy quieted instantly, staring into the depths of stasis fluid at the floating speck within, a bit of twisted flesh that resembled nothing so much as a kidney bean.

“Ah, recognition! I could inject you with this fluid, you know—a needle to the heart—and stop your thrashing about in this unfortunate lad. But then there would be an autopsy. There might be one anyway if you’re not careful to live. We must give you time yet to heal. The entry wounds must be painful, yes?” He got close enough to the boy to see blood inside his lips, but it was hard to tell if he’d done that by gnashing his teeth or whether it might have come up from his interior. “Do you know what you’ve got in there? Perhaps I should ask, do you know what you are?”

He was thrilled by the notion that he might actually be communicating with the flesh-tag for the first time. His simian models had been disappointing in this regard. In fact, in none of them had he seen such extreme reactions. As he’d always suspected, the human organism was the only one that would allow the tags to take their full effect. Which meant… the ends of his efforts might be in sight!

“You are a cancer,” he said. “A bit of self-consuming flesh. Or rather, that’s what you were until I got ahold of you. Now you’re something rather more special than that. In a sense, I am your father.”

The boy stared deep into his eyes, head jerking rapidly.

“Yes I am. You should be pleased that your sire is such a genius. It hasn’t been easy to pursue this work. I’ve had four separate rotating groups of graduate students working with me, all of them unaware of the other groups, all convinced—like my patrons—that they were working toward quite different ends. It’s been a jigsaw puzzle, you see, in which only I hold the key piece. I’ve had to invest a bit of unpaid time myself, but I don’t mind. The exposure to radiation, the messing about with chimerae, all part of the job. Do you remember, I tried sending you messages once before? I wrote amusing little codes into chromosomes and let them replicate within your genetic predecessor. I thought you might catch on and reply in kind. Perhaps you’re not that intelligent. Perhaps you’re nothing more than a malignant worm after all.”

The boy kept nodding, a slather of blood on his chin. Suddenly his eyes rolled back and he slumped in a faint, relaxing the rest of his bodily control. The smell worsened only slightly. Dr. Malikudzu backed away, uncapping the rum and dribbling a bit of stasis fluid over the couch—where it could hardly be distinguished from the rest of the slime—while he shook the tiny tag into the palm of his hand. He pinched it by one end and dropped it into the boy’s yawning mouth.

Instantly young Coover’s jaws snapped shut with such ferocity that his teeth were in danger of shattering. The boy’s throat began to tremble, ripple, and the passage of the tag was marked by the heaving of the chest. There was a lull during which the doctor capped the bottle and slipped it back into his pocket. Then Coover slid from the bed and became a sodden, stinking heap on the floor. A gibbering heap.

Dr. Malikudzu knocked lightly on the door and Dr. Dowsie opened it. “Had enough?”

“I think so. The sedatives seem to have taken effect. Keep me posted, will you? I’d like to stop in this afternoon if that’s all right.”

“He might be in jail this afternoon. I’m trying to see it doesn’t happen.”

Dr. Malikudzu bit his lip. That would be unfortunate. He didn’t know anyone at the jailhouse who might let him in.

“Best of luck,” he said.

“I still don’t understand your interest in this kid,” she said. “What’s he to you?”

He glanced at his watch. “Sorry, I’ve got an appointment with the Chancellor. Shall we talk later?”

She shook her head and called a nurse to let him off the ward.

* * *

His phone rang at 3:30, as he sat with his collection of little liquor bottles arrayed on the desk before him.

“Malikudzu? This is Therese Dowsie—”

“Dr. Dowsie, I was just going to call you. How is our patient? Not taken from our arms yet. I hope.”

“He’s not going anywhere. There’s no way to restrain him. I think the cops are afraid to touch him.”

“Why, what’s happened?”

His heart, which had finally slowed after the events of the morning, now began to beat faster than ever. His dreams were coming true so suddenly!

“I don’t know exactly what’s going on. He seems to be… deteriorating… quite rapidly.”

“Please describe.”

“Bone structure is liquifying. His skin is mottled, as if something’s sucking up the melanin; looks like someone spilled bleach all over him. And his eyes… God, it’s like looking at an octopus. They still blink. They’re yellow. We tried to move him an hour ago and he just sort of… sort of oozed out of his clothes and the strait-jacket. He’s still intact, somehow metabolizing, though I don’t think he can breathe. I wondered if you might have any idea how his happened. You seemed so interested in him this morning. It’s become plain to me that this is not a mental problem.”

“It sounds… terrible.” He had almost said “wonderful.” “Shall I come over and have a look?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Glad to.”

Dr. Dowsie herself was waiting to take him up to the ward. This time, unfortunately, she chose to accompany him into the room. He would have liked time alone with the remains. Perhaps it could still be arranged.

“I think you should call Gavin Shiel,” he said. “A higher authority seems necessary now. A new stage in treatment.”

“Treatment?” She looked considerably aged; her words were shrieked. “What can you do for that?”

She had seen too much at once, without forewarning. He had expected something like this… this malign jelly. The two tags had met, given the proper host, and powered by their fusion they were eating what had once been Mr. Coover from the inside out—like earthworms processing soil, they were eating but not destroying him. They were transforming an ordinary old life into an amazing new form. It was wonderful. He prodded at it with his foot, trying to locate the brain center. Abruptly it opened a pair of golden eyes and winked at him.

“My God, did you see that? I can’t take any more of this.” Dr. Dowsie bolted from the room, forgetting to shut it behind her. He heard her tennis shoes squeaking down the hall.

Dr. Malikudzu had come prepared. As he stooped toward the mass he said, “Intelligent, aren’t we? More intelligent than Mr. Coover, I’d imagine, hm?”

The jelly shook faintly, as if in accord.

“And hardy? Durable? Life, perhaps, everlasting? As difficult to eradicate as cancer itself?”

He had located brain, heart, liver—other major organs. The lungs seemed to have lost their utility. He extracted a long scalpel and began to stroke randomly at the surface of the thing; it was like trying to slice pudding. The slits closed instantly. He stabbed the brain half a dozen times, executing neat twirling trepanning gestures deep in the cortex, but all without effect. The eyes narrowed, staring more brightly than before. Liver, heart, nothing was harmed by his knife—and in fact he was positive that all the organs were moment by moment becoming less differentiated. This quivering protoplasm was life itself, nothing less.

“Fire might do you in,” he said, and it gave him such a look that he almost pitied it. “I wish I could carry you away from here to a safe place. With time we might learn to speak to each other. But I’m afraid I’d need a large bucket for that task—something like one of your custodial drums. There isn’t the time. So many experiments don’t quite pan out. Eventually, however, we will succeed. I think that personally my chances are excellent.”

He bowed slightly, stepping back as the mass extended a pseudopod and flowed toward him, flexing resilient tissue that fell somewhere between muscle and bone in organization and function. He could see it taking on new forms, working out new definitions, discovering itself. He could see how strong it might eventually become. If it lived that long.

They would kill it, of course. They always did. With fire or water or chemical reagents. The world was hard on foundlings.

He turned to the exit, left ajar by Dr. Dowsie, but somehow Coover got ahead of him. A thick snaky arm slipped under the door and drew it shut. There was no latch on the inside.

Dr. Malikudzu regarded the arm with curiosity. It ended in a flat, paddlelike hand from which a dozen wriggling fingers sprouted. Shifting, liquescent, the arm now thrust itself into the air like a fleshy cobra wishing to shake hands. It swayed toward him, thrusting past his half-hearted parry. He was keen to see what it would do.

What it did was cover his mouth. A scream was out of the question. The cupped palm exerted a slight suction on his lips, drawing them open as it gripped his jaw. Several fingers explored his gums, his tongue, and finally came to rest atop the edges of his teeth. In the center of the room, watching him from a distance, the yellow eyes of the cancer flared. The grip tightened. His teeth snapped together, severing the fingertips inside his mouth. For a moment they lay cold and oozing on his tongue, until arousing themselves, they made quickly for the passages of soft tissue and began their burrowing odyssey toward his heart.

This journey had begun with cocktails. If only it could have ended half so pleasantly.

* * *

“The Liquor Cabinet of Dr. Malikudzu” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Night Cry, Summer 1987.

GOOD ’N’ EVIL, OR, THE ONCE AND FUTURE THING

This is my confession.

On this 13th day of the Third Moontide of the Smoldering Beagle Year, at the urging of both Professor Tadmonicker and my own troubled conscience, I, Maven Minkwhistle, set pen to paper. Never again will I type a single character; the mere sight of the clumsy old Underwood fills me with self-loathing for the misdeeds I have done, the falsities I have perpetuated in this already too-false world. I pray that this manuscript will not meet with incredulity in a public that has learned to doubt my word—indeed, my very name. It is not an apology, for I know that society finds such fawning to be more offensive than any crime. Nor is it an eleventh-minute attempt to polish my reputation with further pleas of innocence. I am more concerned for my father—dear Father! I never wanted it to end like this.

After all, it was begun for his benefit and carried out with his tacit approval. When the first bit of truth emerged, he smothered it and pressed me to keep on in my misguided way, knowing that he would benefit in some wise from my crimes. But it may have been that he truly did not suspect me. Certainly he never understood my intentions.

He is a good man, as I will vouch. He raised me to the best of his ability, single-handed in this endeavor after my mother died of the Laughing Sickness when I was still in swaddling clothes. We lived with several other of his tenants in our ancestral home on Downer Street, where I received acceptable tutoring at his hands. My father was a self-taught man and his education was a bit of patchwork, rather threadbare and bound to come unraveled if you nagged at it for too long; yet he was full of enthusiasm for history, and for literature in particular. Because I loved him and wanted to please him in any way that I could, I allowed myself to become infected with this obsession of his. My servility was unconscious, of course; much as I ran to fetch the beanbags which he tossed for our amusement, so I learned to read the fragmentary texts that lined the tottering shelves in his library. And it was here, on those long and lonely days when father labored in the streets, hawking his “Smokable Weeds” and “Restorative Spices Suitable for the Treatment of Mutant Gout, Twisting Fits, and Cumulative Genetic Damage,” that I discovered the old authors of Prior History.

What wonders I uncovered in these ancient, charred tomes! The very pages, redolent of mold and nitrogen, recalled the lofty-spired cities of legend, so unlike our squat towns. I fell in love with this collection of stray, unconnected pages, salvaged from ruins that had long since lapsed into the alkaline mud of their own ashes. For me, these few thousand lines of text, these brittle pages brimming with mystery, were as vast and fantastic as the world humanity had burned to the ground. My father’s shelves seemed another Wonder of the World—a veritable Hanging Library of Babel!

The reading public will understand my love for these works; have they not shown, by their very willingness to be duped, how much we all prize those masters and masterpieces lost in the Turbulation, known only by reputation and a few fragments of prose? Who can forget his first encounter with the timeless, tireless phrases of Sindy Sheldonyx, Jacques Collins, Lousi L’Amorgue, the sage Garfeld, Herold Rubbins, and the Master himself—Strapon Thing?

My father adored this man and his work. At the core of his library were two prized relics, which my father on occasion, after a draught or two of his home-brewed absinthe, had been seen to put to his lips as he knelt intoning their contents, which he knew by heart. They were two treasures delivered from the roaring destruction that had obliterated every library, every book-rack, and reduced each shopping mall to a ring of fire.

They were authentic pages from the Master’s works, deemed such by the literary experts of our day, including Professor Tadmonicker. My father had long since had them impregnated with preservative chemicals and mounted them between sheets of transparent plastic, the better to withstand his reverent kisses and the fevered friction of his worshiping palms.

I remember well the day he brought them down from the locked chest on the highest shelf. His face was aglow with pride; his white whiskers trembled like the mandibles of the pallid pulp-eating beetles that were his bane.

“Maven, my boy,” he said, “this is a very special day for you. A day of great honor! I know you have read every word on these shelves, have committed them to memory like your old father before you. But I hold here two pages of value unmatched, which you have not seen. Touch them lightly, read them slowly. For these, my only son, are the words of the Master!”

Cool was the touch of those plaques to my hands, yet the words within them seemed to burn like black fire. I nearly reeled backward from the force of the scriptures. Scriptures, I call them (and I am not the first), because such was the holy purity of those lines that they spoke directly to my soul, singing of a world forever lost and a heritage that would last until eternity. “Men fear time,” it is written. “But time fears Strapon Thing.” In the few square inches of legible text between the grey spots of mold which had nearly claimed these precious sheets before Professor Tadmonicker’s lamination arrested their voracious spread, I saw revealed such insight into the human condition that my mind began to spin. It was too much! I was hurled forcibly from my body and drifted into a sightless realm composed purely of words. In my swoon, I imagined I could hear the Master speaking the words of his tale….

As my fit passed, I realized that it was my father’s voice I heard. He had caught the plaques as I fell, and now he stood in the shaft of light from the study’s single window, chanting such of the text as was visible. I lay as one in a trance, hardly believing my ears, fearing that I must have died and gone to join the plentiful souls of the dead; for surely, no living man could have written such words. I hardly knew them as meaningful syllables. They seemed like cosmic music to me then.

After a time my father replaced the plaques in their chest, locked the box, and returned it to its place of honor above our heads. Then he turned on me a knowing gaze, half a smile, and crouched on the floor beside me.

“I know what you must be feeling, boy,” he said, putting a hand on my brow. “Such a loss, all those voices, in the Turbulation. And his was the greatest of them.”

I found my voice at last. “Father… Father, where did you find those pages?”

He nodded, thinking back toward darker days. “Hm. Once it was possible to find such things in the markets; they were little valued, except as tinder. I shudder to think of how many complete works of Thing and Cartbland were lost in the fires of illiterate gypsies, thousands of lines of classic prose going to warm a botulous can of creamed corn…. I found one tucked into a telephone directory, if you can believe that. The other was folded in half and glued with mucilage to the last page of an ancient insurance calendar. No human hands had done it, of course—it was the random chaos of the Turbulation, the same force that drove sewing needles into marble pillars, buried corks in steel girders, and sent cotton balls rocketing through the walls of bank vaults. But Chaos was kind to me on the days when I found these treasures. I was no older than you at the time. Even so, I had heard tell of these works; I had seen other fragments in the Museum. I thought I recognized them as the words of Strapon Thing, and I was soon proved correct. A distinguished head of the College studied them for several months, and then announced that they were missing pieces of two great works, Pet Seminary and Salem’s Lost.”

“The Museum?” I asked, starting to my feet. “You mean, there are more like these? Father, will you take me? Won’t you show me, please?”

“Ah, my boy, I have weeds to sell and tonics to distill. You must be patient. Soon we will go, I promise you that. And it would hasten things, you know, if you helped me with my work. I am getting slow and crabbed these days; it pains me greatly to stoop and pick the weeds I need from the sidewalks and the vacant lots. Why don’t you come and help me for awhile? It is time you learned a trade.”

Eventful day! The sight of those pages acted as a catalyst, bringing immense changes in their wake. For even as my father tried to coax me into his profession, I was already thinking of another shop I had seen down the row. There was a sign in the window, advertising for an apprentice. A typewriter shop, it was, where the ancient engines were refurbished, repaired, and pressed back into the service of mankind. I realized that I would never be happy unless I could live day to day with the sight of the black, unchanging characters of the Nigglish language beneath my nose. And so, defying my father (but gently, so as not to wound his pride in his own profession), I presented myself that very afternoon at the shop of Dorky Coxset.

Old Coxset’s shop was dark and musty, smelling of dust and machine oil. Everything in the place seemed lightly furred with clumps of greasy lint, much like the innards of the machines he restored to working order. Coxset walked with a perpetual hunch from bending too long over the bowels of his clanking, toneless instruments. The old gentleman proffered a blackened, oily hand and listened politely to my enthusiastic bid for his instruction. I explained that I had always loved the printed word and that no other occupation would serve me so well as typewriter repair.

“Well, now,” he replied, after a moment’s thought, “I know you from the neighborhood and you’ve always seemed a likeable boy enough… but this work is not as glamorous as you might suppose. An apprentice rarely touches a typer ’til he’s been at the trade for three years, and sometimes four. First you must learn to repair the old ribbons and sew new ones from strips of cloth; then there is the mixing of inks from oak gall and the inking of those ribbons, and the winding of them on spools. There’s much reaming of tiny hieroglyphs in dim light, which will give you the poor eyesight of a mool by the time you are my age; add to that plentiful tightening of springs and a small bit of brightwork to be polished on occasion. Yes, it will be a good long while before you venture into the workings of the actual machine.”

I assured him that I understood this perfectly. Merely the presence, the ineffable aura of print, would carry me through years of unrewarding toil.

“It’s not completely unrewarded,” he said. “In return for your services, if all goes well and you prove compatible, I’ll give you a slight stipend—not much at first, mind. And in my spare time, little as there is of it, I’ll also teach you how to type. Would you like that?”

“To type!” I gasped. “You mean… as the old authors did?”

“Yes, yes. You’ll see your thoughts transformed to printed words. It can be a heady experience for a young lad, as I well remember.” He chuckled at my expression, but I think he scarcely suspected the depth of my awe. To write… to type… to emulate the Master. This would be my life’s work!

“Are you interested, then?” he asked.

Without a word I thrust my hand into his and pumped it rapidly. The bargain was sealed. So it was that with the loftiest of intentions, I set forth on the lowest path that fate could possibly provide me.

My father was distressed when I gave him the news, but he did his best to hide it, and even expressed some happiness. That night he brought out his private stock of absinthe and I had my first taste of that bitter potion. I slept unsoundly, caught between the worlds of wakefulness and dream, yet my thrashings were full of nightmarish images, distant voices growing nearer, and the first intimations of my foolish ambition. I remember, it was on the following morning that my eyes sprang open, and this thought floated from my eyes: I shall learn to type like Strapon Thing!

With a diligence that surprised my master Coxset, I threw myself into the trade of typewriter repair. For a matter of weeks I had no other thought than to become expert in every task that he passed my way, whether it was collecting and bagging the piles of dust that he scraped from the bars of old Olivettis, or rubbing ink and sewing patches into the faded ribbons which his regular customers brought in for repair. At night I would eat a few bites of my father’s healthful salads of boiled nettle and tender young foxtail, then I would leap into my sack and dream of typewriters with gleaming keys, silver hammers spattering onto sheets of fairy-white paper.

It was some months later that Dorky Coxset announced a holiday. He was traveling up to Mazmere to visit his widowed sister. It seemed she had contracted a bad case of the languish, and Dorky was concerned for her. He handed me the keys to the shop, in case of an emergency, and said that he would return in three days’ time.

The moment he left me alone, I remembered what I had been intending for months. Taking a few trading stamps from my weekly stipend, I hurried downtown to the Museum and bought myself a ticket.

On earlier visits I had come to know all the musty lower floors of the Museum, with their cases and cages full of charred artifacts. On this occasion I rushed upstairs to the Special Collection and asked a curator for specific directions to the exhibit I sought. Within moments I stood alone before a dusty plastic cabinet. A lantern flickered at my elbow, so I raised it for a better look at the objects within. My heart pounded like a drum in the vast gallery.

There were a dozen pages painstakingly restored from scattered fragments, the print retouched by experts in order to rescue meaning from the damaged words. Here it was that I first glimpsed the mystic epic of Don Cujo, the anguished Bernardine saint who drove himself to a mad death tilting at cars, in the company of his faithful but rabid dog, Sancho Dracula. Here also I gazed upon actual pages from the unparalleled prophetic tragedy of humanity’s fall from grace—namely Salem’s Lost, which had been dictated by a blind Strapon Thing to his daughter Orphelius.

But more affecting than any of these remnants was a slight bit of human script, not typed but actually penned. Discovered on the flyleaf of some decomposing volume, it had been positively identified despite its advanced age and decrepitude as the actual signature of the Master himself!

The lantern nearly fell from my hands when I realized what it was I beheld. I lapsed into a reverie like that which had claimed me at my first encounter with the Master’s words. My eyes moved again and again over the broken lines of the signature. The scribbles were etched upon my memory—and deeper, upon my very soul. They bound and held me captive.

When I next became aware of my surroundings, I was standing in the street outside my home. It was quite dark. My fingers twitched in my pocket, still tracing those lines. I gazed up at the window of my father’s study and heard him laughing, reading lines of Thing out loud to himself. I hurried into the house, anxious to let him know where I had been, eager to share my day’s discoveries. But all my anticipations were quickly demolished.

I had never seen him in such a fury. My appearance threw him into paroxysms. He had been drinking heavily; the absinthe stink was on his breath, on his clothes, and I swore to myself that I would never again so much as sip the stuff. He demanded to know why I was late, but before I could begin to answer he launched into a fantastical attack on the trade which I had chosen to pursue. He insulted Dorky Coxset’s honor and intelligence, insinuating that some dark relationship had sprung up between the old man and myself. Why else would I have so few words to spare for my dear father? Why else would I spend every waking moment away from home? It was as if, he said, I had wed myself to a typewriter, without so much as my father’s blessing.

I realized that his bitterness stemmed from loneliness. I tried to explain that I thought most highly of his trade in weeds but that it had never held any great appeal for me. He howled and threw his empty bottle at the wall near my head. I wanted desperately to bridge the gap between us, but Father rose up with his hands shaped into crablike claws. I tore myself away from him. I fled the house of my birth and ran headlong down the streets toward the only haven I knew: the typewriter repair shop.

For an hour or so I sat weeping at my workbench. Never had I known such emotional extremes in the space of a single day. From the heights of aesthetic ecstacy to the trough of despair.

I cast about for some salvation, some flimmer of hope, and my hand strayed across an ink pen. I snatched it up idly, thinking to play a dangerous game of mumblety-pen, imagining my father’s reaction if I were to stab myself with an inky nib. Would he relent? Would he love me again?

Instead I found my fingers moving as they had moved earlier. On a scrap of paper I signed the name of Strapon Thing, over and over again.

After awhile, realizing what I had done, I raised the paper to my eyes and scrutinized the signature. It looked exactly like that which I had seen in the museum that afternoon—more so, in fact, for it was fresh and alive!

I thought of my father and the pleasure that would be his if only he could own a signature of Strapon Thing. I realized that it was in my power to grant him such joy as he had never dreamed of acquiring.

I tossed aside the scrap of practice paper and headed into the dim recesses of Dorky Coxset’s storerooms. I had never ventured farther than several feet among the leaning stacks of old paper and corroded typewriters, for Dorky did not like me poking about in the dark. This time I brought the lantern along. My search led me into the depths of the storeroom, and quite a maze it was. Beneath layers of dust, undisturbed for years, I found bottles of nearly colorless ink and ballpoint pens whose balls refused to roll. I selected a few sheets of particularly malodorous paper and returned to my workbench, where Dorky had been teaching me the rudiments of typing in the evenings, after more important business was concluded. I also brought with me an ancient Underwood that Dorky had pronounced unfit for repair and abandoned several weeks before, but from which I managed to elicit more than half the alphabet. I thought it lent the proper air of antiquity to my work.

“My work.” What euphemisms the mind is capable of framing when it diligently stretches to avoid the simple truth!

For hours I labored over that first letter, filling it with the few scraps of knowledge that I had gleaned of the days before the Turbulation. I filled the missive with mysterious implications and carefully left them unexplained. It would not do, after all, to have Strapon Thing explaining commonplaces to one of his contemporaries. The gist of the letter, if you did not see it during the brief but popular tour of my father’s collection, was merely to thank one of Thing’s readers for his admiring response to The Whining. I also framed, in Thing’s words, my intentions to publish a novel which I hoped my fictitious reader would equally enjoy, an extravaganza which I dubbed Good ’n’ Evil. Then I signed the Master’s name to all this nonsense.

Already, as you see, the length and breadth of my plans were mapped out in my mind. Once my course was set, it was merely a matter of sticking to it. For in my heart I had resolved that my father would love me again, no matter what deeds I was driven to.

Late that night I returned home and found him collapsed across the threshold, snoring heavily. I covered him with a blanket and in his hand I placed my letter. Then I crawled into my bag.

I was awakened at first light by his astonished gasp. He stood at the window, a hand to his head, his eyes red-rimmed but fervent with joy.

“My boy!” he cried. “Maven, my son, do you know what this is? Where did you find it?”

“I… I thought you might be interested in it, Father,” I replied, erasing all guile from my face and voice. “Dorky Coxset has a new client, a gentleman from the country—a very secretive gentleman—who has asked us to retype a number of old papers belonging to his grandmother. In exchange, he promised that we may keep what we wish of the original manuscripts. Dorky’s collection of antique stationery is quite well-known, I suppose. But he’s been too busy to do any typing himself. He said that if I did the work, I could have my pick of the paper.”

“But my boy, my boy, this is no less than an original Strapon Thing!”

Before I could express my amazement, my father threw his arms around me and tried to draw me into a jig. I reminded him of the fragile paper which he held, and we set it safely aside before continuing with our celebrations. To my displeasure he insisted on opening another bottle of absinthe, while asking me again to tell him the story of the letter’s origin. He was very curious about the mysterious gentleman.

“Do you think there might be more letters from Strapon Thing in his grandmother’s collection?”

I nodded. “Undoubtedly. He mentioned reams of pages like this one, and not merely correspondence. He thought there might be an entire novel somewhere in the mess. Perhaps it is the one mentioned in the letter—Good ’n’ Evil.”

My father stumbled backward and sat down hard on the floor, with a loud hiccup and a spill of absinthe. His face had gone white. His mouth moved peculiarly. I wondered if he might be hallucinating. The absinthe had strange properties. But after awhile I heard him say, “Incredible fortune. But we must have these pages inspected. The Dean of the College will want to see them, and Professor Tadmonicker. Do you have these pages at the repair shop?”

“No, Father,” I stated quite honestly, and then went on boldly into fabrication. “The gentleman insisted that he apportion them to us a few at a time, so that he might have the opportunity to organize them, and so that we would not become burdened by the work. He was a peculiar fellow; I did not entirely understand his reasoning but he was most particular on these points.”

My father sat deep in thought. “A gentleman. Good family. Grandmother. Money. Perhaps they had a shelter-one that worked, I mean. Old money. Who knows what might have been preserved? And no wonder they are reclusive. Still, it would be excellent to meet this man. We shall have to see if it can be arranged at some point. Don’t be too brash with him, Maven. He mustn’t be frightened off. Go at it gradually but see if you can’t talk him into a meeting.”

I swallowed my doubts and nodded in order to please him.

I left my father perusing the letter, marveling at its excellent condition, and I swore to bring home whatever pages I finished copying. The grand scheme had been hatched; now the living monster issued forth.

All day I worked at my bench, ignoring the insistent knocking of Dorky’s customers. My typing had improved greatly in the several weeks I’d been at it; my fingers fairly flew over the ponderous keys of the old Underwood. The only thing that slowed me was an uncertain knowledge of the days before the Turbulation. This troubled me for some time, until I recalled that the Master had been known not chiefly for his correspondence, but for his fiction!

Refreshed by this insight, I embarked on my first major undertaking—an original manuscript of the epic, Ik! Only scattered fragments of the tale had been discovered. I had no fear that the forgery would be denounced on a comparative basis.

By nightfall, I was ready with a slender sheaf of pages purporting to have issued from the Master’s own Underwood. Weary and expectant, I approached my father’s house only to find it the scene of great excitement. White-bearded gentlemen in dark coats thronged the doorway, arguing with tremendous energy, stamping at the dust of the street as they made their points. I thought that fully half the staff of the College must be present in our house, and I noticed also several foreboding old men and women in the distinctive striped frocks of Museum custodians and the Prior Historical Society. Hoping to pass unnoticed among them, I slipped the forgeries under my jacket and hurried toward the door. But my father, standing in the second-story window, noticed my approach and called out loudly, “There you are, Maven! Have you brought more treasures from the Master?”

Instantly the professors and historians converged on me. I was nearly crushed by the excited crowd until a strong hand rescued me and a powerful voice said, “Stand away from the lad, can’t you see he’s frightened? And no wonder. Come along, boy. This way. Your father awaits, and he’s not the only one.”

I looked up into the face of my benefactor, and thus had my first glance at Professor Tadmonicker. He was a tall, thin man with stern eyes and a sharp nose, his grey hair parted neatly down the middle and his white beard tugged into two tapering prongs. I thanked him for rescuing me, but he was busy clearing the way. The stairs and hallway of our house were almost impassable.

There was slightly more room in my father’s study. Apparently only the most select visitors were allowed in the presence of the Master’s writing. My father grabbed me by the elbow, asking urgently if I had brought any more pages for him. I produced the sheaf which I’d hidden under my jacket and he pounced upon it with a shout, holding it up for all to see.

“Here! Here!” he cried. “My god! Look at this, Tadmonicker! Lickman, Swope, excellent Troubor! These are manuscript pages from Ik!”

The scholars pressed forward without regard for each other. My father distributed the pages and each man sank back to study his prize with extreme care.

“There’s no question about it,” one of them pronounced after a moment. “This is authentic. The prose itself is evidence; who else could have written such lines?”

“This is a great day for literature,” said another. “The future is all the brighter for these discoveries.”

Only Professor Tadmonicker seemed doubtful. “But the ink is still wet,” he said with a glance in my direction.

I stammered under his scrutiny, prepared in that moment to admit the whole scheme. But my father, unasked, came to my assistance.

“It’s the humidity of the evening air,” he said.

“No, Father,” I began. He silenced me with a pinch in the ribs.

“Now, Maven,” he said.

“Let the boy speak,” said Professor Tadmonicker.

I was acutely aware of my father’s trembling grip and the Professor’s steady gaze. But what was the Professor to me, compared with a father’s love?

“I only meant to say, the gentleman who owns these pages says they have been stored in a damp trunk. There was recent flooding in his home. Some of the pages were destroyed. Those he salvaged have begun to seep, some of them.”

“There you are,” my father said.

In fact, this momentous duplicity had passed almost unnoticed by the other guests, who were busy reading aloud lines of “classic prose” from the pages which I had typed that very day. I was filled with embarrassment to hear my own words read aloud; at first they sounded awkward and improbable to me.

“Beautiful! My god, the sound of the words—it’s undeniable, this is Thing at his best.”

The other scholars echoed this opinion and began to elaborate on the unmatched quality of the language. I began to doubt my own doubts. I thought that perhaps I had been too critical of my creation. Surely if these gentlemen found such merit in my work, I could hardly argue its nonexistence. It was not inconceivable, after all, that I might have had the soul of a poet within me, awaiting the opportunity to announce itself. For a moment I regretted that no one would ever know it was I who had typed these lines; but my regret soon passed.

Doctor Swope announced, “These will have to be carefully treated by the preservationists, then copied and distributed to all the world’s centers of learning. There is much of worth here apart from the prose—there are clues to the origins of our society.”

“All in good time,” my father said quickly. “But do not forget, gentlemen, that as my son’s guardian, I am the legal owner of these pages and any that may be forthcoming. You may not copy them without my permission, nor without paying a fee for the privilege.”

The scholars were scandalized. “A fee! What kind of a fee?”

My father considered this carefully. “A sizeable one. The value of these pages is immeasurable “

“But they are a cultural treasure!” said Professor Lickman. You owe it to the world to share them freely.”

“And so I shall. But the world must pay for the privilege. I may put them on display, which will require a suitable facility and the hiring of trained guards. All this will incur great expense, therefore I must charge the public for admission. My life has been greatly upset by this discovery, you must admit. Surely I deserve some remuneration for my troubles. I cannot have people flocking into my house at all hours simply because they consider it their cultural privilege to view these pages.”

The scholars announced their outrage but my father was not to be dissuaded. Presently they fell to haggling with him over prices. Professor Tadmonicker alone refrained from the argument. I noticed that he kept looking in my direction and his expression was not one to inspire confidence. I managed a weak smile, then asked, “Isn’t it wonderful? The prose, I mean?”

The Professor cleared his throat and made a grave face. “I have never been a great adorer of Strapon Thing. My interest is purely scientific. I’m sure that if I had access to those pages, I could quickly prove them to be other than what your mysterious gentleman friend claims. However, I am not about to pay for the privilege.”

His scorn made me blush, but he did not linger to observe my beflusterment. He went to the door and let himself out; I heard him shouting at the other curious visitors to clear the stairs.

“Come, Maven,” my father said. “Tell our friends again the origin of these pages….”

In the days and weeks that followed, my father called upon me frequently to give my story. I felt that he had again accepted me, that he treasured me as was my right. Sometimes I wished that I could admit my secret to him, for then he would have recognized that all the praise heaped on the newly discovered prose of Strapon Thing was in actuality praise of my own talents.

But I could not do it to him; I could not break the spell which I had cast over his life. As the days passed and the Thing manuscripts grew, my father rented a gallery space, to which he charged a modest admission fee. He made arrangements with the University press to publish the works in special editions with introductions by my father. Of course, he demanded exorbitant rates for his endeavors. I was hardly surprised to learn that he got what he demanded, and more besides. Visitors came from around the world to view the manuscripts, and many of them offered fees well beyond the means of the University for the privilege of copying the manuscripts. Being a man of his word, my father refused to bargain with these latecomers, though he did on occasion speak of selling the entire collection (once it was complete) for a fantastic sum that would enable us to live like princes for the rest of our lives.

The more enthusiastic my father became, the wearier I grew. Dorky Coxset had returned from Mazmere, forcing me once again into the drudgery of typewriter repair. I could hardly stomach the work any longer. My fingers itched to be at the keys, putting my thoughts onto paper, writing of the old world before the Turbulation. Instead I was forced to stain my fingers with typing ink and prick myself on tenacious springs. Only at night, when old Coxset left me alone to practice my typing, did I find time to pursue my true interests. I typed the dark hours through, often waking just before dawn, slumped over the Underwood, with scarcely enough time to run the fresh set of pages home to my father and wash my face before returning to the shop for another day of tedious labor. As the weeks went by, I lost several pounds which I could scarce afford to lose; my eyes sank deep into the hollows of my blackening sockets; I began to talk to myself, which disturbed my employer greatly, for his hearing was none too good and he often thought he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. Then there was the fact that I often fell asleep over my workbench.

One afternoon, Dorky Coxset woke me from such a slumber by slamming his hand down on the bench in front of me. I jerked upright to find him glaring at me.

“Do you need this job at all, boy? Your father’s got money enough, I hear. Why don’t you run along home to your precious library? I need an apprentice who’s honest at his trade—one who will work as he promises.”

I was so stunned that for a moment I did not know my whereabouts. Then it came to me—Dorky was threatening to fire me! I could not sacrifice my job, for the typewriter shop was now the means of my father’s livelihood. Without the bales of old paper and bottles of ink, without the sturdy Underwood, I would be finished.

I made my apologies to Dorky, and they were more heartfelt and desperate than he must have expected. He eventually relented, after extracting my promise that I would do better from that moment forward. And when he returned to his work, I realized that I must find some new method of pursuing my forgeries. I could not continue at my present pace without exposing myself through exhaustion, or losing my mind completely.

My predicament was all the more critical because by that time I was well into the creation of my masterpiece—Strapon Thing’s Good ’n’ Evil.

This story filled my every waking moment. It was as if my muse had reached out through time and tapped the very spirit of the Master. When I typed this work I felt as if I were Strapon Thing himself, on the far side of the Turbulation, writing of those marvels that have been forever lost to us. I felt as if I had discovered a well of greatness in myself, from which I had risen up to join the immortals. Father agreed with my judgment, pronouncing every new page of the book to be an installment of genius, world-shaking in its beauty. He declined to parade the novel piecemeal, but once it was complete he intended to sell the publication rights to the highest bidder. He expected it to make our fortune, and he began to run up expenses accordingly, indulging in rich meals, cloth finery, and the company of women with expensive tastes.

I had only to finish the book.

Often he pressed me to introduce him to my mysterious benefactor. He was convinced that the original owner of the purported manuscripts must be a descendant of Strapon Thing. I explained that the fellow was exceedingly shy and had ceased coming to Dorky’s shop altogether for fear of attracting attention. Now, I said, we met in a secret spot outside the town, which necessitated my night-long absences from home. (I had invented this scenario to put off any of Dorky’s own questions, though he had never taken any interest in my father or his fortune.) My father begged to be invited to one of these meetings but I was forced to put him off. In fact I warned my father that his insistence had affected the gentleman in a most unwelcome manner and that the supply of manuscript pages had been accordingly cut back. This gave me a chance to catch up with my sleep, but my father descended into a panic. Now he wished only to offer his apologies to the gentleman, to make amends somehow. I prayed for the opportunity to finish my greatest novel.

And then, one fortunate day, Dorky Coxset’s sister succumbed to the languish and he was called out of town for a full week. I retired immediately to the repair shop, pulled the shades, and brewed pot after pot of my father’s stimulating weed tea. For four days and nights I typed almost without cease, amassing a huge stack of pages, sleeping only fitfully. Even in my dreams, my fingers twitched out the tale of Good ’n’ Evil. It overwhelmed me. I imagined I was visited by spirits of prophecy who described the events of Earth’s history in those final days before the Turbulation. It was this tale which I transcribed.

At last the book was finished. I dragged myself home, handed the manuscript to my father, and fell into my sack. After a draught of sleeping tonic, I plummeted into dreamless slumber and did not awake for three full days.

The first thing I saw upon awakening was a huge bound volume on the floor beside my bed. My father stood above it, grinning down on me. On the cover of the book was the title I had coined, Good ’n’ Evil, and below that the name of the Master, Strapon Thing.

“I was desperate for money,” my father said. “We’re a bit overspent, you know. But the publisher was no less desperate for the book. Audiences have been calling for it! It’s on the market already. The printers went to work on it an hour after you handed it to me.”

I opened the book and gazed in amazement at the words I had written, the story I had invented. Yes, it did seem marvellous, the work of a genius. Only fear stopped me from confessing everything to my father at that moment. I wished with all my

heart that he could have known the true author of the tale. And yet I was sure that the knowledge would ruin him.

At that moment there was a knock on the downstairs door. My father disappeared and returned a moment later rubbing his hands together, grinning, followed by a rotund man in much-worn clothing whose reddish hair sprang from his balding head in twisted sprigs.

“Maven,” he said, “we are honored with a most esteemed guest. This is Castor Donothex.”

Castor Donothex, the world’s most honored living author, himself an emulator of Strapon Thing. I sprang from my bedding, but he had no interest in me. All his attention went to the bound copy of Good ’n’ Evil that my father thrust into his hands.

Mr. Donothex was speechless, but not for long. He opened the book and began to read aloud in a high-pitched oratorical style. After a few minutes of this he gave forth a great sob and clutched the book to his chest. There were tears in his eyes.

My father gave me a look of tremendous satisfaction and a fond wink. Then he produced the original typescript of Good ’n’ Evil and put it into the great author’s hands.

Castor Donothex gasped for breath. My father quickly retrieved the manuscript and bade the great man sit in his comfortable reading chair.

“Might I have a drop of absinthe?” he begged.

“Maven! Be quick with the bottle! You know where it is.”

I uncorked one of the violet bottles full of my father’s distillate, splashed several inches into a snifter, and gave it to my father, who set the glass in Mr. Donothex’s trembling hands. He drank greedily and required another splash of absinthe, although this time diluted with a few drops of sterile water.

Then he climbed down from the chair, directly onto his knees, and reached out for the manuscript. Closing his eyes, he put his lips to the fat packet. I was faintly repulsed by the sight, for there was a sheen of sweat on his lips; I hoped he would not stain the fruit of my labor.

“Now I may die in bliss,” he intoned in a sepulchral voice. “To have touched the actual manuscript of the Master’s greatest work….”

His greatest work! I nearly collapsed at the statement.

The book’s reputation had preceded it into the corners of the literary world. Strapon Thing’s masterpiece—and I had written it!

I hardly noticed Donothex’s exit. The rest of the day passed in an ecstatic haze. I did not truly surface from my thoughts until the next morning, when I knew that Dorky Coxset would be waiting for me in the dingy, prisonlike confines of the typewriter repair shop. I thought of handing in my resignation, for now our fortune was assured. No other pages need issue from the Underwood. I intended to tell my father that the mysterious gentleman’s archives were exhausted.

As I let myself out of the house, I was surprised to see a party of men and women in striped frocks hurrying up the avenue in my direction. I looked behind me, seeking a route of escape, for there was something in their attitude and bearing that impressed me with the thought of danger. However, a similar party was in progress at the other end of the street, this comprised of scholars from the College.

I wondered if I should rouse my father from his absinthine slumbers, but my panic was too great. Ducking my head, I crossed the street and sank into the shadows of an alley. From this safe vantage I observed the meeting of the two parties. They were decidedly hostile and I half expected them to meet like opponents in battle. Instead they joined forces at the door, and in the manner of allies called for my father’s immediate appearance. His head, still decked in a nightcap, soon emerged from the window above. He looked completely confused by the manifestation.

“We’ve been had!” someone shouted up at him.

“Duped!” said another.

“Confound you—we’ll have back the monies we paid, or else we’ll have your hide!”

My father looked from one face to the other. I could see he was at the verge of a trembling fit.

“What—what do you mean?” he asked. “What is this nonsense?”

“‘Strapon Thing,’ bah!” shouted a curator of the Museum. “A cursory reading of your ludicrous forgery shows a thousand inconsistencies, including outright lies about the cause of the Turbulation! Had you bothered to check your histories, you might have avoided some of the more obvious errors—but many are secrets of Prior History in any case, reserved in the confidential comparative archives to protect society from exactly such hoaxes as this. Your little game is up. Now come down from there this minute!”

“A forgery, you say?” my father cried, his astonishment not quite as thorough as he pretended.

“But—but I had a gentleman’s word!”

“There is no gentleman, I’m sure,” said Professor Lickman. “It’s all the product of your fevered imagination, wrought by absinthe and uncontrolled greed.”

“No,” my father said. “You must be mistaken.”

“I assure you, we are not. You have cast unforgivable stains on the name of Strapon Thing. Had your facts not given you away, the dreadful clumsiness of the prose would have considerably degraded our appreciation of all his true masterworks!”

My father looked wildly about the street now, as if seeking some means of escape. By chance, he noticed me. My trembling must have betrayed me, even in the shadows. His arm shot out; his finger pinned me to my place.

“There!” he cried. “You can see plain enough how the truth affects him. There’s your forger, there’s the boy who duped you—just as he duped me! I’ll disown you for this, Maven! I’ll disown you, do you hear?”

Two dozen heads turned toward me; black coats and striped frocks grew flurried with the agitated motions of the historians. For a moment I was frozen but then they made their charge. I stumbled backward with a shout and fled for my life down the narrow alley.

Fortunately, I was well acquainted with the byways of the neighborhood, and I soon left the houndlike sound of their pursuit behind me. But I was desolate, with nowhere to go, no home to call my own, no confidant, no friend in the world. I had not even the money for a ticket that might carry me far from the scene of my crimes. Already I regretted the day that I had ever learned to type.

As I wandered in a sulking mood, a face sprang up from my memory. I thought of one man who might understand me, who might hear me out without passing judgment. Surely Professor Tadmonicker, I thought, would appreciate the truth.

I hastily made my way to the College. Avoiding the departments of History and Literature, I went on to the Science wing, the Department of Artifactual Analysis.

I found the Professor in his office, reading from a huge volume spread open on the desk before him. He was laughing aloud with all his might, but when he saw me he shut the book with a thud and was all seriousness again, as he had been on our first encounter.

“I’ve just been reading Good ’n’ Evil,” he said. “I believe at last my colleagues will be exposed for the fools I’ve known them to be all along.”

I nodded, still speechless.

“And what brings you here, my friend? You must have read the manuscript. Even you must realize that it is a clumsy bundle of lies and fabrications. Or has your gentleman friend fooled even you?”

I found my voice at last. “No, Professor Tadmonicker. I was never fooled. Of course it is nothing but lies. No one knows it better than I.”

“So,” he said, his mood lightening. “You’ve come to confess then, have you? I think that would be wise. Why don’t you have a seat?”

I accepted his offer gratefully. “I’ll tell you everything I know,” I said, “if only you will promise not to betray me. I need a friend. I need your advice.”

“Betray you? But what do you have to fear, Maven?”

And so I told him everything.

Father, dear Father, now you know that I did it all for you. What the public believes is of little importance to me. It is your opinion alone that matters. Look kindly upon your son; find forgiveness in your heart, if you can. I had hoped that my actions would bring us closer, but I was cruelly disappointed. Even so, can you not see how I was motivated by filial affection?

I will deliver a copy of this confession to your cell in the Debtor’s Prison, and another to the news printers who have agreed to lay the whole story before the world. Perhaps then your reputation will be restored, and the judges will mercifully see fit to free you, so that we might be reunited. Our house, I realize, has been taken by creditors; but surely we do not need a mansion to keep us warm. As long as we understand each other, and speak only truth from now on, will not our affections sustain us?

Signed,

Your loving son,

Maven

* * *

“Good ’n’ Evil, or, The Once and Future Thing” copyright 2016 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared at marclaidlaw.com.

LOVE COMES TO THE MIDDLEMAN

Upon the wall, the neighborlings were arguing. Jack listened to the piping voices with increasing anger. The problems of the little people sounded all too much like his own, except smaller.

He opened his eyes and searched for the offending home among the array of tiny buildings stacked to the ceiling of his room. In most, the lights were dim or out completely; in a few, tiny shadows moved against the curtains. The smell of almond tobacco smoke drifted from half-open doorways; newspapers rustled. As a rule, the smaller citizens went to sleep early, and those who stayed up kept their voices down once he’d turned off his light.

Tonight, the Pewlins were the noisemakers:

“If you can’t stay inside your budget, pretty soon we won’t have a budget!”

“It’s not me wasting money on drink and gambling.”

“It’s not you making money, either. I need my recreation.”

“Recreation? You’re a drunk with bad luck. It’s not like you’re developing a skill. You just get drunker and unluckier. And the next time—”

On his knees now, Jack rapped sharply on the door of the Pewlins’ house with a fingernail. “Hey, in there. I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow.”

At the sound of his voice, curtains stirred in the windows of other houses. The Pewlins, too embarrassed to face him, merely began to mutter.

“Told you you’d wake him. We’re going to lose this house and end up in somebody’s sock drawer.”

“Oh, shut up. I’m going to bed.”

As Jack crawled back into his bed—a lumpy mattress laid out on the floor—someone scratched on his door. With a sigh, he got up and opened it.

His house was halfway up the wall of the next room. The giant and his wife shared that room. She was out there now, leaning so close to his door that he could have stepped onto her nose.

“Having trouble in there, Jack?

“It’s the Pewlins again. They went to bed. Thanks for asking, Nairla.”

“If they’re any trouble, we’d be glad to take them out here. We can hardly hear them, they’re so small. I know the neighborlings’ voices can be so penetrating when you’re trying to sleep.”

How do you know that? he thought, but didn’t ask. He had kept her awake a few times, no doubt, with his infrequent parties.

“No, seriously, it’s not a problem now. Thanks anyway.” He leaned out of the doorway and she turned her head so that he could whisper into her vast ear: “I think you’ve probably intimidated them.”

She pulled back and smiled, a very nice smile. Nairla had always taken a special interest in him; for his part, he’d always been attracted to big-boned red headed women. But not as big as Nairla. She was quite out of his league. And besides, her enormous husband lay out there like a range of hills, snoring away. The houses and office buildings along the giants’ walls were all dark; Jack’s samesize neighbors kept similar hours. He only wished his neighborlings could be so quiet.

“Sleep tight,” Nairla said.

“Would you ask her to keep it down?” piped a voice from a corner of Jack’s room. “Some of us have to get up in the morning.”

* * *

Jack awoke with a groan on his lips and a vile taste in his mouth, and the complaints of the neighborlings in his ears: “Turn off that alarm clock! We’re awake!”

As he reached out to switch off the alarm, he realized that he was sick. Swimming head, upset stomach—the flu had been going around at the office. This had to be it. He would just lie here a while and hope it didn’t get worse.

False hope. He lurched out of bed and ran into the bathroom. When he looked up from the sink, the houses along the window ledge were coming to life. Complaints came drifting down to him: “Was that birdsong I heard? What a way to wake up.”

“Sorry,” Jack said.

From bed, he called the office. The phones weren’t being answered yet. He would have to lie and wait a while.

An hour later, he awoke to the sound of buzzing. Tiny private fliers darted among the buildings on his wall. Some of them maneuvered around the ceiling of the room, caught in elaborate flight patterns as they waited their turns to exit through the vents near the ceiling, then headed for neighboring pueblos in other houses. The configurations confused him; they were like specks swimming across his eyes.

Late, he thought. I’m late.

He sat up abruptly and grabbed the phone, fighting nausea as he dialed the office. Mrs. Clorn sounded mildly amused by his illness; apparently she didn’t believe him. As he hung up, a tiny voice asked, “Jack, are you sick?”

He glanced up at the nearest wall. A young mother and her child stood on the ramp outside their house.

“Oh, Revlyn, hi. Yeah, I’ve got the flu.”

“Wish I could help. I make soup for Tilly when he’s sick… but you know how much I’d have to make for you.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. It’s a twenty-four-hour bug.” Someone scratched on his door.

“Come in!” he called.

Nairla put her eye to the opening. “I thought you were still in there. Aren’t you going to work today?”

“He’s got the flu,” Revlyn called.

“What’s that?” asked Nairla. “Is she talking to me, Jack?”

“Of course I’m talking to you, you dumb giant! Can’t you hear me?” Revlyn broke off into wild laughter.

“Nice to see you too, dear,” Nairla said.

“She says I’m sick,” said Jack. “I’ve got the flu.”

“The flu? Oh dear! Would you like some oatmeal? I can mash it up for you. Plenty of fluids and what else? Do you have a fever? I’d lend you a thermometer but… you know.”

“Why don’t you ask her if any of your neighbors are home,” Revlyn said. “You need someone to look in on you, Jack. Seriously.”

“What’s that?” Nairla said.

“Nothing,” Jack said.

“Ask her, Jack,” said Revlyn. “You’d be silly not to. What if you get really sick?”

He sighed. “Nairla, Revlyn says I should ask you to sec if any of my neighbors are home, in case I get worse.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll check. There arc a few… oh, I have a wonderful idea! I’ve been meaning to introduce you two for the longest time. She’s an artist.”

Oh no, he thought. Not that.

“Nairla—” he began. But she was gone. He looked up at Revlyn. “She’s going to get somebody.”

“Good. That’s nice of her. I’m sorry I make fun of her, but she is so deaf, you know?”

“She’s big, that’s all.” Big and nosy.

A minute passed, in which he heard Nairla humming to herself, vibrating the walls of his house. He thought he was going to be sick again. Footsteps came up along the ramp, then a face peeked around the door. It was a samesize woman, a redhead with big bones, strong hands. As she came all the way into the room, she said, “You must be Jack. You look pretty sick.”

He wondered how long Nairla had been waiting for this chance.

“I’m Liss. I brought some tea. I was just making up a pot for my morning work.” She sat on a corner of the mattress and poured some tea into a water glass he’d left on the floor.

“So, uh, I hear you’re an artist,” he said.

She handed him the glass. “I’m a sculptor. Mostl I apply for grants.”

“You’re an artist and you get paid for it?”

“The Plenary Council—have you heard of them? Everything I do goes to the Council, and they arrange showings. There’s a lot of interest in us, among the giants. And I’m talking about giant giants—bigger than Nairla. They’re intrigued by our perceptions of the world. Do you realize they have to look at our art under microscopes?”

“Art, huh? So what’s it mean to the little guy?”

She reached in her pocket and took out both a magnifying glass and a little box. “I’ll show you. This was made by a sculptor three sizes smaller than us. He’s been a great influence on my own work, though I can’t say I’m nearly as good as him. The detail work is incredible.”

Liss handed him first the glass, and then the box with the lid taken off. He found himself staring into a construction the size of a rice grain, elaborately carved, a piece of microscopic scrimshaw showing spiral staircases that grew smaller and smaller as they curled toward the center of the grain. On the stairs were incredibly lifelike figures, also dwindling as the steps shrank. Looking at it made him dizzy. He thought of himself looking at the tiny stairs, and of Nairla looking in at him, and of someone looking in at Nairla.

He blinked at Liss. “Do… do the giants have art?”

“Sure. It’s hard for us to see it sometimes, though. You have to get way back. We’ve tried scaling it down through the levels, but it loses something. The size is part of the meaning.”

“That’s really interesting.”

“Do you think so? It’s funny, with all of us living on this wall, I spend more time talking to Nairla and the neighborlings than I ever do with people my own size.”

He shrugged. “I’m like that. I have a boring job; it makes me feel like all the samesizes are boring. When I get home, I don’t want to sec anybody my own size.”

“My husband’s the same way,” Revlyn called. “I can’t get him to take me out. He’d rather stay home and watch the little people.”

Jack held out the glass and Liss refilled it. He smiled at her, feeling better already, and raised it in a toast.

“Here’s to a new friend,” he said. He was gratified to see her blush.

At the doorway, Nairla blinked in and said, “Aren’t you two cute?”

“Oh, spare me,” said Revlyn, and went inside.

* * *

“Love Comes to the Middleman” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder, edited by Rudy Rucker (1987).

MIDDLEMAN’S RENT

Liss must have heard him coming up the ramp. She opened the front door before he knocked, and met him with a kiss that on an ordinary day would have broken his bad mood instantly. The best he could do today, though, was to take his hands out of his pockets and give her a weak hug.

“Jack, what’s wrong? You look really depressed.”

He nodded as she led him in. As always, her apartment was a mess: paint spattered the floor, her tools lay everywhere, and something that looked like an incomplete sculpture teetered on three spindly, twisted legs in the middle of the room.

“I finished it this morning,” she said when she saw him looking at it. “Do you like it?”

“It’s nice,” he said. “I lost my job.”

“Jack! Oh no, why?” She caught both his hands and drew him down to the cushions in one corner of the room.

He shrugged. He couldn’t exactly say it was because of her, though indirectly that was so. In the twenty days since he and Liss had met, he’d called in sick seven times, and left work earlier and earlier each day. This morning he had come in late—having stayed up almost all last night—and Mr. Dopnitta had informed him that there was no room in the office for a laggard, no matter how well intentioned.

“I was getting tired of the job anyway,” he said.

Liss sighed and got up to brew tea. “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

“No! Don’t be ridiculous. It was time for a change. That job doesn’t suit me anymore. It’s too much all of a level.”

She giggled. “Jack, you didn’t used to talk like that.”

He felt his mood unraveling, and grinned back at her. “O.K., maybe you had something to do with it.”

“I’ll consider it a victory. Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?”

“No. I don’t have any money saved. Enough to pay my current bills, and that’s it.”

“You can move in with me,” she said.

“There’s not enough room for two in here.”

“So we’ll rent a bigger place. Maybe something not so fancy. I’m getting tired of these walls, you know? Wouldn’t you like to find a place with a view of trees and hills? A nice country home?”

He took a long look at her walls, and had to admit that he’d grown tired of tract housing. From floor to ceiling, there was nothing to see but houses and a few little patches of community parkland. Like the wall in his room, the development was deserted most of the day, during business hours. A few tiny adults strolled on the ramps, or watched their tinier children climbing on the vines in the parks, but otherwise the neighborhood was dead.

“And how will I make money?”

“You’ll think of something, Jack.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got your arts grants, but what am I? A paper pusher.”

“…Excuse me.”

Jack turned to the wall just behind him, above the cushions, and saw an old man leaning out from the window of his house.

“Were you talking to me?” Jack said.

“Couldn’t help overhearing you two,” said the neighborling.

“Have I introduced you two?” Liss asked. “I’m sorry, Ganly. This is Jack. Jack, Ganly.”

“Pleasure,” Jack said.

“I just thought I’d point out,” Ganly said, “there’s plenty you could do right in this room to earn money. I don’t think most people realize. I’ve been independent since I was your age, and I make good money at it. Enough to retire without any help from the Equalization Board.”

“Maybe stuff like that works at your level,” Jack said, instantly regretting the disparagement in his tone.

“I like that!” Ganly snapped. “Here I come out with a bit of advice, and I get—well, it’ll teach me to butt in.”

“No, no, no!” Liss said, kneeling down by Ganly’s house. “I’m sure Jack didn’t mean anything. He’s not used to thinking on more than three levels at a time.”

“He’s not even doing that!”

Liss gave Jack a withering look. He crouched down next to her.

“Uh, look, I’m sorry if that came out the wrong way. I’m sure you know what you’re talking about.”

Ganly stared at him a moment with a stern expression, then cocked his head and relaxed into a smile. “You listening?”

“Sure.”

“Now Jack, this doesn’t require thinking on more than the three levels you’re used to. Just put yourself in my place for a moment, and you’ll know what I mean.”

Jack tried to imagine himself at Ganly’s size, standing in Ganly’s living room. It was easy enough. Ganly’s walls were covered with little houses, just like the houses on Jack’s level; and on the walls of those houses were tinier houses with tinier houses on their walls. It was simple to imagine, because if he looked out Liss’s window, he could see that her house was on the wall of a large room, where Nairla and her husband lived. And Nairla’s house was on the wall of a house that was on a larger wall of a larger house….

“Now think of an old man like me,” Ganly said. “I can’t get around the way I used to, you know. Say I want to rearrange the furniture in my house, or get rid of this old table that’s taking up so much space. Now for me that could be quite a chore—hard on my heart, you get me?”

Jack nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“But for you, now, it’s no big deal to pry the roof off this place and move my furniture around. And if you did that for me, why shouldn’t I pay you scale?”

“You mean… pay me what you’d pay some samesize guy?”

“Sure, why not? The work’s worth it to me.” Ganly tapped his forehead with a finger. “There’re plenty of people would agree with that. But whoever thinks of it? Bah—they’re wrapped up on their own level, that’s what it is. Easier to get a desk job and talk to samesizes all day. Now for me, I’d rather get a different perspective on things—the little guy’s point of view, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s a great idea,” Jack said.

“And it works both ways. There’re things you can do for the giants that they can’t do for themselves, and they’ll pay you handsomely to do it—because for them, it’s the tiny work they have trouble with. It’s worth a lot to have someone who knows his way around the inside of a radio.”

“That wouldn’t be me,” Jack said. “I can’t even load a mechanical pencil.”

“Now there are a few guys,” said Ganly, “who act as agents, go-betweens. They make deals not among three or five levels, but among seven, nine, eleven—“

“The Plenary Council is a chair organization,” Liss said. “Its connections run upscale and down for as far as we can tell. I had a job last year working for a giant thirteen levels up. He needed someone to rearrange particles in a microscopic art exhibit. To him they were particles, anyway; to me it was like—well, rearranging furniture. And some of those particles had downscale people on them, working out the most fantastic, intricate textures….”

“I’m not an artist,” Jack said.

“You don’t need to be!” Ganly cried. “There’s plenty of practical work needing to be done. And if you’re thinking of moving to the country—well, farmers can always use an extra hand to dig irrigation ditches, put in fences, bring in the crops.”

“What about the upscale on a farm?” Jack asked. “I’m not so sure I’d want to live with enormous bugs and rats.”

“You’re stuck in outphase thinking,” Liss said. “It’s not like that at all. We all grew up hearing stories about giant insects—houseflies that kidnap children—but it’s folklore, artifacts from the race memory. Those are things from another dimension; they don’t affect us here.”

“I don’t know,” Ganly said. “You hear stories….”

“That’s all they are. Our minds are still ruled by those artifacts. It’s just like you were saying, Ganly. We go on paying samesizes to do work that giants could do easily. We go on building farm machinery to do a job a giant can do with his little finger. I mean, can you believe there’s still a market for tweezers when any neighborling can pick up tiny things for us? We should be living totally different kinds of lives—there should have been some sort of revolution long, long ago. But people cling to the old ways.”

“They’re recalcitrant, every last one of them,” Ganly said. “Down to the smallest, up to the largest.”

Jack said, “But if you made some kind of basic change on your level, don’t you think it could have a reaction that went both ways at once? Say if one level threw out farm machinery completely and relied on giants. Don’t you think those giants would get the idea and throw out their machinery? And the neighborlings of the rebel level would do likewise. Right up and down the line, you’d have a sweeping revolution. The potential’s there.”

“Oh, definitely,” said Ganly. “The potential is infinite. The problem is people your own size. Try telling them to change their ways—to throw out their machines and hire someone from another level. It’s tough! They’d rather put their money in the pocket of a samesize than a neighborling or a giant. It gets distressing.”

Liss put her hands on her hips and stood up facing the wall, considering all those houses and ramps and parks. “What if I decided to paint all the houses in colors that I liked? Who’d stop me?”

“Giants would stop you,” Ganly said. “Don’t be ridiculous. The law applies to all levels equally.”

“And what if I went out and painted on my wall, ‘Giants revolt!’ Or something like that, in huge letters.”

“Depends on your giant. I once had a neighborling used to hang big swear words out his windows—boy, that burned me up! I had kids at the time. I couldn’t touch him, though, legally. The law always protects the little guy. It took a movement of samesizes to get the guy evicted. His neighbors got upset once my kids learned the words and started shouting them at the top of their lungs.”

Liss shook her head, frowning. “Now I’m depressed. It makes me feel like… well, what good is this sculpture, for instance? It’ll never change anything. I could throw it out the door, and to Nairla it would just be a scrap of junk to sweep up.”

Ganly smiled ruefully. “Or you could take one of those pieces of scrap you chipped away and give it to me, and I could put it in my living room and call it art. Next week your scraps could be all the rage on my level.”

There was a light tap on the window. Jack glanced up to see a giant finger at the glass, and beyond it an even larger eye. Liss opened the door.

“Hi, Nairla,” she called. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Jack’s home early?” said the giant woman. “Or did he call in sick again?”

“I got fired,” Jack yelled.

“Fired?” Nairla said. “Isn’t that terrible? What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. Keep me in mind if you need any detail work done.”

Nairla tried to hide her expression, but her face was like an immense beacon where emotions were concerned. She obviously thought him insane.

“Don’t you think that’s a wee bit… humiliating?”

* * *

“Middleman’s Rent” copyright 1988 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1988.

THE FARMER ON THE WALL

“I feel so relaxed in the country,” said Jack Greenpeach, putting an arm around his girlfriend Liss. She pulled forward a few inches to free her long red hair and the porch swing began to rock. She leaned closer to him, drawing her feet up onto the cushions, and said, “I know. It’s so peaceful. The crickets sound like a symphony, don’t they? Each one playing a different instrument, the music rising and falling, rising and falling…”

Crickets? Jack listened to the night, terrified by the prospect of crickets the size of airplanes. There were no insects anymore, not since all the world had moved onto the levels of the great indoors. Pollination was done by tiny workers gathering pollen grain by grain; they passed their bags to giant workers on the next level up, who carried the pollen to fields in other rooms and handed them back down to other tinies for careful insertion in selected plants. A swarm of bees could have put a whole level out of work in a matter of days. A single locust could devour a wallful of crops, overturning tables and chairs in neighboring houses. It was a scary idea.

“That’s not insects,” Jack said, relieved and amused. “You should be glad of it. That’s Narmon Cate snoring.”

Liss jumped up from the swing and went to the porch rail. Leaning out into the night, she peered downward for several moments. He saw her shoulders fall.

“So it is,” she said. “That’s not nearly so romantic.”

He joined her at the rail. Looking down from the porch, he could see the fields falling away in tiers, like a fuzzy staircase leading down to the floor of Narmon’s room. Out in the midst of the vast enclosure was the slumbering mountainous shape of the giant farmer, Narmon Cate, who had rented them this house on his wall. All the walls of the giant’s main room were formed of grassy earth, tiered fields, neatly trimmed orchards. Here and there a few golden lights burned in the windows of other farmhouses the same size as Jack and Liss’s new place. These were country walls, especially beautiful to Jack and Liss who had lived until recently in a suburban apartment whose walls were infested with tiny tract homes. Their home in turn had been one of a thousand on the suburban wall of another giant—Narmon Cate’s white-collar equivalent. In the suburbs, they had longed for fields and trees; but they hadn’t gambled on a snoring giant.

“Should we wake him up?” Jack wondered aloud, knowing that his voice would never carry to the giant.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You don’t go complaining to your own landlord about his habits. We were lucky to get this house.” She straightened suddenly, glancing at her wristwatch. “Uh oh, Jack, we left the lights on.”

They hurried back inside in time to hear the rising of tiny cries, the faint beating of pots and pans. Their walls were patched like four old quilts with the plots of neighboring farmers. Brussels sprouts the size of pinpoints grew across a good quarter of the far wall, and below the sprout patch was a dilapidated farmhouse whose residents were currently gathered on the porch. The tiny children drummed on kitchenware, an ant-sized infant wailed, but the loudest voice belonged to the goat-bearded elder who had earlier introduced himself as Grampa Treel. A lifetime of shouting at giants had invested his voice with authority while robbing it of strength. His words scraped the air like an unrosined bow drawn across an out-of-tune fiddle.

“Where the hell were you?” he bellowed. “We’re farmers here! We expect to get to sleep at a decent hour. Now that light of yours—” (here he jabbed a finger at Jack’s ceiling) “—is parching our crops. Arc you going to be the one out watering them tomorrow? Are you going to take responsibility for upsetting their light cycle? In other words, are you going to play god in every detail, or will you kindly shut off that damn light before I get out my wrist-rocket and do the honors myself?”

Liss already had her hand on the switch. Before Jack could open his mouth, she turned off the light.

The only illumination remaining in the room fell from the little houses on the farming walls.

“It’s about time,” said Grampa Treel. He turned to his family, snatched a pot from the hands of a granddaughter. “The rest of you get inside. I want to have a few words with our new giants.”

“I’m really sorry,” Jack said. “We didn’t mean any harm.”

Grampa Treel flicked the air with a hand, dismissing Jack’s apology. He settled down in a rocking chair whose runners creaked faintly on the warped boards of the porch. Jack saw a microscopic spark of light and might have dismissed it as a random twinkling of his optic nerve if it hadn’t slowly flared and caught fire in a tangle of tobacco, way down in the bowl of a minuscule corncob pipe. The slightest whiff of cherry cavendish drifted through the room.

“Smoke?” asked Grampa Treel.

“No thanks,” Jack said. “I got out of the habit in the city. None of my neighborlings would put up with it.”

“Thank heavens for that,” said Liss.

“Won’t bother me,” said Grampa Treel. “Not much bothers me, now that you come to it—except screwy light. And giants who play harmonica. Last feller had your place, he was a city type like you. Thought that just by moving in he could call himself a country boy. Bought himself a straw hat, a pair of boots, and worst of all he took up the harmonica. Now I don’t mind when my neighborlings play it on their porches in the summer; it’s no more trouble than a fly humming in your ear. But when it’s a giant right outside your door, wheeping up and down the scale, blowing spit all over everything… well, that’s something I can’t abide.”

“I never did want to play harmonica,” Jack said.

“Then there’s hope for you. What brings you to the country?”

“Liss is an artist. She needs peace and quiet to get her work done. We both wanted a change of scene, a new set of walls. I thought I could help out on the farms if anybody needs me.” He flexed his hand, dwarfing the Treels’ front porch. “‘No job too big or too small.’ That’s my motto.”

“Hm,” said Grampa Treel. “Might be I could find some use for a giant. That is, unless Narmon Cate’s got work for you climbing in to ream his pipestems or something like that.”

“Uh, no,” Jack said. “Narmon hasn’t said anything to me about that.”

Treel’s chair stopped rocking. “So tell me, are you an early riser?”

“Sure. I used to work eight to five every day, so I had to get up early. My eyes just pop open around six-thirty.”

“Six-thirty?” The old man found this quite hilarious. “Boy, I wish I could sleep that late.”

Jack bit his tongue. “What time do you get up?”

“We’re up about an hour before light, like I said. And the lights come on at five-thirty this time of year.”

“Five…” Jack stared up at the dark ceiling. “…thirty?”

“Guess you won’t be sleeping in the main room, hm?”

“No,” said Liss.

“Well, no matter. I had some work needed doing first thing, and there’s a field needs turning, but don’t you worry about it. You just sleep in till those eyes of yours ‘pop’ open. Six-thirty, you said?”

“Uh, no, earlier is fine. I can be up around five-thirty, I guess. I need the work.”

“Good man.” Grampa Treel stood up, increasing his height by a fraction of an inch. “Work is something there’s always plenty of around here. I’ll be getting to bed now. Good night, youngsters.”

Liss pulled Jack onto the porch again. He saw that she was laughing with a hand over her mouth.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“You. You’re in for it now.”

“I like getting up early. Really. It’s sort of like… well, it helps you tune into nature. Even if the light cycle is artificial, it’s still based on the rhythm of the world outside. The world that had a sun and a moon, day and night, indoors and outdoors. The world that was, you know, finite.”

“Those old notions again.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I just don’t know if you’re cut out for farming.”

Perturbed, he dropped down in the porch swing and folded his arms.

“Anyway,” he said, “all this was your idea.”

* * *

Despite himself, Jack was up before the lights came on. He had slept badly, like a boy awaiting the coming of old Saint Escher, who strode through the infinite levels of scale, visiting all in a single night, rewarding children both giant and small with miraculous gifts. It puzzled Jack that he should be so excited about a day of manual labor—truly, the first in his life. He slipped out of bed without disturbing Liss, then crept into the dark of the main room.

The farming walls looked like fairy trees ablaze with the tiny lights of neighborlings. He leaned close to the Treel residence, hoping to catch the faint clatter of spoons in cereal bowls, the peaceful mooing of vineclimbing milk cows. Instead, he was greeted with a bellow.

“Well, young feller, didn’t expect to see you till midday.”

He jerked back, a hand to his ear, as Grampa Treel came clomping onto the porch. The old man carried a bullhorn so that Jack wouldn’t miss a syllable.

“Don’t just stand there, sonny, let’s get to work.”

Jack closed the door to the bedroom, envying Liss her extended slumber in the warm dark bed. There was a crust of sleep in his eyes, but he was so tired he hadn’t managed to yawn yet. Meanwhile, the ceiling was slowly growing brighter.

Old Grampa Treel was as lively as he’d been the night before. “Good to get an early start,” he was saying as he tromped around on the porch. “Course, we already milked the cows. You wouldn’t have been much use there. They’re delicate things.”

They certainly were. To Jack they resembled fat spotted aphids clinging to shiny green vines that grew in a tangle above and beside the house. A few plaintive mews rose from the herd. He knew that any attempt on his part to milk them would have ended in disaster. “You mind if I have something to eat?” Jack said.

“Eat? Well, I imagine you do need your fuel. A big feller like you. One of your breakfasts could feed all us Treels for a year and a day.”

At that moment, Jack felt a mighty rumbling. Light poured in through the windows from Narmon Cate’s room. The lobe of Cate’s monstrous ear blocked the glow momentarily, then he heard a roar that faintly resembled the end of the world.

The giants were awake.

Narmon commenced to clear his nostrils, gathering floods of mucus in the vast inmost caverns and sunless seas of his skull. His massive door creaked open; then came the sound of a distant cataclysm as he hawked and spat a mighty wad into the room of the giants on whose wall his house was built. To those giants two levels up from Jack, Cate’s phlegm would have been no more objectionable than a fly speck or a flea turd. (There were neither flies nor fleas in the levels, but these old concepts made useful metaphors and refused to die.) Had Narmon turned to spit on his neighborlings’ earthen wall, however, Jack and Liss could have drowned in the stuff.

Jack had lost his appetite for breakfast. He shrugged, tucked in his shirt, and turned back to Grampa Treel. “Where do I start?”

“You got a fork?”

“A fork?”

“Sure. You were gonna eat, weren’t you? I imagined you’d have a fork.”

“Yes, I have a fork. But what do I need it for?”

“Like I said last night, the lower tier needs turning—gotta bring up that fertile soil. My tractor’s broke down, but all you’ll need to do is dig it up with a fork.”

Jack went into his kitchen. As he rummaged through unfamiliar drawers in the dark, he accidentally woke the residents of a few houses arranged in and around the cabinets. Without apologizing he went back into the main room and knelt down by the Treels’ farm. Grampa strutted back and forth on the long porch, pointing to the area that needed turning

“A job like that would take us two days,” he said. “Let’s see how long it takes you. Skim off about a foot of soil and just, you know, flip it over.”

“A foot?” Jack said.

Treel cackled. “Oh… glad you caught me there. Guess it’d be about a fraction of an inch to you.”

Jack raised the fork and leaned close enough to see tiny stones and the weeds that grew around them. He had just prodded the field with the tines of his fork when a cry went up from elsewhere on the wall

“You better call him off, Treel! That’s a violation of the cross-scale labor laws!”

“Oh, stuff a pipe in it,” Grampa bellowed through his bullhorn. This instrument sounded loud to Jack; it must have been deafening to the Treels’ samesize neighbors. “You go right ahead, Jack.”

Jack sat back and took a look at the walls. All around the Treel place, other tiny farmers had come out of their barns to watch. Expressions of anger were writ large on every minute face.

“You gonna help the rest of us when you’re through there?” cried a relatively tall, plump farmer.

“Well, I…” Jack began.

“You’re not paying him,” yelled Grampa Treel. “He’s got plenty of work to do around my place.”

“That’s unfair competition, Treel! You ever stop to think about the samesizes you’re putting out of work? I don’t suppose you happened to arrange this little deal with the Labor Bureau? Is he paying you scale, giant?”

Jack looked to Grampa Treel for direction. The little old man beckoned him close and shouted without benefit of bullhorn: “Ignore them, Jack. You just turn that soil.”

“Are you sure it’s all right?” Jack said.

“Why wouldn’t it be? They’re just jealous I got you first, that’s all. Damn Labor Bureau doesn’t bother with folks like us.”

Jack addressed the general neighboring community: “I’ll be more than happy to help out where I can in this room.”

“No, no, no, no, no!” wailed Grampa Treel. “You work for me!”

“In this room, eh?” said the tall plump farmer. “What about the next room, and the next? Are we supposed to start digging for our neighborlings? You gonna ask your giants to do your dirty work?”

The tone of his voice angered Jack, who gripped his fork anew and was just about to plunge it in the wall when the bedroom door opened and Liss came out, blinking.

“Jack? Did I hear voices?”

“Bunch of reactionaries,” he grunted. “Go back to sleep.”

He jabbed the tines deep into the wall.

Too deep—

Grampa Treel screamed, “Hold on!”

Startled, Jack wrenched out the fork and a tiny storm of dirt exploded over his fingers. The field began to crumble away, spilling onto the floor. Squeaks rose up from all the neighborlings. The aphid-cattle mewed in fright as their vines rustled and came undone in the growing avalanche. Tier slid over tier, then suddenly the ramshackle Treel farmhouse began to collapse. The inhabitants dashed for safety, throwing themselves onto sagging vines. Then the house flopped over and fell right through the fields before Jack could do anything to catch it. It crashed to the floor in a shower of splinters and glass.

“My God!” Liss cried. She leaped at the wall in time to rescue young Mrs. Treel and her baby, who were poised at the edge of a dissolving precipice where the nursery had been. She set them down on a safer portion of the wall.

Jack dropped the fork, stumbling backward. As the dirt-slide ceased and the dust settled, Grampa Treel appeared atop a rocky mound that had formed in an instant at the base of the wall. He slapped his shirtfront with his ragged hat, coughing and cursing, then narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at Jack.

“You damn fool! Look what you did to the family farm!”

“I—I’ll get a broom,” Jack said.

“It’s your own fault, Treel!” cried the tall plump farmer whose fields had survived the catastrophe. “You’re going to jail right along with him!”

“Jail?” Jack whispered. “But… but…”

He turned to Liss for comfort, for advice, but she had gone to the window and was staring out at the world of the giants, one level up from their own. Jack heard a terrible sound, a bone-freezing, petrifying banshee wail that grew louder and louder until he thought his eardrums would explode—

And then there were thundering knocks on Narmon Cate’s door. They heard the farmer apologizing for the state of his house as he let some giants inside. Jack covered his ears, but he couldn’t block out the giants’ voices: “We got a call from the Labor Bureau. That’s the house; that one right there.”

“That? But they’re new tenants, officer. They seem like cute enough folks anyway.”

“They’re never as cute as they look, Mr. Cate. These are criminal types.”

“Criminals? On my wall?”

“It can happen to anyone. Seems they were setting up to cut across scale labor regulations, doing work that’s zoned for samesizes. One lazy giant can put a whole wallful of skilled low-level workers out of a job. There’s just no way the tinies can compete. Sometimes we have to stop them with force.”

“Go right ahead, officer,” said the giant farmer.

An enormous bloodshot eye pressed up to the window and blinked in at Liss and Jack. The capillaries were as big around as Jack’s arm. Liss put her arms around him. “Jack, I think you’re in trouble. Big trouble.”

“It looks that way.”

Jack shivered and looked at the farming walls. The irate neighborlings showered him with insulting gestures and obscenities: “Go ahead, you big jerk! Take what you’ve got coming!”

After a moment, someone knocked sharply on the door. It sounded too precise to be a giant. Liss opened the door, revealing two samesizes in police uniforms. The giant officer had set them on the porch. One of the cops carried a stunstick; the other held a tiny box decorated with the official infinite-staircase design of the Plenary Police.

“Name?” said the cop with the stunner.

“J-Jack Greenpeach.”

The officer with the box stepped inside, his eyes drawn to the damaged section of farming wall. “There it is,” he said. He knelt down by the recent avalanche and opened his official box. Out of it stepped two tiny officers, diminutive twins of the ones in Jack’s house. With tiny motions, they signaled for Grampa Trecl to descend from his mound. Their voices were too small for Jack to discern, but he had no doubt they were saying something very like what the same-size officer was saying to him:

“You are under arrest for violation of scale statutes and for damaging private and public property. You will accompany us for sentencing.”

Liss wept on his neck. He felt numb, but he couldn’t look away from the two little cops who were leading Grampa Treel back into their box. Once they were inside, the uplevel officer locked the box, picked it up, and tucked it under his arm. The neighboring farmers were cheering all the while.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” Jack told Liss.

“Don’t worry, I know a lawyer. We’ll have you out right away.”

He didn’t have the strength to force a smile, but he managed to nod. “I’m sure you will.” He gave her a kiss. “I love you.”

Just outside, the giant cop was waiting with an upscale version of the police box that now contained Grampa Treel. The officers led Jack inside, strapped him into a seat, and then secured themselves. Soon they were swinging through space. Muttering like thunder rumbled above them as the giant cops debated whether to stop for doughnuts. When Jack’s stomach growled, he gave thanks that he hadn’t eaten breakfast. This was worse than any carnival ride.

* * *

They took his clothes and dropped him naked into a tall glass jar capped with a perforated lid. The jar sat on a shelf along with dozens of others. From this vantage, Jack could look out at a vast ledge crowded with giant officials going about their titanic yet tedious business. That ledge opened onto an even greater one where the giants two levels up were also busy at their work. And that ledge was a mere recess in yet another ledge, where thrice-large giants moved like mountains, their features scarcely discernible. And beyond those were dark slow blurs, the grumble of a hive, inconceivable bulks like planets clipping past each other in vast gulfs of artificial light.

Above the racks of jars, Jack could just make out a small alcove where neighborling officials were hard at work: it was the ledge within this ledge, with ledges within ledges within it. Thus the halls of criminal justice continued in either direction, perhaps to infinity. He wondered if somewhere in that infinity, someone just like him had unwittingly committed a crime like his own and waited now in a jar resembling this one, but astronomically tinier or microscopically more huge. If so, would that fellow’s emotions be any greater or lesser than Jack’s? Did scale apply to human feelings?

Someone rapped on the wall of the jar next to Jack’s. He looked up and saw a pale samesize looking in at him. The voice scarcely carried: “What’re you in for?”

Jack shrugged. He didn’t feel like talking.

“I’m a murderer,” the fellow said, pulling at his hair. “You like that? Murder! All I did was scrape my walls, stamped out those filthy little buggers that’re always yelling at me day in, day out, to clean up this mess, take a shower, bugging me, bugging me, know what I mean? And they call that murder? Those things aren’t even human, know what I mean? They’re roaches. Germs. Give me some insecticide….”

Jack moved to the far side of his space. The jar was bad but the company was worse.

He wasn’t sure how long he had waited when a giant lifted the lid of his jar, dropped in a pair of gray overalls, and then carried him away. He scarcely had time to dress before the jar came down none too gently on a vast tabletop scored with pencil lines and littered with office desks. Liss and a man in a business suit were waiting for him.

“Jack!” Liss cried. She ran up and put her hands on the glass. Her blue eyes were full of tears. “Jack, I brought Tyler Mashaine. He’s your lawyer now.”

The man gave Jack a nod. “Good evening, Mr. Greenpeach. I’ve studied your case and spoken through intermediaries to citizen Treel and several witnesses of this morning’s event. I think the best we can do is ask for a minimum period of confinement, a moderate fine, and a period of probation in keeping with your past record as a person of honest character. I’ll stress the fact that you were ignorant of cross-scale labor regulations when you went into business for the farmers.”

“You know the laws, I guess,” Jack said with a shrug. Mashaine grimaced. “Well, I know better than to cross scale without a permit.”

Jack blushed. “What exactly did I do, Mr. Mashaine?”

Mashaine crossed his arms and looked down at Jack’s bare feet. “Mr. Greenpeach, our society, our very environment, is based on principles of strict order. The integrity of scale, perfect compression, relativity… these are fundamental. When we came to the levels, we traded a disorderly world for a realm engineered from pure thought. Unfortunately, when we made the transition, human nature remained basically unchanged. We must conform to logical rules if we wish to exist here; even a minor functional infraction can greatly affect the purity of form. But our nature is sloppy. We evolved in a sloppy locale. We can be taught to obey—well, to fear and then obey—the laws necessary to our safety and sanity. I believe the judge will rule that you do not have a proper respect for the principles of proportion and must therefore submit to them for a time not to exceed, say, ninety days.”

“Ninety days?” Jack cried.

“I’ll visit you every one of them,” Liss promised.

“That could be difficult, Liss,” said Mashaine. “I’m afraid Mr. Greenpeach will have to cross scale. There’s no getting around that. It’s one of the ways the penal system has of enforcing conformation to scalar law. Form following function, you understand. It’s also, more broadly, a security precaution.”

“You mean, they think I’d try to escape? I’m not a hardened criminal, Mr. Mashaine. I’m—I’m—this is small-time stuff!”

“I know you wouldn’t try anything, Mr. Green- peach, but the courts are very consistent on this matter. There were problems in the past—on Earth, I suppose—with overcrowding, and this has proved to be the most effective way of using space while stretching penal resources.”

“Crossing scale,” Jack repeated. It was a possibility he had never considered. I he’d spent all his life on one level He was meant to be this size.

Liss stared at him, stunned, her fingers tangled in her golden red hair. “This doesn’t change anything, Jack. Between us, I mean.”

He tried to smile. “I didn’t mean it when I said this was all your idea. I mean, it wasn’t your fault. I was stupid.”

“Nice meeting you, Mr. Greenpeach,” said Tyler Mashaine. “Let’s hope this is the last time you need my services.”

Liss blew him a kiss. They whisked him away in his jar, and for a time he sat on a shelf. Later, the expected news was delivered by a frowning giant: he’d received ninety days’ confinement, a thousand-dollar fine, a year’s probation.

His term began the moment he crossed scale.

They shook him out of the jar and into the center of a small, round stage. He was bathed in sapphire light for five minutes. When it faded, the dimensions of the stage had increased by incredible proportions. What had once been no broader than his shoulders now seemed an endless plain. As he surveyed the featureless wasteland, a shadow fell from the sky, an endless pole tipped with a huge fleecy pad. It poked the plain beside him and swept gently in his direction. Jack fled, overcome by pointless terror, the panic of a fly that sees the swatter falling. The fleecy pad brushed him from behind, like a huge hand caressing him from head to toe. Apparently it was impregnated with a dry adhesive to which he found himself completely glued. This was a good thing, for the pad-tipped pole lifted him straight into the sky for what seemed like miles. He soon wearied of screaming. Besides, he was allergic to the adhesive. By the time they set him down and gently scraped him onto a floor, he was limp with exhaustion. He found himself in a cell whose dimensions nearly approached his own. The walls were bare, devoid of neighborlings, and the cell had no ceiling. There was no reason anyone his size would want to clamber out. He would only be squashed or otherwise exterminated by inconceivably monstrous wardens.

Twice a day, a samesize guard checked to make sure that he had food and water. The bed and other furniture were all a bit too small, which convinced him that the downscaling had not been entirely precise. In the mornings he was allowed to stretch in a corridor between other cells. There was nothing to see except the roofless cubical buildings. There was no one to talk to, no human face aside from the warden’s. After a while he realized that he missed having neighborlings—tiny lives to watch, tiny miseries to share or sympathize with, tiny problems he could be grateful weren’t his own. He’d never really appreciated them before. Now he was smaller by far than his neighborlings. He’d have been a speck under their shoes, small enough to inhabit the dustmotes that fell through their long afternoons.

Loneliness propelled him into a strange kind of trance, a numbed isolation that left him lying on his back day after day, staring up at the blurry sky with his arms crossed behind his head for a pillow on the undersized bed. Time passed differently here: it went very slowly. After a while he forgot the life he’d left behind. Even in his dreams he had always been here. He was adrift, cut free from anything familiar.

And then, perhaps a month into his term, he began to notice inexplicable repetitions in the sky. Each day around lunchtime there would come a self-similar formation of clouds, or what he had thought were clouds until their regularity caught hold of his curiosity and began to rouse him from torpid no-thoughts. Clouds never repeated from day to day. Clouds weren’t always, always tinted with the same hues of pink and blue, or accompanied by vast atmospheric streamers of hazy reddish gold that defied meteorological explanation.

He stared and stared, thoughts brightening, slowly emerging from his trance to puzzle out this strange natural phenomenon, spirit quickening day by day until at last he realized what it was.

Who it was.

Each day at noon, as she had promised, Liss came to visit him.

* * *

“The Farmer on the Wall” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Synergy 4, edited by George Zebrowski (1989)

BRUNO’S SHADOW

Through the light which shines in natural things, one mounts up to the life which presides over them.

-Giordano Bruno

Creaking, the heavy door swung open, and I stepped into the darkened cell. The old gatekeeper waited at my back. Two hundred years ago he would have been a jailer, and this might have been my cell. I straightened up slowly, uncertain of the ceiling height, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. I had an electric lantern with me, but I wanted my first impressions of the cell to match those of its last tenant. What had he felt as the door closed behind him and the key turned in the lock? In the end, had his eyes turned huge and sightless from staring into shadows? Had he seen the pyre to which they led him after so many years in the dark? Or had that final dawn burned out his eyes, even before the flames of the auto-da-fe came leaping from below?

Poor Bruno. Burned alive, a conflagration, no more shadows.

“It’s on the wall behind you,” my guide called after me. “I’ll close the door so you can see it whole.”

I spun around in time to see the doorway closing up: “No!”

But he hadn’t heard me. The old man was possibly quite deaf. Of course, I had wanted him to shut the door eventually— but not so soon. Not until I’d had time to grow used to my surroundings.

I could not bear the darkness. Quickly I switched on the lantern. And found myself staring at Bruno’s masterpiece.

It was a composition in black and white and tones of gray, applied with a hand steadier and more revealing than that of any painter. At first it seemed to me no more than a subtle arrangement of dark and light planes, perfectly abstract, broken by slanting lines and gray arcs, with a row of dappled, feathery shapes suspended from above. It covered the entire wall, including the door through which I had entered the cell. As my eye grew more familiar with the piece, I realized that it was not abstract but had been taken directly from life. The image was merely inverted.

Turning on my heel, I regarded the opposite wall. Yes, there was the window he had used, long since boarded up. In Bruno’s day it had looked out on a square enclosed by imposing white walls, with arches along one side and slender trees lining the far end. It was this scene which he had captured, in inverse, on the wall of his cell.

All that architecture had long since been destroyed. Where the courtyard had been, there now rose a squat, gray monument to Roman finance. From the street one could see this modern monstrosity and the old prison of the Inquisition hulking shoulder to shoulder, like conspirators.

In that small window, now sightless and dark, Bruno had inserted a wooden shutter which completely sealed the cell from light. In the midst of the shutter was a circular aperture, over which he tacked a sheet of gold leaf. And in the very center of that sheet was the tiniest possible hole, no more than a pinprick, admitting only the faintest imaginable light.

Faint, but suitable for his purposes.

I wondered what his jailers had thought when he dispatched them to search for the various strange materials his camera required. He must have had some friend outside the prison to furnish the gold leaf and chemicals. His requests should have surprised no one—he was already thought a sorcerer, after all—but I was amazed that they had ever been honored. What mightn’t he have concocted in the years he spent in prison? Gunpowder? Poison gases? Why not the philosophers’ stone?

But his materials were actually quite harmless and must have seemed so even to the warden: silver salts, bitumen of Judaea, pewter sheets, and lavender oil. A lesser man would have given up after months, perhaps even days of frustrated experimentation. But here, for once, Bruno’s muscular ego served him in good stead. He had eight years in which to work without interruption, undistracted. Eventually he succeeded in rediscovering principles he had previously taken for granted. Leonardo’s own processes had been kept a careful secret by his estate, which dispensed fine cameras, paper, and premixed chemicals to those who dared to purchase them in violation of Church decrees. It was not until more than a century after Bruno’s death that Da Vinci’s self-imposed patents expired, and the chemical principles of chiaroscurography became widely understood. But long before that time, following the brilliant suspicions that had made him such a terror to the Church, Bruno had managed to duplicate Da Vinci’s findings and develop his own ingenious techniques.

Imprisonment had slowed his pace but not his mind. It took the flames of the Inquisition to make that engine fail.

No record remains of the trials he conducted. History has not preserved his failures. All that remains is Bruno’s triumph, cast in light and shadow on the wall of his living tomb. He must have labored all through the year’s shortest night, painting the wall with the mixture he finally settled upon as ideal, namely an asphalt which hardened on exposure to light.

The entire wall beneath that bituminous layer was covered with sheets of polished pewter, tacked up edge to edge to form a seamless canvas. He had pewter-plated even the door.

At dawn he took his position. The waxing sunlight pierced the tiny hole in the sheet of gold leaf, throwing thin rays over Bruno’s wall. It was Midsummer Day, the trees in leaf, the shadows stark and simple on the plaza as the sun crawled overhead. Those shadows were conducted into the dark cell by the pinhole and focused on the light-sensitive coating. Bruno never moved, not for an instant of the year’s longest day. Sunlight poured through the golden hole, hardening the asphalt wherever it touched. Gradually, invisibly, the bright image of the outer world, that expansive courtyard, was frozen in the hardening bitumen of Judaea, while all the shadows remained soft—none softer than the region directly behind Bruno, which bore his umbral shape. When at last the pinhole went dark, had he collapsed exhausted on the floor of his camera? I do not think so. There was much to do while the asphalt was still soft; he had to act quickly to reveal the mystery hidden on the wall.

He worked through another night with a rag or brush soaked in lavender oil, gently dabbing the coated pewter to remove the soft bitumen, taking microscopic care not to destroy the hardened areas. By candlelight he watched the image emerge: The lines of walls and columns, the sweep of the arches, the sun-flecked leaves of inverted trees—these were captured in dark pewter and white asphalt. And last of all, his own form emerged.

But where was it?

I raised my own lantern, sending the shadows shifting over the wall, casting light at last upon the door itself, which was slightly recessed in the wall.

There he knelt, Giordano Bruno himself—the true shadow of the man!

I had not expected this. No one had described him. In the Church records, there was no mention of the shadow’s posture.

As I have said, he was kneeling. His head leaned forward. In his perfect silhouette I could see the blunt, broken shape of his nose, barely touched to his upraised fingertips. His hands were together in prayer. Thus had the heretic portrayed himself— worshipful, dedicated, a devout shadow darkly captured on the door of his cell, imposed in turn on the inverted sky above (or beneath) the courtyard.

I brought my lamp close to his shadow. More than the perfectly rendered pillars, trees, and arches, it was Bruno’s own outline that fascinated me. I had seen him before, naturally, in his crumbling self-portraits. But those had been done in the brief days of his glory, most of them in Wittenberg. Here in Rome at the end of his life he seemed a different man, broken—

Yet not without his triumph.

He had achieved a great part of his aim, had he not? The wall bore testimony to the scope and practicality of his dreams. Here was miraculous evidence that fleeting man could collaborate with the immortal sun. He had proven it in the face of the Church’s ban on cameras, when all chiaroscurographers had been considered heretics— with Bruno merely the worst of them.

In 1591 Giordano Bruno had returned to Italy, his birthplace, in order to convince Pope Clement VIII that the camera and its images were divine in nature—direct gifts from God. Bruno had made a name for himself as a chiaroscurographer and philosopher of the camera. In his De umbris idearum, he had eloquently stated his thesis that no other instrument was so inspired by pure, heavenly principles. In its renderings of light and darkness, the camera seemed to Bruno the perfect tool for the Church, an actual key to the Kingdom of God, the City of the Sun. He pointed out that while the Bible was itself largely incomprehensible to the common man, these images—named chiaroscurographs by their inventor, Leonardo da Vinci—could be widely appreciated, highly instructive, and capable of infinite subtlety, surpassing even the interpretive powers of a Michelangelo, a Raphael.

But Bruno’s words had gone no farther than the porches of the papal ears. The Church had already condemned all camera images; the instrument itself was dubbed the Eye of the Devil. For it was blasphemy to think of collaborating with the sun. The hand of a painter at least was guided by God, who could thus reveal or disguise His plan as He saw fit. But this perfection—it was unholy! Clement himself had toyed briefly with the device—and with impunity, given his position—but he abandoned it as too complex and never looked kindly on the attempts of lesser men to “dabble in light.” So Bruno asked, How will we ever erect the City of God unless each man understands the design and knows his part in the building thereof?

Clement remained silent, averted his gaze. For Bruno, to be ignored was the greatest of hardships. He decided he must go beyond words to make his point. He must let the images themselves speak to the Church and to the common mind.

In Wittenberg, Bruno had been welcomed and much admired by the Lutherans. He had taught chiaroscurography at Luther’s own university until Calvinist scholars rose to power and drove him out, protesting in particular his scandalous use of the town’s young men and prostitutes in composing his more elaborate scenes. He had never lost his fondness for the memory of Martin Luther, and now he followed Luther’s example from the Diet of Worms—although in a style more true to his own extravagance. To the doors and walls of the Vatican he fastened a hundred of his images, the best of his life’s work. He hoped they would persuade the Church to reconsider its position. And indeed the Church did revise its previous attitude, much to Bruno’s misfortune.

That very morning, while Rome babbled of all it had seen or thought it had seen on the Vatican walls, Giordano Bruno was arrested. His camera was destroyed, his chiaroscurographs seized, and his soul confined to a dark cell where it was hoped that he would presently rot.

The Inquisition could not comprehend a creature that flourished in the dark. Apparently the masterpiece on his cell wall was the heresy that made all the others seem unbearable. Composed on Midsummer Day in 1599, it was not discovered until the following year. He was promptly burned at the stake, on February 17, 1600, like a martyr lit to warm in the chilly new century.

I marveled that the Inquisition had let the image stand.

For two hundred years no one had touched this wall. No other prisoner had occupied the cell. It had been sealed, toured occasionally by prison curators and Vatican scholars, and whispered of in imprecise terms. But it had not been destroyed. The Church kept it locked away but perfectly preserved, in the most perverse hypocrisy imaginable. They found the image intolerable and yet they treasured it, just as they treasure their pagan idols, their hundred-breasted Aphrodites, their forbidden books, and the thick compendiums of heretical chiaroscurographs which lie under lock and key in carefully humidified vaults in the Vatican library.

No one but those librarians and a few select others have been allowed to glimpse Bruno’s camera work for these two hundred years. I have looked on them. I have seen the hundred images he tacked defiantly to the Vatican wall. De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione. They were seized by the Church so quickly that none of the public seemed quite sure of what they had witnessed. But those images will never leave my mind: softly lit nudes—male and female both. Adam and Eve stand gleaming like statues in a sunlit grove, their hands joined, staring up at the sun. No fig leaf hides Adam’s sex; no modest torsion of the pelvis obscures the folds of Eve’s thighs, the curls of her pubic hair.

A pale Madonna nurses a silver babe, her face half in darkness with one eye gleaming out of the darkly textured shadows.

A white dove’s weight curves the olive branch on which it rests, forming a precise and delicate arch that resembles the expression of some forbidden equation.

Sunlight on craggy mountains; sunlight on the towers of a walled town; pillars of sunlight falling through broken clouds, setting pools of fire upon a sea of grain.

White breasts, dark nipples, the faint gray stipple of pores—all against a background of deepest black.

A penis, uncircumcised, nested in dark curls. Another standing erect against a shadowed backdrop. I remember the smooth arch of pubic bone beneath the flesh. A couple entwined in a forest, their clothes piled at the base of a tree whose long branches stroke his back and her legs.

Images of dangerous beauty, of course these dominate the memory.

But had the scandalized church fathers even looked at half the images they snatched down? What of the street scenes? What of the portraits? These were the people of Bruno’s day, the people of any day. Laughing, grieving, beautiful, and disfigured. One was a man who posed for the sculptors of gargoyles, his face hideously contorted by a syndrome which has yet to be named. Then a succession of dark-eyed Magdalens, all of them different yet somehow similar. Bruno’s lovers? I wonder. I wonder that these marvels have survived.

The door creaked and swung open, taking Bruno’s captive shadow with it.

“Wait,” I told the keeper. “Just a moment longer. I’m not quite finished yet.”

He peered in at me, puzzled, and shrugged. “As you like. Knock when you’re ready.” He shut the door.

I set my lantern on the high window ledge and set it at full radiance. Crouching, I let my eyes rove over the entire surface of the wall. They returned again and again to the door, the praying hands, the profile. A curve of the doorway hid the cuff of Bruno’s sleeve; I moved the lantern slightly to one side so that the entire shadow lay revealed. When I was satisfied, I unsnapped the leather cover on my own camera and peered down into the lens. Bruno’s wall more than filled the ground glass. There was no room to move back, to encompass more of the wall.

I took in a deep breath, let it out, and at the turning of the next inhalation—the moment of greatest stillness in the soul—I triggered the shutter, exposed my image.

One was all I made. Like Bruno, I felt I had one chance.

It was as I approached the door for a final time, to leave the cell, that I noticed faint scratches within the head of Bruno’s shadow: lines of poetry, engraved there by the prisoner himself:

“Escaped from the narrow murky prison

Where for so many years error held me straitly,

Here I leave the chain that bound me

And the shadow of my fiercely malicious foe.”

“My fiercely malicious foe…”

Had he meant the Inquisition or himself?

I sensed the frustration in the scratched handwriting. If only he had been quieter, subtler in his methods, the Church perhaps would have let him go on with his work, even ignored him. Other chiaroscurographers had thrived, albeit on other continents. With time the world might have come to appreciate him. He might not have had to die upon the pyre. But Bruno was Bruno. He could be no one else. And who can escape his own shadow?

Moments later, I stood in the corridor with my camera packed away, my lantern dark, watching the back of the old gatekeeper as he led me out of the prison, amiably chatting the whole way. I did not hear a word he said until we stood nearly on the threshold of the building, when he opened the last great set of doors to let me out onto the street. The noise of the world pressed in, with all its sights and sounds, its complex shadows and harsh images. I wondered what Bruno would have made of this.

I wondered how different this street might have looked today had the Church reconsidered its position in Bruno’s hour and let him continue his work—with some modification—under its aegis.

I could not envision it. The lens of time lay focused on this moment to the exclusion of every other. Combustion carriages roared and fumed in the street, terrifying the few remaining horses. I prefer to walk, to take my time in this swiftly changing world, to look for images that seem to embody our progress—and our decline.

The doorman fell silent, as if in sympathy. I turned back to him. He had a good face, skin that held the light. I thought of taking his image as he stood there half in shadow, dwarfed by the huge iron doors. The sun’s position was ideal.

“Would you mind?” I said, raising my camera slightly.

His eyes widened. “Are you allowed?”

“Allowed?” I asked, uncovering my ground glass.

“I didn’t think—well, you being the Vatican ’scurographer and all… Someone like me is of no importance.”

“On the contrary.” I uncapped the lens. “The sun shines on us all.”

He stood waiting, stiffly posed, his eyes appearing empty as a statue’s in my viewing lens. I wondered how to unlock his face’s expressiveness.

“You know the reason why I’ve come here today, don’t you?” I asked.

“Not exactly, sir,” he answered, still looking somewhat awkward and expectant.

“I wanted to get a record of Bruno’s cell. You see, they’re planning on tearing this old prison down.”

The doorman whistled between his teeth, eyebrows raised. Now there was a look worth capturing. In that instant I exposed the image.

“And what’s to go in its place? Another bank? Will they be needing a doorman, do you think?”

“I imagine so. It’s to be a gallery, a museum of art. The Giordano Bruno Institute of Chiaroscurography.”

And with that, I bid him good day.

* * *

“Bruno’s Shadow” copyright 1988 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, August 1988.

YOUR STYLE GUIDE—USE IT WISELY

by Marc Laidlaw

Director, Style Enforcement Agency

WHY A CONVENTIONAL FORMAT?

Your reader has just come out of a Phom McNguyen Shoe Store and is standing on the curb, expecting answers. It is always advisable to make an attempt to link disparate images in order to create the illusion of causality:

• Peering through side window of lowrider car as it waits at stoplight.

• Pulsebeat music, foam dice, soccer scores.

• Clear catheters trail from young driver’s intestines into vinyl dashboard. Gauges register fuel, speed, rpm, blood pressure, heat of digestion, petroglobin viscosity.

Subjectivity is the chief variable, but several constants must be taken into consideration:

F = Feitzer’s Reader Credulity Quotient (calculated by sexual precocity indices and National Debt at date of birth)

A = Avogadro’s Social Security Number

Mister X = Number of times reader has encountered references to faceless technicians in genre literature (Western, Romance, High Finance)

It is important to explain all facts and insinuations, especially those which are most easily accessible in other textual works, for purposes of providing internal coherence to 20th Century Prosody and in order to facilitate cross-referencing careers to 21st Century librarians. Supervisual footnotes are the most acceptable format for such interpolations.

Example:

I never shop at Phom McNguyen’s despite the weekly sales. I am afraid that people might look at my shoes and know that they are a generic brand, or the next worst thing, and not the work of a reputable Italian designer.

Example:

By “lowrider,” the author is referring to an automobile, preferably of mid-20th century American manufacture, favored by urban North American Hispanic adolescents, equipped with a mechanized suspension system whereby the relationship of the chassis to the street may be varied by remote control. For social context, ask your librarian to matriculate the glossary.

If you are contractually bound to the conventional design, precede as outlined in Author’s Guide to Plot Concretization published by the National Arts Task Force. For the convenience of such authors, the work has been done for you. Please recast in your own writing, or enter attached soft-mag cartridge into any UPS-compatible text generator with your personal access code and savings account number.

For Manual Entry

• Reader spied by Hispanic driver; laser-guided eyes fix on reader’s tennis shoes; face shows no expression but bioregisters on dashboard betray slight fluctuation.

• Sourceless panic.

• Standard chase.

• Agency intervention. (File Form XT-1023 for list of Agencies possessing Intragenre-Specification license. Unauthorized mention of any Agency, licensed or otherwise, is punishable at discretion of Civil Service Defense League.)

• Enforcement of judgment. If your reader is still permitted access to literature after sentencing, hse may finish the story in hsis own words, expressing sorrow for any ethical-civi1 violations, and include completed work with Form RHB-1134, Plea for Rehabi1itation. Otherwise, drive to next corner and check pedestrian shoes. (GOTO “Riverrunrrex:Joyce”.)

Authors who have been granted permission to proceed by a licensed organization (National Semiconductor Foundation for the Arts, President’s Council on Fractal Plot Exploitation, North American Treatise Organization) may continue in accord with principles and intentions as detailed in the approved Proposed Request for Funding. It is advisable (although not enforceable) to employ abstract verbs instead of nouns, and to make liberal use of excessive clauses, empty phrases, promotional sex defects, and dehumanizing slang. Such techniques will give the innovative work a superficial resemblance to standard texts and therefore render it palatable to the general audience.

• Driver nods. Silver-nailed finger lifts from the steering wheel three times.

• Covert code recognition.

• The crowd pushes out around you but you keep your place on the curb, nodding three times back at him.

• He looks away from your shoes.

Obviously the Style Guide cannot follow authors beyond this point. Until the artist files the Provisional Acceptance Form, hse must follow hsis best judgment, as provided by the strictures indicated on all credit allotments.

• Finger the cold plug in your belly; you touch a leak, wishing that it looked more like a sweat stain, wondering who in the crowd can see.

• Shrill brass horns. The sun caught in the cement warren. Oven temperatures.

• Lowrider rumbles and pulls away into traffic.

• Jealousy, you know?

DEALING WITH REJECTION

If the text is rejected, the author must first submit to involuntary screening and accept the possibility of holocortical revision by a qualified editor or hsis editorial consultant. Emotional quotients will be rebalanced to offer increased objectivity, and then recommendations will be made by the PolyDecisional Authority Board. The author at this point may wish to return to the conventional format (see previous instructions), or else hse may further develop the work until it is considered suitable for social integration. Once approval has been granted, the artist has cause to rejoice. (See form RJC- 465. )

• The light changes back to red. Trapped again.

• Another lowrider pulls alongside you. Driver glances out.

• You decide to make contact.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE TEXT AFTER ACCEPTANCE?

For the dedicated artist, this may be the most difficult phase of creation: artifactual collaboration. An acceptable text is immediately distributed nationwide and judged for applicability by a wide range of media utilities, including cinevideo inducers, sociocultivators, satellite principalities, light rail surgeons, hive designers, rheological medics, extermination surveyors, and UPS-compatible academicians. All of these departments and many others are required by law to put your text to work.

• The finger lifts three times from the wheel.

As the social order encounters your text, facilitators will first reduce it to the basic constituents, then “predigest” any content for maximum bioavailability. A consumable product may take the form of a mass-marketed “Eat&Learn” planarian diet, or it could be as homely as a mandatory printed-wall feature. There can surely be no thrill to compare with that of the author whose work has been injected into the economy, to become part of every citizen’s neutral baseline status.

• You give three nods.

WRITER’S BLOCK

This maladaptive syndrome has become less common in recent years. At one time, authors stated that the sight of a sheet of blank paper waiting to be filled was an obstacle to the first stroke of creation. We have tried to remedy this problem by providing a plethora of forms and flow-sheets, many of which are already at least partially completed for the author’s convenience. In addition, there are many public domain programs designed to break the seemingly endless sheet of ice represented by 93.5 square inches of white paper.

• The light changes.

For further information, file Form PTW-109 (Permission to Write), or present your Querent’s License Number to the Style Enforcement Agency. Please check the Information Etiquette Access Guide for your social classification and save yourself time and money by making sure that your question is not forbidden before you ask it.

• Ah, brotherhood!

• You step down from the curb.

• “I have a message—”

• Squeal of tires, stench of burning rubber.

• Spiderwork cracks infiltrate your vision as your windshield eyes shatter.

• You’re not my reader, and you never were—

USER INTERRUPT

USER INTERRUPT

BUDGETARY VIOLATION

BUDGETARY VIOLATION

TRAGIC RESTRICTION 7998

TRAGIC RESTRICTION 7998

THIS WORKSTATION HAS BEEN REVOKED

THIS WORKSTATION HAS BEEN REVOKED

* * *

“Your Style Guide - Use It Wisely” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Semiotext[e] SF (1989), edited by Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson.

MARS WILL HAVE BLOOD

“Too much ichor,” said red-faced Jack Magnusson, scowling into a playbook. “The whole tragedy is sopping in it. Blood, blood, blood. No, it won’t do for a student production. We’re not educating little vampires here.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Nora Sherman, the English office head. She stared into Magnusson’s round obsidian paperweight, which he had pushed to the center of the table. Little Mr. Dean’s hand kept darting toward it and receding.

Magnusson, the chairman of Blackstone Intermediate School’s Ethics Advisory Committee, threw the playbook at Steve Dean, who was sometimes mistaken for a student. Dean flinched but caught it.

“Well, Jack…”

“Speak up, Dean.”

“Er, it is Macbeth, Jack, and it’s on the reading list this year.”

Magnusson drew himself up, spreading his halfback shoulders, running a hand through his thinning steel-wool hair. “That curriculum’s always been trouble,” he said, “but there’s no use asking for more. What with the swear-word in Catcher in the Rye and the dead horse in Red Sky at Morning and the A.V. Department showing Corpse Grinders on Back-to-School Night, we’re going to start losing constituents to other districts that don’t have these problems.”

Dean looked ready to cry into the pages of Macbeth. Nora Sherman grabbed the book from him and held it dangling by the spine.

She said, “Tirades aside, Jack, you’d better let the kids do Shakespeare this year or there’ll be a rebellion. Birnham Wood will move at recess, with Neal Bay heading the insurrection. There’s a lot of talent going to waste around here and the kids damn well know it.”

Dean stared at her, dazed. “Well said, Nora.”

“You stay out of this,” she said.

“What do you want from me?” Magnusson asked her. “I can’t approve this.”

“Perhaps not as it is, but what if it were toned down?”

Magnusson reared back. “Cut out the blood? There’d be nothing left.”

“No editing,” she said. “We won’t use the Shakespeare. We’ll write our own version. Improvise. I’ve seen grade school kids do it with The Wind in the Willows. Once we get rid of the poetry, we’re not stuck to the plot, and that gives the students considerable freedom. We can change the setting and period.”

Magnusson got the book back. “Take it out of Scotland, you mean?”

“I’ve seen it done. Romeo and Juliet transplanted into the Stone Age, or onto Monster Beach. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the usual organ donor. Can you imagine it set in German-occupied France? Or in Boston during the Revolutionary War? One was set in Transylvania, but it wasn’t exactly bloodless…” She trailed off, one metallic blue fingernail tracing the green line of an artery on the back of her hand.

“You could set it in Siberia or the outback,” said Mr. Dean. He sat up and reached for the book, but Magnusson ignored him and held the captive copy spread masklike before his face. Dean dropped back into his seat and gazed into the paperweight.

“Or the Old West,” he said, crossing his arms.

“Too messy, Dean,” said Mrs. Sherman. “What I suggest is we give our actor-warriors weapons that won’t be as sloppy as bullets and swords. Give them, say, ray-guns and send them off to… I don’t know, Mars. Sure. Tie it in with the study groups reading The Martian Chronicles.”

“Mars,” said Magnusson, as if the planet were a jawbreaker that refused to dissolve on his tongue.

“With real Martian music,” said Mr. Dean.

Mrs. Sherman caught and held his eyes. “I didn’t say anything about that.”

“No, I did,” said Mr. Dean.

“We have to use the band this year,” said Magnusson.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because he promised,” said Mr. Dean. “We haven’t had a musical in the last three years. The Crucible, Man in the Moon Marigolds, Snake House… The things these kids choose, I swear. They have the sense of humor of morticians. This year we’re doing something lighter, a musical ‘revue.’ I think our own Sheri DuBose could come up with something appropriate in the way of music and songs for Macbeth.”

“Oh my God,” said Nora, sinking.

Magnusson hardly looked at her, though he was smiling with one side of his mouth. “That should keep the kids tame, yes.”

“For that you’d need wild-animal tamers,” said Mr. Dean. “At least it will keep them happy.”

Mrs. Sherman seemed to come out of a coma. “Forget I ever mentioned Macbeth. Don’t do it to that play. Not that silly girl’s music…”

“Nora,” said Mr. Magnusson, shaking his head at her and smiling as if he knew something she didn’t. “So pale. Are you well?”

“Seen Banquo’s ghost?” said Dean, with a chuckle.

“You’re not being a very good sport,” said Magnusson. “We’ve all got what we wanted.”

She tightened her metallic-blue mouth, looked at both of them, then put out a hand and touched the copy of Macbeth as if to swear upon it. When she was perfectly still, she whispered, “If you get Sheri DuBose, I get Ricardo Rivera.” Mr. Dean jumped as if he had been grabbed; but before he could form a word or stop her, her hand shot out and touched the black paperweight in the center of the table.

“Ha!” she said. “Motion passed.”

Dean slumped back in his chair.

“All right,” said Magnusson. “Let’s move on to athletics.”

* * *

Lunch bag in hand, Ricardo Rivera hurried across the quadrangle toward the crowd of twelve- and thirteen-year-old students that had gathered at the back of the auditorium by the stage door.

He was a small boy, green-eyed, with dark curly hair, fine-cut features, and a grin that some might call elfin. The grin was partly imaginary because at that moment he thought he was to be the next Macbeth.

At the edge of the group he asked Sheri DuBose if the cast list for Macbeth’s Martian Revue had been posted, though it obviously hadn’t.

“Not yet, Ricardo,” she said. “Mr. Dean wants me to write the songs, though.” She smiled. “I have it on good authority.”

“Good authority,’” mimicked Bruce Vicks, pigging his nose at her with a finger. “Sheri DuPug,” he said.

Sheri snorted and turned away, forgetting about Ricardo. “‘If it were done when ’tis done,’” Ricardo said, “then ’tis best it were done when it’s best it were… now wait a minute.” His audition piece was already sliding from memory.

“Here come de prez,” somebody said.

Ricardo jumped to look over the heads of the others and saw a tall boy with longish sun-bleached hair, a sure and smiling freckled face, and the lopsided walk of a skateboarder.

Ricardo waved at him. “Hey, Neal, over here!”

Neal Bay joined the crowd, smiling at everyone.

“Good job, Neal,” said Randy Keane, shaking Neal’s hand. “You better remember your campaign promise for lots of movies.”

“Won’t forget,” said Neal. “I’ve already got The Red Balloon on order.”

Keane groaned and laughed. “That stinker?”

Ricardo pushed his way to Neal’s side. “The list’s not up yet.”

“Duh,” said Neal. “My brilliant campaign manager. I can see the list isn’t up yet, dipstick. I don’t know how I won with you on my side.”

Ricardo ignored the insult and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I hear Cory gave you trouble yesterday.”

“Trouble? Who told you that?”

“At student council.”

“No trouble, except maybe for you. I just asked Cory about a few of the things you told me.”

Ricardo stepped back. “I told you? Like what?”

“Oh, like how you said that Lisa Freuhoff told you Cory was fixing the elections.”

“That’s what Lisa said,” said Ricardo, backing away but pointing at Neal. “I didn’t say it was true.”

“Yeah? And how she swore I’d be sorry if I won. She’d get even, you said. I never asked where you heard that one.”

“Lisa said it,” Ricardo said.

Neal crossed his arms, rolled his eyes, and smirked. “Yeah? Well, Cory and I are a team now.”

“But she was your-your enemy!”

“We were never enemies. We always knew one of us would win, and the other would be vice-president. You just wanted us to be enemies.”

Ricardo fell silent, trying to imagine what Neal meant. “We’ve been good friends, Neal,” he said. “You shouldn’t just treat me like this now that you’ve won. You’ll still see me around. Maybe you’ll even get the part of Banquo. You did a great audition.”

“Banquo?” Neal laughed. “I’m going to be Mister Macbeth, Junior.”

“No way,” said Ricardo. The idea was laughable, and he laughed. Then he turned his tongue back to the more important issue. “Cory was always nasty to you. Remember that time in the cafeteria?”

“You shut up,” Neal said, taking a step to hook his forefinger into the soft flesh and glands under Ricardo’s jaw. The bigger boy grinned, and it was not the kind of smile that makes one comfortable.

Ricardo moaned until Neal let him slip free. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice didn’t carry.

“Bet you don’t even get Malcolm’s part,” he said. “Bet you don’t even get to be a Murderer.”

Neal started forward.

“It’s a fight!”

A cry from the direction of the door interrupted them. Mr. Dean stepped outside, wincing at the sunlight and the students. He waved a sheet of ditto paper as if it were a pennant. Everyone cheered. He tacked it to the door and slipped back in before he could be trapped by the kids.

As Ricardo struggled forward, he dropped his lunch bag. He bent down, but before he could grab it a Hush Puppy squashed the sack, spilling the guts of a peanut butter and banana sandwich onto the asphalt. Rising, suddenly hungry, he heard someone say, “Awright! Macbeth for President!”

“No,” Ricardo said in disbelief. “Oh, no.”

President Bay appeared above him, looking down his long, straight nose. “Sorry, buddy, you’re Banquo. Sorry for both of us, I mean. I’d just as soon not see you on that stage.”

Ricardo felt his face scrunch up with anger. “Banquo,” he said. “Banquo gets killed halfway through, then he’s just a- a-a ghost. I wanted—”

“Don’t be a wussy,” Neal said.

“A wussy?” Ricardo said. His anger passed and he felt weak. “Neal, see if I was second choice.”

“You dummy, you’re not even my understudy. Be glad you got anything.”

“But you can’t do it, Neal, you don’t have the time. You’re already president, isn’t that enough?”

“President no thanks to you, when all you did was tell me lies about Cory Fordyce, which is pretty screwed considering how you’ve got the hots for her.”

Around them, kids were staring and starting to laugh. Some even looked frightened in a tentative, eager way. “The hots,” someone repeated.

Ricardo tripped on an ankle out of nowhere, and falling backward grabbed the nearest object: Neal’s chest. He heard a rip as he continued to fall, and when he landed he had a handful of torn, threadbare cotton with Primo Beer written across it.

He looked slowly up at a bare-chested, raging Neal, and something happened to freeze them in time. Something kept his words in his mouth and Neal’s fists in the air. Everything stopped and Ricardo sat suspended outside of the world.

Until Cory Fordyce looked in.

Long blond hair, Miss Clairol curls, rosy cheeks and lips, pale blue eyes. All he could see of her was her face; the crowd hid the rest. She was peering around Neal, while Neal turned slowly to look at her.

“Hello, Cory,” Neal said, smiling as his fingers uncurled.

She scowled past him and looked down at Ricardo. “What did you tell him about me, Ricardo?”

“I didn’t say a thing!” Ricardo shouted. “Lisa said! Ask Lisa!”

Neal stepped forward with a shout, swinging his arm as if he were bowling. Ricardo’s face went numb with pain; he wasn’t sure why. He lay back on the asphalt, smelling a cloud of tarry, rusty, bloody smoke rising around him. Neal’s fist floated above in slow motion, a white planet spattered in blood. Ricardo’s awareness roamed into the dark.

* * *

“Ricardo?” A woman’s voice. “This is Mrs. Ensign, the nurse. We’ve called your mother. I’m afraid she’ll have to take you to the hospital. Your nose is quite broken. Breathe through your mouth and you won’t have so much trouble.”

His face felt like a pane of safety glass, shattered but clinging together. She wiped his eyes with a wet cloth as the sounds of typewriters and telephones filled his ears.

Jars rattled and a fluorescent light appeared. Mrs. Ensign stood above, shaking a thermometer. Then she shook her head.

“If I did that you wouldn’t be able to breathe,” she said. “Poor boy.”

“Bisses Edsid, could I see a cast list for Bacbeth’s Bartiad Revue?”

“A catalyst for who?”

“Cast list, cast list. I cad’t talk right.”

“Can you read right? Stay put, I’ll get you the list.”

When she returned, she had a ditto so fresh it fumed. She held it before his face so that he could read:

MACBETH’S MARTIAN REVUE

Macbeth…… Neal Bay

Banquo…… Ricardo Rivera

Lady Macbeth…… Cory Fordyce

“That’s all,” he said.

She left him alone with his pain.

Why me? he thought. Why me?

That was an old thought, worn thin over the years of his childhood. It hardly captured his present frustration, which felt like the undertow at high tide.

Why Neal? he thought. Better.

Why Neal, the sun-tanned surfer, instead of me, the brainy twerp? I’m not such a bad bodysurfer.

And why Neal, with the perfect dumb joke that makes all the girls laugh (except Cory usually, but probably now she’ll laugh), instead of me, s-s-stuttering R-R-Ricardo?

Yeah? Why does Neal get to be President Bloody Macbeth of the Blackstone Intermediate Bloody Spaceways and the Planet of Bloody Blood; when I get to be Good Ol’ Banquo the Friendly Ghost?

Why does Neal get Cory while I get… I get…

Cory. Thinking of her was like swallowing a Superball. He had never gotten over the bruises she’d given him the previous year, when he had let himself have a crush on her even while knowing that she hated him, even while knowing for certain that his affection would make her crueler.

In moments of pain, her image always brightened to torment him. He had never known as much pain as he felt now, and her face had never been so bright.

* * *

That night he cried out in his sleep. His mother found him sitting half-awake in his bed, describing in a senseless rush the events of some nightmare on another world: a planet of blood where starships of rusted metal crashed into the ruins of red cities; where a bloody sun and moon chased each other round and round while the stars howled in a hungry chorus, and seas of blood drenched everything in red. He fell back asleep without truly waking, leaving her clinging to his seemingly empty body, leaving her afraid.

On the table by his bedside, she saw his English assignment: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

“I’ll call the office in the morning,” she promised her son. “That place is giving you nightmares.”

* * *

Mrs. Sherman sighed when she saw Ricardo in homeroom 408 the next morning. His bandaged nose was the subject of several disputes between first and second bells. As the students punched their new day’s schedules into computer cards and copied each other’s math homework, she watched him gazing into space. Near the end of the period, she checked his schedule and saw that he had no class after home room.

“Would you please come see me at fourth bell?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Sherman,” said Ricardo, and he shuffled away without having met her eyes.

He wandered into the department office at third bell and was waiting for her when she got free of Mr. Ezra and Miss Bachary, who each claimed to have the room for the next period. The scheduling computer was down again.

“Everyone defended Neal,” he said, when she was sitting at her desk. He looked about eighty years old when he said it. She wanted to tell him to look up, to smile.

“They said you started it?” she asked.

He nodded. “I let them give my part away. Newt got it. David Deacon, I mean. He’s even shorter than me. I don’t know why Mr. Dean thinks Banquo’s a shrimp.”

“Have you taken your story to Mr. Magnusson?” she asked.

“He and Mr. Bay go golfing together,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the stupid play anyway.”

“Maybe it’s for the better, Ricardo,” she said. “I thought of you when we chose Macbeth. Mr. Dean will need a student playwright, someone who can write, to polish what the actors come up with and read it back to them better than before.”

Ricardo looked up, astonished. “You mean me?”

She smiled. “That could be, but it depends on you.”

“I’d do it! I have an idea about-about Macbeth’s mother!”

“Fine, Ricardo. I’ve talked to David Deacon since he was chosen, by the way. He’s in my science fiction class and he loves Mars. He said he’d be glad to help you learn what you need to know to write a story on Mars.”

“Write a story on Mars,” Ricardo said to himself. “Wow.”

“—gladly share his fine ideas about the angry red planet, that grisly world of war and blood.”

She looked past him, through the filing cabinets, up at the clock.

“And Macbeth,” she intoned, “all black and red, dark night and dark blood. A haunted planet, a cursed play. Did you know there was a curse put on the play? It’s bad luck for an actor to hear the Scotsman’s name, unless they’re in the play. If you listen long enough, you’ll hear stories about the strange things that happen when people perform Macbeth.”

Ricardo’s gaze followed the path her eyes traced upward, ever upward.

“Use your gift, Ricardo.”

“Okay, Mrs. Sherman, I’ll give it a try.”

“A-plus, Ricardo,” she said. “You’re A-plus material.”

* * *

The new Banquo, David “Newt” Deacon, was a nerd. He even had a bowl-head haircut. When Ricardo found him in the audiovisual room, he had toilet plungers strapped to both legs and was filming himself with an upside-down video camera while extolling the virtues of “Human Housefly Sucker-Cups.” He looked a bit like a housefly himself, wearing bug-eyed glasses with quarter-inch-thick lenses.

Newt shed his plungers and turned off the video recorder.

“Ricky River?” he asked.

“Ricardo Rivera.”

Newt shook his head, as if clearing it. “Thought that couldn’t be right.”

“Mrs. Sherman sent me.”

“Oh, I know. Excuse me a second.” He went poking through shelves cluttered with tape reels and charred copper wire, speaking over his shoulder. “She’s neat, huh? She said I’d tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Mars, right?”

“I guess I know as much as anybody. I read The Martian Chronicles.”

“Oh,” Newt said. “That’s just the beginning.”

When he came out of the cupboard, holding a burned-out electromagnet, his cheeks were sucked in between his molars. He stared at Ricardo’s bandages.

“Neal was my best friend once,” he said. “Back in fifth grade, we did everything together. He got ideas for all these neat things—squirt-gun burglar traps and stuff—and I built ’em. But he kept taking and breaking them. Now it figures he’s president. And going with Cary Fordyce, too.”

“Cory,” said Ricardo.

Newt unwound some of the scorched copper wire from the motor and began winding it around the fingers of his left hand as he talked.

“Here’s what I thought would work for Mars on the stage: all red lights; we’d make big castles out of red foam rubber—sandstone-looking stuff. I wanted to do a sandstorm—they’re really bad on Mars—but Mr. Dean said no, too messy. We get an avalanche at least. The space suits are gonna be kind of a cross between space suits and kilts.”

“How about canals?” Ricardo asked.

“There aren’t any canals,” Newt said emphatically. “Didn’t you ever see Robinson Crusoe on Mars?”

“No, but-but I think I know how Mars looks.” He looked up and saw a clock with its hands skipping backward. The office reset speeding clocks several times a day. “It has two moons, a red sky, towers, and Martians who nobody ever sees… I bet I could write it so everyone acted like they would if they were really up there.”

“Make it good and bloody,” said Newt, fidgeting with the prongs of an electric plug. The other end of the wire was hooked to the motor, now strapped to his left hand.

“Yeah,” Ricardo sighed, “except they won’t let us have any blood in it.”

“Aw, there’s this great word from horror stories that no one would ever mind.”

Ricardo leaned closer. “Tell me.”

Newt’s hand exploded. He yanked the plug out of the wall socket while Ricardo, in shock, peered at the smoldering hand.

“You did that to yourself?”

Grinning, Newt unwrapped his hand and held it out. The fingers and palm were powdered with carbon but unharmed.

“Mr. Dean’s letting me do the special effects,” he said. “Now, you were asking about a good word for blood?”

* * *

A small flame licked up and seared Ricardo’s heart each time Cory and Neal shared the stage. Two weeks after the primaries, their political sessions were notorious; according to Lisa Freuhoff, they would as soon ogle each other as filibuster. Sunk deep into a folding chair, Ricardo daily watched them declare their sappy Martian version of love while a piano student rapped out accompaniment. When the ruddy stage lighting lingered in their eyes even off the stage, he saw it as the glow of lust and hated it. Cory tried none of the tricks she had played on Ricardo last year. She and Neal were at each other’s mercy.

One afternoon, between scenes, Neal jumped from the stage and sauntered over to Ricardo.

“What a quay-zar,” Neal said.

Ricardo drew up his knees and sank down into the safety of his own lap. “What are you trying to prove, Bay?”

“Nothing you haven’t proved already. That you’re a lying little wimp. If your mouth and fingers are both really connected to your brain, then everything you’re writing is probably a lie, too.”

Ricardo sat up and set the script book down. He was getting hot now.

“Neal, would you just fuck off?”

Of course, of course his voice had to break when he said the worst word he knew.

“Ooooh! What nasty words! They’re just what I’d expect from a nasty little boy like you. Nasty little fag.”

Neal spun away and leapt back onto the stage without using his hands. Ricardo lapsed into a fever of pent rage; he almost smote his breast in public.

“Just because I don’t have a bitch for a girlfriend!”

Sheri DuBose, who was passing behind him, gasped.

He blushed, felt his ears burning. When she was gone, he looked at Cory Fordyce, alone at the center of the stage. He covered her with a hand, imagining the bitch-queen of them all in her place. Lady Macbeth, with long black hair and vampire teeth and bloody lips and hungry eyes. In his mind, the Lady consumed Cory, another bitch, and he began to smile.

“I don’t care if I’m not Macbeth or Banquo or any of you,” he whispered, giggling.

He held his pen up before his eyes, concentrating on it until he went slightly cross-eyed. His thinking also did something like doubling; he suddenly thought of himself as every one of them. He could be Duncan, murdered in his sand castle, and any or all of the three witches who danced across the viewscreen of the starship Silex; he could be the comical porter of the air-lock. The whole time the players thought they were creating the play, he had actually been writing new lines and getting the actors to learn them.

Over Christmas break, he was left to polish the script and prepare a final version. He lost interest in the mundane holiday and often had to be coerced to take part in family affairs such as ornamenting the tree and visiting relatives.

For two solid weeks he breathed the sands of Mars and haunted the winding stairs of a crumbling Martian castle. Instead of carols, he heard phantom birds cawing from the high thin air as murder sneaked through the two-mooned night. His dreams were premonitions of laser-fire, in which no blood was allowed. The holes in Duncan’s chest smoldered, cauterized. And always, just before he woke, the sand dunes of the Birnham Waste came humping forward, crawling, alive….

He wrote and rewrote. Sometimes he stared at the wall and the soccer trophies and the Certificates of Merit and the pencils in the papier-mâché holder he’d made in third grade. He stared at these objects but all the while saw blood, only blood, blood swirling into sand, spraying in the wind, blood that the school would never allow, everywhere the substance that the Committee had forbidden.

The days passed in a red dream.

(“Merry Christmas, darl— Ricardo, did you even sleep?”)

On New Year’s Day, inspired by the changing year, he took a silver pin and pricked his fingertips; squeezed out bright beads and droplets that splashed the fresh-typed manuscript; chanted, “By the pricking of my thumbs, Neal Bay is overcome!”

He smeared a little blood on each page. For a while he watched it dry, then he licked his fingers clean of blood and ink.

* * *

“Excellent job, Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean the next day. “Sheri turned in the final draft of her songs; I hope you two got together over the holidays? Then I guess that should do it. Listen, if you’re not too busy this trimester, why don’t you lend a hand building sets?”

Ricardo could have cackled and rubbed his hands together, but he had more control than that. He nodded and went looking for a hammer.

That afternoon he worked on the stage, doing quiet tasks with glue and thumbtacks in the dark wings while the actors looked over their new script.

Cory Fordyce said, “But I don’t remember… Morris, this isn’t our play.”

“What else would it be?” said Mr. Dean. His word outweighed that of Morris Fluornoy, the student director. “I’ll expect you to have it memorized by Friday. Don’t forget, opening night’s only two months away.”

“But this is scary,” said Lady Macbeth.

“It’s supposed to be,” said Newt, who had already complimented Ricardo on his script. “It’s Mars. Didn’t you ever see Queen of Blood?”

Ricardo resumed hammering. In his hands, the first of the Martian towers began to rise. The flunkies in set construction were used to taking orders; it was easy to shape their understanding of Martian architecture. He explained how low gravity and rarefied air required all structures to be warped until they could withstand ion storms and colloidal temperature gradients.

So, under his direction, they built something like a huge Cubist monster with a low, foam-rubber belly, giraffe-long legs, and a vast fanged mouth missing the lower jaw. They painted it red-orange, stapled a slit sheet of clear plastic between the front legs, and finally gave it wheels. Ricardo discovered a talent for painting, and covered it with writhing figures, deliberately crude glyphs of torment.

Portcullis-cum-air-lock. Hell-gate. Beast. It stood like a watchdog, always somewhere on the stage, its upper regions hidden from the audience by hanging backdrops and the proscenium arch.

Another of Ricardo’s talents also came in handy. He proved an excellent mimic, and so created a variety of unusual sound effects once he’d made friends with the sound technician. The obscure bird of night called, when it called, in a high voice familiar to Neal; and each time it called, the sandy-haired athlete grew slightly pale inside his skier’s tan. The bird’s cry, Neal once said to Cory within Ricardo’s hearing, sounded almost like a voice. He didn’t know that the words, Ricardo’s taunts, had been accelerated and run together until no sense could be made of them.

Neal became an ever more haggard Macbeth, in his plastic kilt and rakish cellophane visor. He started crossing the stage to avoid the young playwright and set-builder.

But Lady Macbeth—that is, Cory Fordyce—seemed to grow ever bolder.

Ricardo noticed her watching him as he went about his business in the shadows. One day he climbed a ladder all the way up to the catwalk, where spotlights and unused backdrops hung. He stood directly over her as she read a hologram from her husband who was fighting rebels in space. Ricardo concentrated on the top of her head, and within seconds she looked straight up at him, though he had climbed aloft in perfect silence, unobserved until now. He pretended to adjust a red gel on a spotlight while she continued her speech.

When he descended she walked proudly toward him, seeming to drink up the red light as she came, seeming to swell and tower as it filled her. Her hair caught scarlet highlights, her mouth wettened with blood, her eyes swam in red tears.

“Ricardo,” she said, “what are you up to?”

He backed away and she moved closer, forcing him into a corner.

“What are you doing to us?” she repeated.

Ricardo could summon no strength to meet the red glare in her eyes. Her intonation was that of Lady Macbeth in speeches he had written. She had such power over him. He felt his own power ebbing, leaking swiftly onto the ground, unstoppable.

She followed him along the row of ropes that dangled up into darkness.

“Don’t you run,” she said, “I want to talk to you. Sometimes you make me so mad—”

He saw a door and rushed through it, and turned with a cry as he realized his mistake. He had fled into the light cage. He turned to see her, triumphant and angry as she grabbed the wirework door and slammed it shut upon him.

The last of his strength left him. He slumped backward, catching his elbows on light levers, and so drew the theater into darkness with him as he fell.

When they found the source of trouble, they sent him out to sit in the auditorium until he felt better.

Cory came onstage. For a moment the lights were all wrong, pale white instead of red. She looked like a porcelain doll, eyes wide but blank. When she saw Ricardo, she looked over his head. Though he was the only one in the empty auditorium, she looked everywhere but at him.

“We’ll try Lady Macbeth’s song now,” said Morris.

“It’s Neal I want,” Ricardo whispered. “Stay out of my way.”

He felt murderous and guilty, but the alternative was worse. If he didn’t hate, then there would be nothing left for him at all. He did not want to be numb. If no one loved him, then he would see that they hated him; for though love was but a dream one forgot upon waking, hate worked in full daylight. Hate brought bright red visions of double lunacy, of a crimson planet spinning through a velvet-black void.

The piano played a few notes and Cory sang:

“Should I? Could I?

Would I do this deed?

How will—I kill

Duncan and mislead

The Martian warriors who’ll

Find him in his bed

The noble fighters

Who’ll see he’s really dead?

With Duncan’s last breath,

He’ll see a Macbeth,

But will it be my Lord or me?

Should it be my Lord or me?”

Ricardo groaned at Sheri’s song. It was so bad it might ruin the rest of the show.

Neal entered and they began a duet.

“Will we? Shall we?

How can we protect our fate?

Still we… will be…

Taking risks so very great.”

The monster of hell-gate loomed suddenly flimsy and ridiculous above the awkward singers.

“Dare we? Care we?”

Ricardo answered, “No!”

He rushed down the row of folding chairs, kicking a few out of his way. The piano stopped and the singers fell quiet. The actors and crew came out on the stage to see him.

“That stuff stinks!” he said.

“Mr. Rivera,” said Mr. Dean, aiming a quivering finger at the door, “you are out of bounds. Now leave and don’t bother returning.”

“I won’t have to come back,” he said. “I’ll hear everybody booing on opening night, even way out where I live.”

Cory’s eyes flashed red and he stayed a moment to look at her. Hate mauled his heart. He slammed his way outside to face a cloudy sky of blue with no trace of red in it.

* * *

Even then, he did not abandon the play. Whenever possible, he entered the auditorium before crew and cast arrived, and stayed hidden up in the dark catwalks until all had gone. Cory never saw him, for her eyes were always on Neal. Ricardo’s eyes, in the meantime, opened to the full scheme of performance, the total effect of actors and words, lighting and music—such as it was—working in dramatic fusion.

With silver pins he pricked his thumbs and dribbled his blood over everything, investing the play with his own power. He bled on the net full of foam boulders intended for the avalanche scene. He daubed the witches’ robes down in the costume rooms; these were worn by three members of Neal and Cory’s cabinet. Let them wear his blood, and though they were enemies their gestures might carry some of his power.

There were rumors, whispers, stories that he overheard from his high place. A girl in the costume room had seen the witches’ robes moving all by themselves. A boy working late on the set had seen a woman in red-black tatters standing in the light cage. Shreds of music drifted over the stage when the tape player was disconnected. Others saw severed heads that vanished. Then the hell-beast rolled swiftly across the stage with no hands pushing it.

Only Ricardo saw Newt at his tricks.

He thought of nothing but Macbeth’s Martian Revue. He never again wondered, “Why him instead of me?” His power carried him beyond all that. In daydreams he communed with Shakespeare and saw at first hand the awful history that had provoked the play: Macbeth’s veiled mother (where could she have come from, except his dreams?) pointing the finger of guilt at Duncan. He dipped a hand into eternity and sipped from the splashing spring of the witches’ queen Hecate: a fount of blood in a dark forest. Not even the Ethics Advisory Committee could spoil that sanguine vision or censor its red power, no more than they could stop his Mars from coming into being as he imagined it.

Vampire dreams. Huddled like a bat in the loft, he watched the actors. He hid by the speaker where the night-bird cried, and sometimes joined its voice with his own. Even Newt looked worried then, and he had wished aloud for ghostly visitations.

Cory also came into her own, and nothing strange or out of place could touch her. She led Neal around by the hand; leaned against him during critique sessions; and one afternoon, while Ricardo watched, she kissed him backstage. The kiss lasted too long and Ricardo gasped for air. Neal’s hands on her hips, clutching and tense, pulled her forward; while her hands rested smooth and relaxed upon his shoulders, and drew gentle curves, and never needed to tug because he fell toward her of his own will. Ricardo, too, almost fell. Later he lay on his back, panting, dreaming of the plunge he had nearly taken.

Opening night came as if without warning, but Ricardo had been ready for a long time.

“Banquo!” he called through the stage door. “Banquo, psst!”

Newt spied him and came over, looking wary at first, then startled. He wore pointed ears, Mr. Spock style.

“You!” he said. “You’re not supposed to—”

“Come outside a minute,” Ricardo said.

They stood in the lunch quadrangle. It was dark except for a moth-battered floodlight above the stage door.

“Are you going to see the show?” Newt asked. “It shaped up pretty well, except for those dumb songs.”

“I want a favor,” Ricardo said. “No one but you will know, all right?”

“What kind of favor?”

Ricardo held up a paper sack. “I’ve got a space suit in here, kilt and visor with Banquo’s emblem on ’em. I want to play your ghost tonight.”

“What? You can’t—”

Ricardo lunged and caught Newt by the throat. He held him against the wall.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Deacon, but I will. Just let me play Banquo’s ghost. We’ll switch places, it’s a short scene. No one’ll know it’s me except for you.”

“Why?” Newt asked. “It’s crazy.”

“That’s right. And if Neal asks, it was you playing the ghost, not me.”

Newt took a deep breath. “Let go.”

“Not till you agree.”

Newt shrugged. “I don’t care if you’re the ghost. Be my guest. It’s still pretty weird.”

“Yeah. Go on, get ready. I’ll be hiding backstage.” Newt went back inside. Ricardo went to a restroom and changed into the space suit. He fit a cap over his curls and pulled down the visor, thus resembling a dozen others in the cast. A tube of Vampire Blood, left over from Halloween, went into a tunic pocket.

When he returned to the auditorium, the play began with an orchestral flourish that seemed to catch up and echo the coughs of the audience. The Blackstone Intermediate School Band forged on to the end of the overture, then continued a few bars past that and sputtered into silence.

He peered through the backstage curtains and saw the set of Macbeth’s spaceship, the Silex, much resembling the deck of the Enterprise from Star Trek. On the viewscreen—a framework with blue gauze stretched across it—three hags from Cory’s campaign appeared cackling prophecies.

Neal Macbeth set his jaw and told the hags to get out of the way, he needed to see to make a landing. He was taking his shipful of space pirates to fight for the planet Mars.

“Aye, the red planet,” said one witch. “That swollen, infected orb of death and decay. Beware you do not stab the crawling sands, for your own ichor may flow below the surface.”

“Ichor in crawling sands?” said Macbeth. “What is this?”

Newt Banquo, Macbeth’s second in command, leapt at the screen brandishing his ray-gun. The witches vanished amid shrieks and groans from the sound system.

The irrepressible space pirates broke into song:

“Oh we’re on our way to Mars,

We’ve come from far-off stars,

Though the place we’re really

Fondest of is Earth.

Oh it’s been an endless trip

But the captain of our ship

Knows pretty much just what

A light-year’s worth.

So Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!

Hip-Hip Hooray, Macbeth!”

The audience started laughing, tentatively at first. Ricardo shivered, feeling their hilarity grow.

As if on cue, the spaceship’s flimsy viewscreen trembled and would have toppled except for Newt, who caught and held it till the stagehands had anchored it from behind.

Coolly, Newt turned to his pale captain and said, “They don’t make these screens like they used to.”

The audience never had a chance to breathe.

Ricardo backed into the sets, unable to watch. The laughter went on, but he only half heard it. How could something with so much of himself in it appear so absurd? What had become of his life’s blood, his offering of labor?

“Please,” he prayed to the catwalks. “Please don’t let them laugh.”

Not all of the original spirit was lost. The laughter died out gradually, though never completely, and the lengthening silences seemed full of increasing horror. Much of the action, unseen to him, must have struck the crowd as gruesome. Murder and betrayal, the beast of hell-gate, the cry of the obscene bird: all cast a spell of red darkness that was nearly but never quite broken each time a DuBose song came up. Relief and dismay were blended in the laughter.

Ricardo smiled. There was still hope. He affixed Vulcan points to his ears and painted his nose with gooey Vampire Blood. When Newt came looking for him, he stepped out from behind a set-piece.

“You enter over there,” Newt whispered, taking his hiding place. “You look really gross.”

“Thanks.”

“Break a leg.”

Ricardo pulled down his visor and peeked through a curtain at the scene. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were entertaining officers around an octagonal table. As he waited for his cue, he looked into the audience and immediately spied Mrs. Sherman in the front row, beyond the band, her jewelry glittering in the footlights. He hoped she wouldn’t recognize him.

“Let’s drink this toast in Venusian slug-ichor!” said Macbeth.

The officers raised their goblets.

Someone strode down the front row, a huge man with silvery hair and a dark red furious face. It was Mr. Magnusson, come to summon Mrs. Sherman from her seat. All around them, parents watched, while politely pretending to see nothing.

Ricardo heard his cue. He took a deep breath and strode onstage, aware of the two adults leaving together. Mr. Dean looked after them in horror, his conductor’s wand drooping. The music swooned.

Neal spotted Ricardo in his costume, and his eyes widened with melodrama. “By the cosmos!” he cried.

“What is it, my Lord?” said Lady Macbeth, her eyes passing through Ricardo as he shambled forward. He heard the expectant breathing of the audience at his side, now invisible in the red glare of footlights. The whole set, everything around him, appeared to be drenched in blood. His insane hieroglyphs crawled over the walls, red-on-red, luminous.

“But-but-but,” said Neal. “You-you-you…”

Ricardo walked offstage, turned on his heel, and waited to re-enter. His visor was steamed with the sweat of stage fright. He tried to find his breath

“My lord?” said Cory Fordyce. “What is it? Have you seen some nightmare with your eyes wide open?”

“Didn’t you see him?” Neal asked.

“See who?”

“Nothing, it must be nothing. I am tired, my dear. However, I’ll let nothing stop our celebrations. I propose a toast to—”

Backstage, Ricardo heard a growing commotion. Mr. Magnusson, pulling Mrs. Sherman after him, came through a stage door.

“No, Jack,” Mrs. Sherman whispered. “You can’t just stop the show. If you were going to come late, you shouldn’t have come at all. You’re drunk, Jack.”

“Ichor,” said Mr. Magnusson, almost spitting. “Ichor! That’s practically blood! It was the first word I heard. I’ll pull down the curtain myself if I have to.”

Morris Fluornoy bumped into Ricardo. He was running from the adults.

“What’s going on?” Ricardo asked.

“We’re in trouble!” Morris said, and blinked in puzzlement. He stooped to look under the visor. “Hey… Ricardo?”

“My cue,” Ricardo said.

He slipped back onto the stage and stood at Neal’s side. His pointed ears and Banquo’s emblems were enough to tell the audience who he was, but now it was time to show Neal alone. He stepped before his former friend and slipped the visor up an inch or so, until Neal could see his grin while the audience saw only the back of his head. Another inch of raised visor exposed the tip of his bloodied nose. Finally Ricardo stared full into Neal’s face. He rolled up his eyes until the whites were showing, and with his hand smeared Vampire Blood all over his face.

Neal turned ghastly green.

“Hello, my friend,” Ricardo whispered.

Cory looked over and yelled, “You!”

The visor dropped. Ricardo turned and ran till he was tangled in the wings. Where was the backstage door? He saw Lady Macbeth scowling after him and Neal still gaping. He ripped off the ears and wiped the red goo on his sleeve.

“Newt?” he whispered. “Trade off.”

“All right,” said a deep voice that echoed through the backstage. Mr. Magnusson came storming around the backdrop, intent on the light cage.

“Jack,” said Mrs. Sherman, just behind him, still trying to whisper. “Jack, they’ll murder you.”

“If not them, their parents,” he said.

Actors rushed from the stage and the next scene began in chaos.

Neal and Cory charged Ricardo.

Mr. Magnusson opened the door to the light cage.

Ricardo turned toward the backstage door but Neal veered to cut him off. The next thing he saw was the ladder.

He was climbing.

Cory cried, “I’ll get him!”

The ladder shuddered as if it were trying to throw him. Looking down past his feet, he saw Lady Macbeth climbing up. Below her, Mr. Magnusson swore at the array of light switches, asked “Which is which?” of the terrified operator, then snarled and stalked out of the cage.

Ricardo reached the top and looked out over the stage. The catwalk was the narrowest of tracks across the deepest of pits. At the bottom, three witches chanted around their cauldron while their red and black queen Hecate—played by Sheri DuBose—rose with her arms outspread to take in all the stage. She met his eyes and screamed.

The band faltered, stopped. Mr. Dean climbed onto the stage and met Mr. Magnusson and Mrs. Sherman at the witches’ cauldron; there they stood looking out at the audience. The proper witches backed away. Sheri still stood looking up at Ricardo. He realized he had better move. A door opened onto the roof at the other side of the catwalk.

Mr. Magnusson began, “We apologize—”

Cory’s feet banged on the ladder. Ricardo scuttled over the abyss. Below, Hecate screamed again, pointing now.

“Don’t do it!” she cried.

Murmurs from the audience, yells from the darkened regions of the stage. The Committee looked up at him.

Halfway out, he heard Cory speak after him:

“Ricardo, don’t be stupid. You can’t get out that way. Come on back and face the music.”

Her voice was soft.

He took a tentative step.

“Please,” she said. The word was like nothing he had ever heard.

He turned to face her, and crouched with both hands holding the plank. She stood at the end of the catwalk, her red robes flowing into space. She was barefoot tonight, raven-haired, seeming much older and crueler than ever, despite her gentle word.

“Don’t come out,” he said.

She took a step.

Glancing down, he saw all of them, Neal and Newt and the faculty, all of them looking up at him with rubies for eyes.

“What is it you want, Ricardo?” she asked. He looked up. “Attention?”

Her face seemed to crack into pieces, everything he recognized in it crumbling away. She was smiling, reaching out to him, yet she was sad. He knew that look: pity. It drove him back.

She took a step. The catwalk shuddered like a diving board.

“Don’t,” he said, and turned to run.

One foot missed the plank.

He fell, bleating.

Cory screamed. Newt was already running through the darkness below, pushing the hell-beast like a cradle to catch him. Ricardo’s clawing hands triggered the net full of foam boulders and he plunged amid a shower of soft Martian rocks.

As he fell, he dreamed with regret of all the scenes that would not be seen tonight because the show was spoiled. There would be no Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, sniffing the ozone left on her fingers by the firing of ray-guns. There would be no attack by Birnham Waste, where soldiers disguised as sand dunes advanced on Macbeth. Macbeth’s disconcerted cry of “Ichor!” would not be heard, for he would never casually thrust a spear-point in that same sand. Ricardo saw all the things that should have been and would have been, if not for his fall.

Falling took longer than it should have.

Above him he saw no catwalk receding, no backdrops rushing past, no dwindling floodlights. There was instead a sky of crimson so dark, so deep that it was almost black; wherein, high up, like the smiling white eyes of a slick red beast, were two tiny horned moons. It was his dream, Mars as he had come to see it, and now it had him.

With much ripping of foam and splintering of wood and creaking of chicken wire, he landed. The belly of the hell-beast split wide, dropping him on the floor. A few boulders tumbled through after him.

A little figure scurried to him, a small boy swathed in red, with wide shiny eyes beneath a strange cowl.

“I’m here,” said Newt. “Ricardo, can you answer?”

The mound of foam on which he lay collapsed, spilling him out from under the hell-beast. Ricardo’s eyes blurred over for a moment, then his vision began to brighten.

“Newt!” he said.

“I’m here.”

“I can see Mars. I really see it. I—I’m going…”

“Wow, Ricardo! Great! How is it?”

“Just like I im—”

He shrieked, his eyes fixed on the Martian firmament that no one else could see. He wailed as the moontips burst the membrane of sky and the red heavens poured down around him. Up he rose through the dark flood, like a bubble in a bottle of burgundy, and it seemed he would never reach the surface, never breathe again. For the air of Mars was thin, thin and cold, cold as death.

* * *

“Mars Will Have Blood” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Scare Care, edited by Graham Masterton.

UNEASY STREET

“Ah, good, here come the cops to arrest some more mutants,” said Raleigh’s boss, Pete. “Can’t have them just lounging around, living off the fat of the land, snacking on the core of our civilization.”

Raleigh finished counting verdigrised pennies into the grimy hand of a man who wore a heavy overcoat and woolen muffler despite the August heat, then he handed over the brown bag full of Copenhagen slicks. His eyes followed the man out into the heat-warped glare of the street. In the flickering intervals between speeding cars, he could see that the tiny park across the street was full of cops.

“Mutants?” Raleigh said, glancing into the fish-eye mirror at the men who browsed between racks of cello-wrapped magazines and sex toys. “You mean, like, genetic drift?”

“I’m talking sci-fi horror movies, kid. I mean bug-eyed monsters with green skin and the faces of dogs. Nothing remotely human.”

Raleigh looked back at the park. “They’re just bums, Pete. Street people.”

“I must disagree,” Pete said, taking a moment to readjust his John Lennon spectacles, which looked as misplaced as a lorgnette on his oft-broken nose. “Neither hapless hustler nor decrepit wino, Raleigh. These are the genuine item. Homo mutatis. I’ve been studying them for years, from this inconspicuous vantage. And what’s more, I’d wager the police will find their ragged pockets stuffed full of Easy.”

“Easy? That new drug, you mean?”

Pete stood up excitedly, peering past Raleigh and wagging his finger in the direction of the cash register. Raleigh turned to face yet another overdressed customer bearing yet another glossy, overpriced skinzine. As he searched for the dollar value among kroner, pounds, and lire, Pete went on about mutant pharmaceuticals.

“It’s everywhere these days, Raleigh. It’s as common as the mutants themselves. Don’t know where they get it, but they’re all pushers, selling it to each other. They call it ‘Easy,’ I gather, because it’s so easy to fix. A snort, a swallow—no needles need apply. And because once you take enough of it, life seems easy. Easy as pie. Maybe it caused the mutants; I don’t know. You can blame them on solar flares, or pesticides, or the national debt. From my experience, poverty can warp the mind; why shouldn’t it have subtler genetic effects?”

“Thank you, sir,” Raleigh told his customer. “You might want to keep on this side of the street for a few blocks.”

“Won’t matter,” Pete proclaimed. “The police have their hands full at the moment. Hey, Raleigh, take a look at this one. I’ll watch the register.”

Raleigh switched places with Pete in the cramped space behind the counter, and by stepping on the hidden cashbox, he managed to get a clear view of the melee.

“All I see is a bunch of cops,” he said.

“Brown coat, brown hair—it looks like a victim of cosmetic malpractice. And it hops like a frog.”

“Jesus, Pete,” he said. “That’s a person, not an ‘it.’”

“And I say you’re wrong, kid. That comes to $9.95.”

“You have no compassion, Pete.”

Raleigh watched the woman stumble against the metal steps of the paddy van. With both hands cuffed behind her back, and the cops pushing her ahead of them, she stumbled forward like a sack of potatoes. A plastic bag full of gray powder fell from the folds of her coat; one cop snatched it up with a shout. Raleigh had a glimpse of her face: wide, loose lips; basset-hound eyes showing more red than white; skin a cigarettish brown-green in color. As the cops shoved her into the van, he realized why the woman had “hopped,” as Pete put it. One leg of her slacks flapped loose.

“My God, that poor lady. She’s an amputee, and the way the cops are shoving her around—”

“Let me see,” Pete said, striving to regain his old place. Raleigh held on long enough to see her remaining leg disappear into the van, then the door slammed shut.

“Well, that’s that,” said Pete. “But they’ll be back tomorrow, and twice as many, too. Confine them in a cell and they multiply even faster.”

“You’re sick,” Raleigh said. His face burned; his throat had closed up and gone dry. “Those are just regular people, like maybe you and I could have been if we’d had a long run of bad luck. It’s living on the street makes them sick like that.”

“The street, eh? You sure it’s not the greenhouse effect?”

Raleigh sputtered and laughed despite himself. Pete slapped him on the shoulder, then leaned in close, whispering, “So what makes them look like this?”

He referred to the next customer, a stunted, pop-eyed-old man with a fringe of gray beard and a toothless mouth. Raleigh gritted his teeth and counted the proffered money, all in tarnished dimes, though he felt as if he were selling Wet Beaver Beach Party to Snuffy Smith.

“Sorry, gramps,” he said a minute later. “There’s not enough here. Why don’t you go get yourself something to eat?”

“You crazy?” the old man rasped. “That shit’s expensive!”

* * *

The next morning, before Pete’s shop opened, Raleigh stood in the park across the street with a lukewarm cup of coffee and a doughnut. Brick high-rises enclosed the little square of balding grass and litter; an alley ran along one edge. Thorny hedges concealed a few long, lumpy shapes like lint-colored turds the size of men; the sound of snoring drifted from them. Otherwise the park was empty.

As he drank his coffee, he saw Pete wandering up the far side of the street, beret pulled down low on his brow. Raleigh drained the Styrofoam cup and tossed it toward the trash can, but a gust of stale wind swept it aside.

The park was full of garbage. One cup more or less made no difference. Yet Raleigh could not avoid the voice of his conscience. Littering was bad, punishable by heavy fines. He wandered over to the hedge and carefully spread a few branches, looking for his cup.

There it lay, swaddled in bloody bandages, steaming.

He staggered back, slashing his wrists on thorns.

“Raleigh! Ho!”

Pete hailed him from the door of the shop. Raleigh hesitated, drawn to take another peek into the bushes despite the sickness caused by his first look. He finally broke and ran across the street ahead of a wave of traffic, the glimpse of dirty, blood-soaked swathes still hanging in his eyes.

“I’m glad you came early today,” Pete said as they went in. The shop was dark, and he kept it that way as he went back into his office for the cashbox. “I wanted a chance to talk to you privately.”

Raleigh was wondering about the heap of bandages. He tried to make himself concentrate on what Pete was saying, but it wasn’t easy. He was accustomed to tuning out most of his boss’s words.

“I’m afraid I have to let you go. Business has been lousy lately, as you may have been aware. I’m going to have to run the place single-handedly for a while if I want to break even.” He shook his head and laughed. “Even then, it’s not likely.”

“Wait a minute,” Raleigh said, following him at last. “Let me go? You mean, just like that—cut me off?”

“Like I said—”

“Come on, you can’t even give me a few hours a week? Pete, this job is my security! I’m counting on it.”

“I told you, I’m deep in the red. I wish I could give you some kind of severance pay, but this isn’t exactly a corporation. Of course, you’ll get the usual discount if you want to buy anything.”

“Yeah, right,” Raleigh said, slapping at a stack of magazines that stood as tall as Pete. They toppled and slithered over the floor of the office.

“There’s no call for that,” Pete said.

“You could’ve at least warned me, man.”

Raleigh raised his hands to go after another stack.

Pete stepped in front of him. “All right, here’s your warning. If you don’t get out of here, I’m calling the cops. I don’t need a vandal in my shop.”

Raleigh spun away from him and pushed out of the tiny office, rushed down the aisles of packaged flesh. Behind him, Pete muttered about Vandals, Goths, barbarians, mutants, the beginning of the end.

It felt good to slam the door and shove past the first trench-coated customer of the day.

An hour later he was still stalking the street, pissed off, in another world, and not a cent richer. In fact, he was already five dollars closer to eviction from his Tenderloin studio.

He curbed his anger and bought a pork bao from a dim sum place; the red meat was rancid, so he hurled it into traffic and went back demanding another. The cook came out from behind the counter with a carving knife, while two screaming Chinese women tried to hold him pinned against the wall—what was known in the area as Hong Kong persuasion. He tore free, but their shouts followed him down the street.

Get yourself together, man, he told himself, examining the holes the claws of the women had left in the shoulders of his T-shirt. Make yourself presentable, because you need a job in a hurry.

He headed toward Market Street along peep-show row, ducking into every adult bookstore that he passed. In most of them the scene was so depressing that he didn’t bother offering his services. Men were browsing but not buying. He knew a few of Pete’s competitors, but all of them told him straight out that business was sick. Flesh was a luxury item these days.

By the time five o’clock rolled around, he was no closer to finding a job, and he was forty dollars short on the rent. He knew that he’d be up all night retracing his steps, looking for night-shift positions, but he had the feeling that things would be just as tight.

Standing at the window of his one-room apartment, he watched the neon come to life below him. Bums moved like pigeons in the street, picking through trash bins. Three generations of a Vietnamese family poked through bushes for aluminum cans, bottle glass, anything they could recycle. The grandmother picked up a wad of soiled rags and dropped it with a start.

What you need (he told himself) is to get out of the slums, move into the suburbs or the financial district. Get yourself a haircut, a change of clothes, a telephone number of your own. Make yourself some money.

“Yeah, right. Just like that.”

He examined himself in the mirror. Uncut hair, three-day beard, gray T-shirt slowly fading to black.

“I need money to make money,” he reminded himself. “And where’s that gonna come from?”

In the mirror he surveyed the inverted room. It looked bigger in there, full of promise. He considered the black guitar case, the ghetto-blaster that needed new batteries, the cheap stereo.

“Time is money, and time’s a-wasting.”

He opened the closet, hauled out an old cardboard suitcase, and started to pack his things.

* * *

“Hey, kid, wanna buy joints? Crack? It’s good stuff, no shit. Acid? I got everything. Hey, you want Easy? Special today—Easy comes cheap, kid. Tell you what, I’ll let you try it free of charge. If you don’t like it, let me know. I got plenty of other stuff, something for everybody.”

Raleigh kept walking, but the man hung close to him, following him up Sixth Street. He must have seen him go into the pawnshop with the grocery cart full of goods; and now his hands were empty.

“I don’t have money to waste on drugs,” he said.

“First time’s free, baby. You look like an Easy kind of guy. And Easy is something I got plenty of.”

“Nothing personal,” Raleigh said, “but fuck off.”

“Yeah, Jack. You know where to find me.”

Raleigh had checked out of his studio that morning and moved his stuff into the Civic Center Hotel. It was half the price of his old place, but crowded, cramped, and noisy—like a prison, a dormitory, or a motel. The window in his coffin-sized room had a view of a littered rooftop, fifty other windows, and a tattered, illegible billboard. He had enough money in his pocket to pay for a month’s rent, if he did all his eating at Jack-in-the-Box. He wouldn’t be buying any new clothes, though.

He cut down an alley. He didn’t know this part of the city all that well; maybe he should look for work around here. Hell, he had skills, didn’t he? He didn’t have to work in the same old skinshops all his life, right? He could stack boxes, do lifting, deliver papers—

He looked up suddenly, confronted by half a dozen silent figures huddled near a chain-link fence. They were as surprised as he was. One of them dropped a gray plastic bag, creating an explosion of dust like mushroom spores. He started to take a wide detour around them, avoiding meeting their eyes, and they moved back to clear the way even further. There was something familiar about the way a few of them moved.

They hopped.

As he stiffened, craning to look back at them, shouts came from the far end of the alley. A cluster of teenagers stood there, yelling at him.

No, they were yelling at the mendicants. Raleigh heard the bums scuffling away behind him, kicking tin cans and broken glass as they fled, maimed and ungainly. The boys came running toward him. He expected them to ignore him as they went after their unhealthy targets, and a detached bit of Darwinian reasoning flashed through his brain like a sound track lifted from a science program: “Stronger and more cohesive social groups now purge the streets of the sick and dying fragments.” You’re slow, you blow.

They started flinging rocks and hunks of masonry; switchblades scratched the air.

My God, he thought. They’re the ones cutting up the street people.

Raleigh ducked and dashed to one side, desperate for cover, but two of them veered in his direction and knocked him down. They bashed him into the wall, kicked him in the ribs. He felt their hands dig into his pockets after the wallet, and when he screamed at them to stop, screamed for the police, he saw a fist come down clenching a slab of brick that looked like a petrified heart. He didn’t feel it hit.

* * *

The pain, when it came, hit him like a strong dose of acid. He didn’t know where he was: he just lay there and let himself ache. It felt like there was grit in his wounds. Maybe a few ribs were broken. He opened his eyes and saw the dark alley, lined with cars now. He thought of the people who had parked next to him, and wondered what they’d thought of him—if they’d noticed him at all. Only another wino sleeping in the gutter. Just another junkie.

He tried to move, but the pain made him moan. He sank back down.

As if invoked by his howl, a shape rose from shadows near the door. It was a man, rising from a heap of black plastic garbage bags. No, the man was clothed in plastic bags, the better to conceal himself in these dark alleys. Raleigh wondered if the trashmen ever tried to collect him.

“You’re hurtin’, kid. Take some of this.”

The man held out a bag. In the light from a distant streetlamp, it looked like it was full of mold.

“No, thanks,” Raleigh said.

“It’s pure,” said the man. “I’ve got a reputation to protect. I wouldn’t mess your head with no inferior item.”

“No, thanks,” Raleigh said again.

“I’m the Man from Glad. I find it fresh! Come on, dude, I know you need it. Just take a little on your palm and lick it up. It’s got no taste. You’ll feel a world better.”

Raleigh tried to move, but his ribs felt like a rack of knives stabbing him all at once. He sank back with tears in his eyes, recognizing that the moans he heard were his own.

“I can’t stand here and do nothing,” said the Man from Glad.

Before Raleigh could protect himself, a handful of dust was shoved under his nose. Some of it went in his mouth; some of it he inhaled; the rest he flung back at the Man from Glad, who laughed and pretended to bathe in it. The dust drifted down like a slow fall of pollen.

“Easy, man, Easy! It’s all so Easy now….”

Raleigh didn’t feel any happier, but he sure didn’t feel so bad. He rose slowly, because he knew that he should be careful; but he was numb, completely numb. Someone else was in control of his body, a pilot he could trust. Maybe this mysterious pilot would guide him to an emergency room, or maybe not. Whatever happened, he was sure it would be all right.

“Better, isn’t it?” asked the Man from Glad.

“Better,” Raleigh agreed through thick lips.

“Now go get yourself cleaned up; look after yourself. I don’t want to see you around here. You’re too young for this kind of shit.”

The Man from Glad appeared to be a shiny, kindly ghost, a crinkling silhouette dancing in the alley. Raleigh smiled and nodded and glided forward. Everything was Easy now, and Easy was everything.

“Where do you get this stuff?” he asked.

“Oh baby!” said the Man from Glad, jigging away from him. “It just falls from Heaven.”

* * *

“It’ll come from somewhere,” he told himself. “Money’s like Easy; yeah, it’ll come from somewhere. From Heaven. Don’t worry, Raleigh. You’ll have a room again real soon. You’ll have some clothes and some things of your own…. But for now, you’ve got to travel light, right?”

As he zipped up his knapsack, he heard muttering outside in the dark. He took a last look out the window of the hotel. Down in the dark corner of the rooftop, there was a huddle of shapes. It was nearly midnight. When had they climbed up there?

A black shadow pulled away from the group and went crawling toward the dim-lit, featureless billboard. He heard wild laughter, then whispers. Someone darted after the fugitive, but they were too slow, too clumsy.

The person in flight made it onto the lower edge of the billboard and hauled himself out onto the narrow catwalk where the sign painters worked. It was his laughter Raleigh heard. He scrabbled along the gray face of the board, a disjointed silhouette. For a moment he passed through the one beam of light that still shone on the blank sign, then he crept beyond.

High on Easy, Raleigh thought.

The others kept to the shadows, giving up pursuit.

At the far edge of the billboard, the man simply disappeared. It was a three-story drop. He couldn’t have gone anywhere else.

Raleigh backed away from the window, watching not the shadows, not the far edge of the catwalk, but that diffuse white region where the single bulb lit the billboard.

There was a broad red streak across it, as if the man had slapped the sign with a fat, wet paintbrush as he struggled past.

“Oh God,” Raleigh said. “I’m out of here.”

* * *

The doctor at St. Anthony’s took his temperature, changed the bandages around his ribs, and gave him the usual packet of aspirin. “Get some rest,” was his only advice.

“Yeah, right,” Raleigh said. “You got a spare bed here?”

“I’m sorry, we’re full,” the doctor said. “We have permanent tenants now. Used to be on a first-come basis, but that’s all changed.”

“How about the soup kitchen?”

The doctor shook his head. “We don’t do that anymore.”

Raleigh rubbed his belly. “Just like that?”

“I’m sorry.”

No wonder the people in the street looked so much sicker this year. If they hadn’t been so thin and weak, their desperation might have made them dangerous. As it was, they stirred few emotions but pity.

He passed the Public Library, once a daytime haven for vagrants. Now you weren’t permitted to browse or read there unless you showed a library card. And to get a library card, you needed an address. Raleigh had never used the library when he had a place to live. Pete’s shop had provided all the reading material he needed.

As he stumbled up Larkin, he became aware of the well-dressed men and women hurrying to and from the Federal Building, City Hall, and the Opera Plaza. They moved to avoid him, kept their eyes fixed on the sky, as if enjoying the thin, angular allotment of blue with all their hearts. What Raleigh saw was a chicken bone with every last bit of gristle gnawed from the knobs; a coffee cup swimming with thin liquid and cigarette butts, too disgusting to consider; a crumpled paper bag that he would have searched for remnants, if he hadn’t seen another bum toss it down ahead of him. The trash bin had been scattered over the sidewalk by lunchtime foragers.

There was no end to hunger. It was his constant companion. He thought back with nostalgic regret to the rancid pork bao he had thrown to the cars. Panhandling, he was lucky to raise fifty cents a day, which was less than half what he would have needed for one of the sticky things. He wasn’t yet sickly or ugly enough to summon instant pity from strangers, despite the bandages that he wore for show, now that his injuries had healed.

He saw a young man coming, mirrored glasses, preppy haircut, sport coat and valise. Pretending not to see him, Raleigh thought. He’s my age.

“Got a quarter, mister?”

The guy did a little sidestep. “I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my ass.”

If only he could have been slightly more pathetic. It would have made life much simpler.

The only simple thing about his existence was Easy.

It was always there if he wanted it, whether he needed it or not. Little gray bags from Heaven.

He was afraid of it, though. He took it sparingly when it was offered, and never asked for a second hit. He was afraid it would make him completely indifferent to the street. You could buy it if you wanted to, if you were, say, a hip young dude from the Sunset looking for kicks; but to someone on the street, it was free. He couldn’t find out where it came from. Heaven seemed like the logical source. It did give some comfort to those without food or shelter. But he wasn’t yet ready to accept a numbness that profound, an obliteration so complete.

“Taking the Easy way out,” was what they called it, when he overheard them talking. Most of the street people avoided him, sensing that he had not accepted them as companions. He wasn’t ready to give up—not yet. He still looked up at the windows in the tall buildings, imagined the warm rooms behind them, and planned ways of returning. He just needed to get back on his feet; and to do that, he needed to get a little stronger; and to do that, God damn it, he needed to eat.

He stood in the park across the street from Pete’s shop, and stared at the window half the day, thinking of ways to get in and escape with the cashbox.

Darkness came down. The crowd in the park ebbed and flowed. Matches flared; cigarettes were shared; gray powder poured and was wasted on the wind.

He listened to their talk, but kept to himself, watching Pete lock up and skulk down the avenue through the cold wind and fog, sunk down in his high collar, beret sliding gutterward.

“Fresh batch of Easy,” someone was saying.

“Yeah, where’d this one come from?”

“Shit, man, a box of the stuff sitting in an alley, same as usual. Plenty for everybody. Man from Glad found it first—he’s got a nose for the stuff. You know what I think? I think there’s some fat dude sitting up in one of those towers, mixing it up with government money—”

“That’s where my VA loan went, man!”

“—and handing it out free to all us sick fucks, so that we’ll be happy to stay where we are, and never climb up so high that we can spoil his day. Some kid, prob’ly. Spoiled brat. The higher he gets, the less he has to look at us.”

Raleigh thought of the guy in the dark glasses, skittering past him.

“Yeah? I’d like to get to that guy’s penthouse.”

“You? They wouldn’t let you in the fucking freight elevator. You better forget it and be grateful he thinks enough of you to give you free Easy.”

“Aw, man, stop talking about it and spoon it out.”

Knives in Raleigh’s gut prodded him to his feet. He grabbed onto a lamppost and wondered how long he would have to wait before things settled down enough to let him take a shot at the window. He could smash that glass door, run back into the office, grab the cashbox, and be out of there in thirty seconds.

But it would be the last thing he ever did of his own free will.

He could see all too clearly how such a move would screw him up completely and forever. The cops would catch him with the hamburger halfway in his mouth, then he could forget about ever getting back on his feet.

Raleigh clenched his stomach and huddled over, gritting his teeth. He could almost feel the rock in his hand, the one he would use to smash the glass. He could more readily imagine the cold manacles the cops would clap on his wrists.

I’ll never do it, he thought. I’ll starve first.

After a while he realized that there was a hand on his shoulder. When he felt it there, and knew it for what it was—the hand of an unknown friend, a sympathetic stranger—he started to sob.

A raspy voice said, “What’s the matter, hon?”

Was that a woman’s voice?

He looked up into a face he had seen once before. A face with wide, loose lips; sagging, black-circled eyes; a face with skin the color of Easy.

“I know what your problem is,” she said. “Come on, can you get up? Why don’t you come with me?”

She took him by the arm and pulled him up. He should have been the one helping her to rise, because she had only one leg.

“You’re a new one,” she said. “But I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?”

He clung to the lamppost.

“You want some Easy?” she asked.

He couldn’t speak; he shook his head.

“You want company?”

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” he shouted. “I’m not like you! Not like any of you, you understand? I’m not gonna get stuck here, numbed out of my skull, helpless and paralyzed….”

“Right on, brother,” someone said. “But how do you plan to get out?”

He realized that many of the faces in the park were staring at him. Conversations had broken off; cigarette tips hung unmoving in the dark.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“On your own?” asked the one-legged woman.

He drew away from her and spat the worst thing he could think of: “Fucking mutants.”

“That ain’t true,” she said, some vague hurt in her eyes. “We’re people. We take care of our own. And we’ll help you—”

“I’m not one of your own,” he said, “and I never will be.”

“That’s fine, hon. But how are you gonna make it through the night?”

He glanced down at her leg and felt the pain of her loss. It was all mixed up with his own regret.

“I’m sorry,” he said, breaking down now. “Christ, I’m sorry. I can’t handle this. I’m the mutant. I’m the one who can’t adjust. Stupid of me….”

He swung around the lamppost, staggering as if he were drunk—although he was merely weak—and strode toward the far, dark side of the park. He crossed the alley and went into the deepest shadows, where he was sure they couldn’t see him. And there he stopped. For all his denial, he was afraid to leave them. He was not one of them, but he was close enough.

He sank down, trying to ignore the burning hollow in his stomach, fending off the sparks that threatened to consume his vision. He felt himself deteriorating, breaking down into more isolated, desperate pieces. He tore at his fingernails. He forgot where he was.

Later—much later, it must have been—the sound of crying woke him. It was darker than before; the corner markets were shut down; the streets were deserted. He listened to the weeping for nearly a minute, then discovered that it came from himself.

Others had heard the sound. Shadows moved around him, blocking out the few streetlights that hadn’t been shattered or burned out. Shapes closed in, moving awkwardly, some of them hopping.

Terror took hold of him. He had called them mutants, insulted them, told them how he despised them. He thought of bloody bandages in the hedge.

My God, he thought. They’re going to show me. They’re going to make me one of them.

He backed up against the wall. One of the shadows put its hand over his mouth before he could scream. Two of them dragged him down the alley, to where it was even darker.

He struggled, but they knew just how to hold him.

Someone lit a match, back in the recess of the alleyway, and what he saw in that instant surpassed his ability to respond. He did not even try to scream. The asphalt was stained with blood; wads of clotted brown cloth were piled in the corners, stuffed down storm gratings; someone was holding a knife under a stream of alcohol. Bands of surgical rubber lay coiled like worms on the stains. The match went out, but they lit another, touched it to the knife. The blade glowed blue as neon, shining in the eyes of those around him.

“We know what you need,” said the rasping voice of the one-legged woman. “We’ve all felt the same thing. We understand.”

“No,” he mumbled, under the fleshy palm. “Please don’t do it.”

“Sometimes to get what you want, you gotta give something up. You make a sacrifice, and in return….”

“Please don’t.”

The blade flickered and went out, but not before someone touched it to a candle. The tiny flame gradually grew, filling the cul-de-sac with a thin radiance. A skinny, aging man sat in the farthest corner, staring up at them. Raleigh had never seen him before. The knife was in his hands.

“Please,” Raleigh pleaded. “Why don’t you let me go? I’ll find the people who crushed you, the people who hooked you on Easy, the fucking overlords. I’ll make it somehow; I won’t forget you, I swear. I just need—I just need—”

“You need us,” said the woman.

The man with the knife said, “Easy.”

Someone took out a crackling gray plastic bag.

“You need strength.”

“Easy!”

Raleigh didn’t try to move. He knew they wouldn’t let him. But he shook his head, and used his most reasonable tone of voice.

“I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

“Don’t worry,” said the woman with the raspy voice. “It isn’t for you.”

The man set the knife in his lap, opened the bag under his nose, and inhaled deeply. He sniffed again and again, then began to lick the insides of the bag until every grain of the stuff had been consumed. He slumped back against the wall, grinning, his eyes rolling up into his head.

Another man dropped down next to him and took the knife. He slit the seam of the ragged trousers and ripped away the cloth.

Raleigh put his hand to his mouth. With a length of surgical tubing, they began to tie off the man’s leg, just above the knee.

He gagged, turned away. They held him more gently now.

“There, there. Do you see? There’s no need to be afraid. Do you want some Easy?’

He gasped for air, shaking his head, but someone shoved a bag against his face, and he couldn’t help breathing it.

“Every now and then, someone comes along, someone young like you, someone with promise,” said the woman. “We don’t mind making the sacrifice. Our strength will become your strength. But everything we give to you, you’ll eventually pay back.”

He felt numbness, acceptance, a sense of purpose. He would never forget these people. He would do everything in his power to help them. Yes, he would make it out of here. He would find the monsters, the mutants, who drove these human beings down into the cracks of the earth, and he would destroy them. The strength to do all this was about to come into him.

“It’s not so bad is it?” said the woman. “The Easy, I mean? We won’t give you much. Wouldn’t want to get you hooked. But believe me, it’ll help you keep down your supper.”

* * *

“Uneasy Street” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1989.

THE DEMONSTRATION

As they approached the site of the company picnic, Dewey and his parents saw a crowd of weird-looking people standing along the roadside waving picket signs. Dewey’s father muttered, “God damn” under his breath.

“Roll up your window, Dewey,” said his mother.

“Who are they?” Dewey asked, putting up the rear window of the station wagon.

“Anarchists,” his father said. “They’d like to see us all turned into animals—and worse.”

Animals? Dewey wondered. He got up on his knees to see them better. By now the car had slowed to a crawl. Dewey’s father sounded the horn. “Get out of the road!” he shouted, though his voice didn’t carry with the windows all rolled up.

“Daddy, why do they want us to be animals?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Mommy said.

But the anarchists looked halfway to animal already, like the creatures of Dr. Moreau. They wore their hair long and ragged; their cheeks were slashed with black-and-white zebra stripes, their eyes wild and beseeching. Some of them looked like living skeletons, zombies in tattered clothes.

“There’s a spy in the company,” Daddy said suddenly.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mommy said.

“How else could they have learned about the picnic? They’re trying to spoil everything—first the Project and now our private lives. God damn them!”

“They have their own beliefs. They’re concerned citizens.”

“They don’t give a damn about civilization.”

The skulls and animals lurched toward the car, spilling onto the road now. Dewey jerked back as a woman with long claws raked the window an inch from his face. She screamed into his eyes: “Make them stop! It’s your generation that loses! Your own father is killing you!”

Dewey felt his insides turn cold. “Mommy…”

“Don’t listen to them, sugar.”

The horn blared, and the station wagon sped up. The woman stumbled away, losing hold of her picket sign. Dewey read it as it fell: BRING BACK THE NUKES!

Just ahead was the private gate, standing tall between high bushes. Guards waited there with hands on their holsters. The crowd stayed back on the main road, still shouting and waving signs. The guards stepped aside and let the car pass through, nodding in recognition to Dewey’s father. The station wagon rushed down a dusty road between summer-browned oaks, dry-baked hills.

“Daddy,” Dewey said, “what’s a nuke?”

“You don’t need to know,” his father said. “They’ll soon be obsolete.”

As they pulled into the small parking lot among fifty other cars, Dewey saw that the barbecue pits were already smoking and a softball game was under way. Plenty of kids were playing around the picnic tables, but he didn’t know any of them. This was the first company picnic since Dewey’s father had come to help supervise the Project. There hadn’t been time to relax until recently. Daddy was always griping about deadlines. But now the Project was finished. The new power station had been in operation for a week, running smoothly in the nearby hills. At last the company had granted its employees an afternoon to picnic with their families.

While his parents unpacked the station wagon, Dewey wandered toward a small group of kids who were kicking a soccer ball between them. He stood at the edge of the game for a few minutes, trying to figure out if there were any rules—until someone kicked the ball too hard, and it flew past Dewey into the heavy underbrush that surrounded the picnic grounds.

Dewey shouted, “I’ll get it!”

He plunged into the tangled brambles, thinking that if he retrieved the ball, he could make some friends. The others shouted encouragement as he stooped ever lower; soon he was almost crawling. Then, just ahead of him, he saw the ball. He ignored the thorns that scratched at his face and arms, and pressed forward.

A black hand darted out of the thicket and grabbed at his wrist.

“Hey!” he shouted, tearing himself away.

Something moved inside the hedge, struggling after him. Whoever or whatever it was grew trapped in thorns; the hand fell out of sight. He stumbled backward, terrified. A black hand! It hadn’t been the chocolate brown of his own skin; no, it had been the black of something badly burned.

A second later Dewey was free of the bushes. The other kids were waiting for him. “Well, where is it?” asked a tall blond boy.

Dewey couldn’t catch his breath. “There’s someone in there,” he gasped.

“Someone stole our ball, you mean?” said a girl.

He looked back at the bushes, but they were silent, unrustling.

“Naw,” said the blond boy, “he’s just chicken.”

“He does look scared,” said another kid.

“You go get it, then!” Dewey said angrily, turning away from them so that his fear would be hidden. He decided that he didn’t want to play with them after all. He walked slowly past the picnic table where his mother was setting out plastic bowls full of salad. His father was standing with a few other men, all of them drinking beer in the shade of an old oak tree. Dewey went up to them and waited for his father to notice him.

“Daddy,” he said, when the men kept on talking. “Daddy, there’s someone in the bushes over there.” He pointed, but now saw that the kids had their ball back and were kicking it across the dry grass.

“What’re you talking about?” his father asked.

Dewey stared at the motionless thicket; there wasn’t even a breeze to stir the branches. Suddenly he remembered the people on the road.

“Those animal people,” he said.

That got his father’s attention. “What do you mean? The anarchists?”

One of the other men laughed. “Those idiots. How did they ever get it into their head that the Project was dangerous?”

“I saw one of them, Daddy. He was—”

“Where?” Dewey’s father whirled around, searching the hills, the hedges, the trees. “You saw them, Dewey?”

“Relax, man,” said one of the others. “They can’t get in here.”

“You don’t know that,” said Dewey’s father. “Those people won’t stop at protest. They don’t respect normal people. I carry a gun now; you’d be crazy not to.”

“Come on, who’s going to resort to violence over a little thing like a power plant? It’s for their own good, even if they don’t understand how it works. They’re ignorant, that’s all. Superstitious. If they really understood tau particles and time/mass transfer, they wouldn’t be afraid anymore.”

“Believe what you want,” said Dewey’s father, still eyeing the landscape with suspicion. “You remember how violent the antinuke protests got; or have you forgotten already?’

“Yeah, but that stuff was dangerous. This is safe.”

“You can believe that if you want, too,” said Dewey’s father.

“I gotta say,” said another man, “they did give me a bit of a scare on the way in. You saw how they were dressed. Kind of reminded me of the nuke protests, the dead-falls. Remember when the protestors used to dress like burned-up corpses and skeletons and fall down dead in the streets?”

“That’s what I saw!” Dewey shouted. “Just like that! Down there in the hedge!” He pointed again.

The men laughed among each other, all except Dewey’s father.

“Kid’s got quite an imagination.”

“Dewey doesn’t imagine things,” his father said.

“I’m telling you, those demonstrators can’t get in here. Don’t let them ruin your day.”

“They already have. Come on, Dewey.”

Daddy started back toward the car. As they passed the picnic table, Dewey’s mother looked up and saw the expression on her husband’s face. “Honey? What is it?”

He didn’t answer, except to glance sideways at Dewey and say, “Get in the car.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Don’t argue, just get in the car.”

Dewey slid into the backseat while his father opened the front door and reached under the seat. He straightened and quickly tucked something into his belt; before the shirt covered it, Dewey saw the handle of a gun.

“Daddy?”

“Keep still. I saw something in those bushes, too. More than one. I think we’re surrounded, Dewey; that’s why I want you to stay in the car. The rest of these fools won’t believe me until it’s too late. Now I’m going to try and get your mother to come sit with you if I can do it without scaring her. Then we’re going to drive out of here the way we came in.”

“But Daddy, the picnic—”

“Keep quiet, I said. The picnic doesn’t matter.”

Dewey’s father slammed the door and went striding toward the picnic table. He took hold of Mommy’s arm and began to whisper urgently in her ear. Dewey saw her look change from concern to fear and then to irritation. She was about to argue, when a scream caused everyone to turn.

One of the girls playing kickball was standing in the middle of the grass, pointing up at the hills. Dewey saw a black figure come stumbling down through the bushes, a weird man dressed in rags. And he wasn’t the only one, either. All of a sudden the hedges and hills were dotted with terrible-looking people; they came staggering toward the picnic tables, pushing through the bushes, howling and scraping at the air. They had left their picket signs behind, demonstrating their protest now with actions instead of words.

The company picnickers moved back toward the car. A woman ran out into the field and grabbed the screaming girl. Panic broke out among the tables. Dewey’s father pushed his mother toward the car, and she came running willingly now, her eyes wide with terror. Daddy drew his gun and aimed it at the nearest target. A small black shape broke free of the hedges where Dewey had sought the soccer ball. It reminded Dewey of a spider, a charred spider with half its legs pulled off. The sound it made was a horrible, senseless wailing. It lunged at Dewey’s father, and he fired without hesitation.

The black thing fell dead on the weeds. The gun sounded again and again. By now the other men were running for the cars, pushing their families inside; a few pulled out shotguns they carried mounted behind the seats. With loud whoops, they rushed out to join Dewey’s father. The protestors kept on coming, and the killing began in earnest. The long grass hid the bodies as they fell.

“Come back here!” Dewey’s mother screamed from the car. “Come back here right now, damn it!”

Dewey’s father hesitated, glanced back at her, then lowered his arm. He ran across the field and jumped into the car. “Out of bullets anyway,” he said as he started the motor. Dewey’s neck snapped as the car leaped backward, screeching out of the parking space. The station wagon lurched forward in a sharp turn, and then they were speeding along the narrow road.

At a blind turn, a car shot out in front of them. Dewey’s mother screamed; the brakes squealed. The cars collided with a soft metallic crunch and the shattering of glass.

After that, Dewey lay dozing in the seat, aware of the stillness of the hills, the soft sound of settling dust, the warmth of the sun. He thought it was the most beautiful moment he had ever known. Then he remembered what had happened, where he was.

He sat up and saw Daddy standing on the road talking to another man, the driver of the other car. Mommy leaned against the hood, holding her forehead. As in a dream, Dewey opened his door and walked toward them. Everything seemed to speed up; it felt as if the world were beginning, ever so slowly, to spin like a carousel. He was dizzy and sick to his stomach.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Dewey’s father asked the man.

“What do you mean? I came for the picnic.”

“The hell you did! You’re on duty this afternoon—you’re supposed to be watching the board.”

“Not me,” said the man angrily. “I swapped with McNally. He’s watching the board. We made a deal.”

“I just left McNally in the picnic grounds. He’s back there taking care of some demonstrators.”

“The ones at the gate?”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that your butt is in the wrong damn place. You’re not supposed to deal with McNally; you deal with me.”

The man shook his head, staring at the broken noses of the cars. “Shit. You mean McNally’s here? Then who’s at the board?”

“That’s what I’m asking you!”

The other man shrugged, avoiding the eyes of Dewey’s father.

Just then Dewey’s nausea surged. He didn’t have time to ask his mother for help. He ran to the side of the road, bent over in the bushes, and began to vomit.

Everything went dark. The carousel was spinning full tilt. Dewey sprawled over in the dirt, crying wordlessly for his parents. Thorns tore at his face; the sun scorched his arms, and his lungs filled with dust that tasted like smoke and ashes. He thought he was going to faint; he saw his father’s hand reaching to pull him to his feet. He grabbed hold of Daddy’s wrist for the merest second, then lost it. The world got even darker.

Dewey’s dream seemed to last an eternity. He saw bits and pieces of his whole life, strewn together and flying about in a feverish whirlwind. For a time he lay comfortably on the backseat of the station wagon, wrapped up in a blanket and listening to his parents talk while streetlights flickered past. Then he was at his grandparents’ house, playing with their old dog, the one with cataracts who peed every time the doorbell rang. He was climbing the tree behind his house, eating fresh corn, smelling the dusty electric smell of rain and thunder that came with a storm.

And then he woke up, still burning with fever. He must have wandered off the road farther than he thought, deeper into the bushes. He could hear voices, someone shouting. He crawled toward the sound, wanting only to be safe with his parents, away from the animal people, the zombies, the gunshots, the bodies, away from the accident and the thorns. He got to his feet in the bushes, and suddenly he was out in the open; he was free.

He tried to suck in a deep breath, but it hurt his lungs. He blinked away harsh tears and sunlight. Then he saw Daddy.

Dewey wailed with relief and started running. “Daddy!” he cried, though his throat was still sore and the words didn’t seem right.

In fact, nothing seemed right. He had come all the way back to the picnic grounds. There were the tables; there were the cars; there was Mommy running away.

And here was Daddy, aiming his gun. Aiming it right at Dewey and squeezing the trigger.

* * *

“The Demonstration” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1989.

LOAVES FROM HELL

It was in a sweltering dusk that Charlie stumbled on a tombstone and lay panting in the grass. He longed to stay where he had fallen, to sleep for days in the peace of the old graveyard, but where the dead were buried, the living must be near. He needed a more secluded bed or else he would surely be discovered.

He had awakened in the early hours of the previous morning, head bloody and ringing, to find himself in a black mist, tangled in the arms of a German corpse, left for dead on the Brooklyn shore. He’d thought he heard the soft lapping of oars slowly fading over the harbor, but he hadn’t dared cry out for fear of alerting the British to his position. In the dark stillness, he had searched for living allies and found none, nor any sign of the Patriot Army’s boats. That was when he’d known for certain he was alone, except for any prisoners of war the British might already have taken—as they would soon take him if he weren’t swift to flee.

By dawn, he was on his way eastward. From Jamaica Pass he looked back and saw the mist clearing as though slain by the enemy’s advance. They moved ominously out of it, the kilted Black Watch as well as the Hessian troops with their tall, glinting brass helmets and brighter bayonets. The Patriots had avoided defeat by surrendering Long Island. Now the enemy was dispersing along the northern shore, spreading out to take possession of the coast and thus securing the interior, entrapping Charlie.

He made his way through dense woods, avoiding roads that might carry British troops. He skirted farms and towns as well, fearing that anyone he approached for help might turn him over to the King’s men. But half the houses he passed proved to be freshly abandoned, as though news of the battle had flown ahead of him. The Long Islanders must be rushing across the Sound to Connecticut, abandoning their property. Seeing this, he grew more convinced that he must hide himself, for only Loyalists would stay behind to welcome the troops.

That night he kept on despite cruel thickets and drenching August rains, though exhaustion and the blows he’d taken on his skull kept dragging him down to sleep. When morning came he was still struggling forward, though at a much slower pace. His toes showed through his shoes; his breeches were little more than rags; he’d long ago lost his coat and hat. Now, half-naked, he took more care than ever to avoid being sighted. He gorged on berries, drank from streams, tried to forget about sleep. But by the time he collapsed in the graveyard, another night approaching, he knew that he could go no farther without rest.

Just a bit more, he told himself. Get to the bottom of this hill, crawl under a holly bush if you have to, and maybe you can sleep an hour or two—but no more.

He had hardly begun the last concerted effort to drag himself forward, when he heard a low chuckle from the trees behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw three men, two in red coats and one in German blue, coming quickly toward him.

“Well, now, who’s this?” said the first, his face as red as his coat.

“Looks like a rebel to me, captain,” said the second Englishmen, shorter and stouter than the first.

“Either that or a gravedigger,” the captain said.

“Why not a rebel gravedigger?”

“Aye. There’s plenty of need for rebel graves, that’s certain.”

The German was tall and bearded, with long blond hair streaming down from his three-cornered hat. He stared at Charlie with none of the false good humor of the others. He carried a carbine rifle in one hand and a pickax in the other; in fact, all three men were armed with picks along with their guns. The captain buried the tip of his pick in the earth and came up to Charlie.

“Get up,” he said.

Wearily, Charlie rose. The captain lifted his musket and laid the end of the barrel against Charlie’s brow.

“Where’d you get that wound?” he asked, nudging an infected gash with the gun barrel. Charlie winced and started to brush the gun away, then realized that the captain must have wanted him to do something of the sort. He let his hands fall.

“Ah, wise lad. You must have learned something in the flatlands, eh? There’s nothing like a good beating to drive a lesson into a boy.”

The German seemed irritated by the proceedings. Hefting his pick over his shoulder, he started past Charlie.

“Where’s he going?” the captain said.

“Wolfgang!” said the other. “Listen to the captain, man.”

“God damn it,” said the captain. “I’ve had enough of this one. I knew there was no good reason for him to have left his troops. He’s probably a deserter.”

“Then why would he join us, sir?” asked the short man. Again he called after the German. “You’ll have to learn to take orders from Englishmen, you know.”

“Here, I’ll give him an order he understands.”

The captain aimed his musket at the German’s legs. As the man’s finger started to squeeze the trigger, something stirred up in Charlie. He let out a cry and his hand shot out to knock the barrel aside. When the gun discharged, it was pointing at the sky. The captain let out a snarl and spun on Charlie, clubbing him with the gunstock. Charlie dropped on the damp, sticky grass, holding his head, blinded. He felt a sharp pricking of his throat and opened his eyes to find the captain standing over him, scowling. His sword was drawn, its point somewhere out of sight below Charlie’s vision. When he swallowed, he felt it piercing deeper into his neck.

“Nein.” said a gruff voice. Charlie looked to one side and saw that the German had his carbine trained on the captain.

All blood drained from the officer’s ruddy face. For a moment, no one moved. Then the German drew back the lock with an audible click. A few seconds later, the captain’s sword wavered and finally swept free of Charlie’s neck.

“Get up,” he said.

Charlie rose, supporting himself on a tombstone.

“You’re a prisoner of war now,” the captain went on without another look at the German, as though nothing had happened. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to lie about in a comfortable cell, eating our bread and wasting our water. We have work for you. You’ve come at a fortunate time.”

He turned around for the pick, uprooted it, and thrust it at Charlie, who caught it in numb fingers. His exhaustion was largely forgotten, unfelt. The captain gestured toward the graveyard, indicating that they should proceed. The German lowered his carbine and strode on. Puffing slightly, the stout little Englishman hurried after him.

“Go on,” said the captain. “Get to work.”

The woods were full of headstones, many of them fallen and thus hidden in the tall grass. Charlie stumbled several times, the pick’s weight unbalancing him; finally he landed heavily on his knees and knelt there with his head bowed, unmoving.

“Up,” the captain said. “Up or I’ll blow your head off.”

Charlie thrust one foot ahead of him, leaning his full weight on the pick handle. He couldn’t rise. A moment later, a strong arm encircled his shoulders and lifted him to his feet. The German had come to his aid.

“Thank you,” Charlie whispered.

“He’s not fit for work, captain,” said the small man.

“He’ll help us build ovens or be baked in them,” the captain said. “And there’s where he’ll start.”

Charlie followed the captain’s finger to a row of grey granite crypts, each of them nearly the height of a man.

“We can’t carry those, captain. We’d best send for a wagon.”

“We’re not going to carry them, Parkes. We’ll build them right where they stand. Easier to transport supplies here than carry a quarry back to camp. We’ll send for the cooks, that’s all. Now get to work.”

“Aye, captain. You heard him, Wolfgang; you too, boy. Get to work. Haul up those stones.”

“But… but those are gravestones,” Charlie said. “You can’t disturb the dead.”

“Rebel dead,” the captain said. “We’ll put those stones to some good use, building ovens to feed the living.”

“Go on, boy,” said Parkes. “It’s your bread we’ll be baking. You look hungry.”

“But they weren’t reb—Patriots,” Charlie argued. “They were here before this trouble, before the taxes or any of it.”

“Patriots, is it?” the captain snarled. “I’ve heard enough out of you to last me a lifetime, boy. How’d you like to lie down here forever with these dear friends of yours?”

Charlie walked to the first of the crypts, where Wolfgang had already begun to dig at the base of one stone. The German’s pick grated against the granite, leaving bright bone-white streaks in the lichen-mottled surface. Charlie circled around to the other side of the tomb, aware of the captain’s gaze. Parkes stood loading a pipe with tobacco, his own pick propped against his leg.

“Should I take a run back to camp, captain?” he asked.

“Fetch the cooks?”

“A run?” the captain said sarcastically. “On your fat stumps? No, I think we’ll wait till we’ve assembled a few ovens— give the cooks something to do when they get here. You could put yourself to better use digging up stones.”

“Right away, sir. Just as soon as I finish this bowl.”

“Bowl be damned, Parkes. Do it now.”

With a sigh, the portly Parkes strolled over to stand behind Charlie, as if he would supervise the progress of the work.

“Hold your pick a moment, boy,” he said. “Let’s have a look at whose sleep we’re disturbing, shall we?”

Charlie stood back and Parkes came up to the stone. He stood on his toes, craned his neck sideways at an awkward angle, and mumbled a few syllables, reading to himself. When he moved back from the stone, his face had gone white.

“Captain,” he muttered, hurrying away.

“What is it, Parkes? Another excuse to keep you from your duties?”

“No, sir. I think it’s a Mason, sir.”

“A Mason? What are you talking about?”

“Come look for yourself, sir. There’s signs and sigils of the sort the colonel warned us away from.”

“Masonic signs?”

“I don’t know, sir, not being a Mason myself. But the colonel was very particular about not disturbing any Masons, as you must surely recall, sir. Those were his direct orders to you, sir.”

“I remember his orders, damn you. Let me see.”

The captain accompanied Parkes back to the stone. The German meanwhile kept digging, his pick striking the granite with a grating sound that turned Charlie’s stomach. While the captain leaned over the crypt, Charlie tried to imagine what might be lying within. He had seen plenty of death in recent weeks, but it was all of the fresh, bloody kind. Whatever those stones contained would be at best shrivelled and dry, if not mere dust. Still, he did not like the thought of disturbing it. He hoped the soul that slumbered here could see and understand his predicament, and that if it were inclined toward any form of ghostly revenge, it would show him mercy.

But he had seen too many of his comrades, alive and shouting one moment, fall down in battle and never rise again, to believe that something so long dead could ever manage to stir against its enemies, no matter how just the cause.

The captain leaned across the stone, tracing the carved figures there with his fingers, then he shook his head. “I don’t know what these are, but they’re not Masonic.”

“Rosicrucian, then?”

“Take my word for it, Parkes, these are nothing to do with the colonel. And he won’t know a thing about it anyway, because when we build the ovens we’ll turn the inscriptions inward. Blank stone, that’s all he’ll see. Now stop putting off your labor.”

“But sir, it’s almost night. We should be getting back to camp.”

“We’ll camp here if we must. Now there’s an idea. Why don’t you go gather some firewood? Be useful for once.”

Seeming mildly offended, Parkes strolled into the trees. The captain followed him a short distance, as if to ensure that he went about his task properly, and Charlie took the opportunity to look at the inscriptions on the surface of the stone. The dusk had deepened to such an extent that very little should have been visible, but the lines and designs must have been incised very deeply. Each one looked like a thin edge of night, infinitely deep instead of mere fractions of an inch. He almost thought he saw stars glimmering down inside them, though that must have been flecks of the silvery mica that always dwells in granite. The letters of the deceased’s name were very queer indeed, written in a script that bore only a superficial resemblance to any Charlie had ever seen. Of course, he couldn’t read. Apart from the letters, the stone was covered with a wealth of intricate symbols, star-shapes and triangles, all growing like leaves from a carved vine that almost completely covered the crypt’s topmost slab.

He had just stepped back to raise his pick when the German let out a warning cry. With a grinding sound, the sides of the tomb began to shift and tilt, caving in on themselves like the walls of the Dagonite temple. The German’s digging had undermined the whole support, though it scarcely seemed possible that four thick walls could be so easily toppled. The heavy slab atop the four drove them sideways to the earth, where they collapsed almost gently, unbroken. The coffin must have been buried beneath the earth, and not imprisoned in the stones as Charlie had feared. There was nothing but hollow space in there.

Parkes and the captain came running from the woods.

“What happened here?” the captain said.

The German stared at him as if he were an idiot.

“Our first oven!” Parkes cried. “I can almost smell that bread. Please, captain, let me run for a cook. We’ll eat fresh loaves tonight.”

“While the rest of the army dines on stale?” said the captain, but something in this must have pleased him, for he nodded, smiling, and told Parkes, “Run back, then. But be discreet. One cook, and bring only enough supplies for our own needs. We’ll give the oven a trial to break it in; let heat scour the grave-grubs from the stone.”

“What about the boy?” Parkes asked. “The prisoner?”

“We can’t send him back just yet or he’ll no doubt tell them what we’re up to. He bears us no love, you can be certain.”

Parkes rubbed his hands together, barely restraining his delight, and hurried away faster than Charlie would have thought was in his power. The dark was oppressive now, no less so the heat, which seemed to have increased with nightfall. Heat lightning flickered far off, followed seconds later by thunder.

“Bloody provincial weather,” the captain griped. “Heat and damp. It’s like living in an armpit.”

Charlie bent over the fallen stones and said softly, “And like a louse, you infest it.”

He heard a soft chuckle. Wolfgang was grinning as he slid his hands under a slab.

“You don’t speak, but you understand, don’t you?” Charlie whispered.

The German nodded. Together, they lifted the carved slab between them. Lightning flashed again, nearer than before, catching in the ornate stonework and filling with woods with light.

Between them, first digging a firepit and then erecting the stones upon it, they finished the oven before Parkes returned. He came leading a horse laden with several sacks, followed by a sullen, silent little man who supervised the firing of the oven and then sat down to mix up and knead several loaves by its fitful light. Rain fell, first lightly and then in torrents; as the oven heated, steam rose from the stones and mixed with the general humidity. Charlie was given the task of stoking the flames. The heat was disagreeable and the rain was too persistent to ever allow the flames to dry him. Finally the cook pushed him aside and shoved half a dozen loaves into the granite maw, and the slab that served as a door was wrestled into place. As soon as the first faint smell of cooking bread pervaded the night, the captain told the cook to return to camp before he was missed. The man stalked angrily away, obviously wishing he’d been invited to join the meal. The horse went with him.

There was no other focus for their evening now but the oven and the loaves within it. The four stood around the radiant crypt, Charlie feeling mildly proud of the accomplishment, thinking it a neat trick that might be repeated for the benefit of the Patriot Army, if he ever happened to rejoin his regiment, and if circumstances were ever dire enough to require it.

“You can stop slavering,” the captain admonished him. “None of those loaves will be wasted on a prisoner of war. We’ve retained some crusts for that purpose.”

Parkes chuckled.

“I wouldn’t want it anyway,” Charlie forced himself to say, although he was sorely disappointed by this inevitable news. “That’s dead man’s bread. It’s probably cursed.”

“Superstitious lout,” the captain said. “Well, suit yourself, as necessity would have it.” He drew a few crusts out of his coat pocket. “Here, these have served me well during the campaign. They were probably baked the day before your cowardly Washington fled across the river.”

At that, Charlie could restrain himself no longer. He had no rationality to hold him in check, and little enough reason to live in any case. He struck the crumbs from the captain’s palm and, in continuance of the same gesture, threw his hands around the officer’s neck. As Charlie throttled him, a feeling of satisfaction filled him. Even as the captain choked and sputtered, Charlie knew that Parkes was creeping up behind him.

He heard the click of a musket lock, but he didn’t care. The barrel poked him in the kidney.

“Release him!” Parkes hissed.

Thunder and lightning crashed and blazed in the same instant. The captain’s eyes looked like wet marble, bulging but not yet sightless; there was still a strong fire of triumph in them.

“Go ahead, Parkes,” Charlie said over his shoulder. “Kill me.”

“Parkes!” the captain croaked.

The hammer hit the pan with a dull sound. Nothing. Rain must have soaked the powder. Charlie laughed miserably and thrust the captain away from him. He was outnumbered by an army.

The captain stood rubbing his throat, glaring at Charlie in the orange glow. His hand trembled on the hilt of his sword. Parkes cursed the useless musket, then threw it aside and strode to the oven.

“Bread must be ready,” he said. “Can’t let it burn, can we?” The captain glared at Charlie a moment longer, then let go of his sword and gestured at the oven. “Get it out then,” he said.

“After we eat, this prisoner goes to the camp. I’ve been treating him too carelessly. He may have military secrets that would be some use to us. I’ll see if we can’t arrange for Indians to draw them out of it.” He smiled at Charlie. “They’re excellent torturers, you know.”

Parkes urged Wolfgang to open the oven. The German wrapped his hands in his thick blue coat, then shoved the heavy door aside. It fell sizzling on the grass. A blaze of heat rushed out at them, seeming to glitter for a moment like the starry flecks that Charlie had seen in the inscriptions. The loaves were golden, perfect. He swallowed his saliva and sank back, turning away from the torment of sight and smell.

“Watch him, Parkes,” the captain said.

“Aye, sir. No foolish moves, boy, or we’ll have an entire army down on you.”

Wolfgang stooped into the oven and batted out one loaf, two, catching them in the folds of his coat. These were delivered to Parkes, who seemed unable to wait for them to cool. The rain had abated, so he swept the top of one of the untouched granite crypts and set the loaves down. Soon the oven was empty. Charlie refused to look at the bread; instead his eyes were drawn to the melting air inside the kiln. The lower slab was the one with inscriptions on it. The heat seemed to gather where the darkness had been before, glowing out of the lines and letters, sketching them on his eyes. Even when he looked away, into the dark woods, he could see them burning there. In fact, they seemed to continue to grow, looping out in bright extensions of the carved vines, threading through the shadowy trees, tangling everything in fire.

Parkes sighed. “The smell is heavenly. I can’t wait any longer, Captain.”

“It’s your own tongue you’ll burn. Go ahead.”

Parkes lifted a loaf to his mouth and tore off a bite that should have suffocated him. He chewed it happily, and when he opened his mouth, steam escaped, even in the warm air.

“Delicious, captain,” he gasped. “I commend it to your appetite.”

“Ah.” The captain took up a second loaf and ripped off a handful, chewed slowly and thoughtfully, glancing sidelong at Charlie. “Like a piece, boy?” he said through his food. “I bet you would. It’s good bread. The best I’ve eaten. A growing boy needs good fare like this. But a rebel like you deserves only to waste away. You might as well watch me eat, boy. It’s the closest you’ll get to a meal tonight.”

“What about you, Wolfgang?” Parkes said. “You worked hard, you must be hungry. Go ahead.”

The German was crouching by the stove. Now he rose and retrieved two loaves.

“Ah,” said Parkes, “I knew you must be ravenous. A big fellow like you.”

But with a swift double-gesture, Wolfgang tossed one loaf to Charlie and raised his carbine with the now-free hand, aiming it at the captain.

“Damn you!” the captain cried, struggling to his feet. “I knew you were trouble from the first. You’re a criminal, aren’t you? Faced with imprisonment or military service, eh? Well, you’ll be rotting in a cell before this war is over—that, or rotting in the earth.”

“If so, I wouldn’t be the first criminal turned soldier… captain.”

These words from the German were utterly shocking to Charlie, who sat with the hot loaf of bread clenched in both hands, not yet daring to eat. Shocking because they were delivered with a clear English accent.

Charlie was not the only one surprised by the German’s speech. The captain sputtered and turned to look one way, then the other. At last he faced Wolfgang again. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that you’re a murderer.”

“If you call killing in battle murder, then I suppose I am.”

Wolfgang smirked. “What would you call killing a defenseless girl? Valor?”

“Who are you?” the captain said.

“I am justice, your nemesis, sealer of your fate. I entered that room after you’d left it. I found my sister dead. No one would have believed me had I accused an officer of such a crime, and you were sailing the next day. I thought that if I followed you, I might someday have a chance to avenge her far from the English courts, which would only protect someone of your class. I sailed as a mate on a ship of the line, and once here it was easy enough to steal a blue coat. Even easier to get you to take me on. You’re so eager for slaves, you’d accept any story.”

“He’s mad, Parkes,” the captain said.

“If so, the rape and murder of my sister drove me mad.”

“That’s right, you’re mad,” Parkes chattered. “You think you have the upper hand, but that gun is useless, as you should know, in all this damp.”

Wolfgang shook his head. “The Indians have a way of keeping the powder dry. I learned it.”

“He’s bluffing,” said the captain.

“You’re welcome to see for yourself.”

No one moved. Wolfgang settled down, carbine fixed on the captain, propped on his knee. He nodded at Charlie.

“Eat,” he said. “I’ll do nothing else until you’ve eaten.”

Charlie looked down at the cooling loaf in his hands. It was flaky, baked hard on the outside, but soft within. He turned it over, and saw something that gave him pause.

On the underside of the loaf, strange designs had been baked into the bread in bas relief. He saw part of a five-pointed star, a few curls of twisting vine, a stylized eye. They’d been imprinted on the bread by the oven floor.

He pushed the loaf away from him. To eat it would have been like supping on the dead.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s wrong.”

Wolfgang’s eyes narrowed. “What is?”

In that instant, the captain threw himself at Wolfgang. The carbine fired. Parkes screamed, leapt up, staggered backward into a tree with his hand clapped over his eye and blood leaking through his fingers; he slumped and made no further sound. The gun fell spent and useless to the ground.

Charlie jumped to his feet and rushed toward the two struggling men. He tried to lift the stone door of the oven, thinking he could crush the man’s skull, but it seared the skin from his fingers, as though only that moment removed from the flames. He whirled to see that the captain, besides his sword, was armed with a dagger. Its tip lay at Wolfgang’s neck, just about to dig in.

“Please!” Charlie screamed. He didn’t know who he was begging.

But a transformation came over the captain, at first indistinguishable from rage. His eyes widened, his mouth gaped, the dagger dropped from his fingers. Releasing Wolfgang, he dropped back into the grass, probing at his flesh with trembling hands.

While Charlie and Wolfgang stared, tiny lines of blackness snaked out of the captain’s mouth, like bloodworms or swift growing vines; they swiftly veiled his face. Deep incisions appeared in his flesh, as though hot, invisible brands were pressing into him. The symbols were all too familiar to Charlie: stars and eyes and triangles, and everywhere those gripping tendrils. They glowed with a fire-flecked blackness. The captain screamed, once with all his voice, then a second time, when his throat was choked. A black growth filled it. He writhed as though caught in a net, but the net was inside him and nowhere else.

He staggered to his feet, turning blindly to run. His fatal plunge carried him straight into the mouth of the oven.

Charlie gasped and moved away from the sudden smell of burning flesh. Wolfgang bent to the granite slab that served as an oven door. Scarcely seeming to feel the heat that had fused Charlie’s fingertips mere seconds before, he forced the door into place, sealing the savories to bake in the oven. Then he too moved away, toward the trees. At the last moment before vanishing into the dark, he turned back toward Charlie.

“I know where to find a boat,” he said. “I’ll bring you along, if you’ll show me how to find General Washington. I wish to join the American army, if they’ll take me.”

“Oh, they’ll take you,” Charlie said. “We need more men like you.”

In the oven, fat sizzled and spat.

* * *

“Loaves from Hell” copyright 2011 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Weird Fiction Review, Vol. 1 (2011), edited by S. T. Joshi (though written many years earlier).

HIS POWDER’D WIG, HIS CROWN OF THORNES

Grant Innes first saw the icon in the Indian ghettos of London but thought nothing of it. There were so many gewgaws of native “art” being thrust in his face by faddishly war-painted Cherokees that this was just another nuisance to avoid, like the huge radios blaring obnoxious “Choctawk” percussions and the high-pitched warbling of Tommy Hawkes and the effeminate Turquoise Boys; like the young Mohawk ruddies practicing skateboard stunts for sluttish cockney girls whose kohled black eyes and slack blue lips betrayed more interest in the dregs of the bottles those boys carried than in the boys themselves. Of course, it was not pleasure or curiosity that brought him into the squalid district, among the baggy green canvas street-teepees and graffitoed storefronts. Business alone could bring him here. He had paid a fair sum for the name and number of a Mr. Cloud, dealer in Navaho jewelry, whose samples had proved of excellent quality and would fetch the highest prices, not only in Europe but in the Colonies as well. Astute dealers knew that the rage for turquoise had nearly run its course, thank God; following the popularity of the lurid blue stone, the simplicity of black-patterned silver would be a welcome relief indeed. Grant had hardly been able to tolerate the sight of so much garish rock as he’d been forced to stock in order to suit his customers; he was looking forward to this next trend. He’d already laid the ground for several showcase presentations in Paris; five major glossies were bidding for rights to photograph his collector’s pieces, antique sand-cast najas and squash-blossom necklaces, for a special fashion portfolio.

Here in the slums, dodging extruded plastic kachina dolls and machine-woven blankets, his fine-tuned eye was offended by virtually everything he saw. It was trash for tourists. Oh, it had its spurts of cheap popularity, like the warbonnets, which all the cyclists had worn last summer, but such moments were fleeting as pop hits, thank God. Only true quality could ever transcend the dizzying gyres of public favor. Fine art, precious stones, pure metal—these were investments that would never lose their value.

So much garbage ultimately had the effect of blinding him to his environment; avoidance became a mental as well as a physical trick. He was dreaming of silver crescents gleaming against ivory skin when he realized that he must have passed the street he sought. He stopped in his tracks, suddenly aware of the hawkers’ cries, the pulse of hide drums and synthesizers. He spun about searching for a number on any of the shops.

“Lost, guv?” said a tall brave with gold teeth, his bare chest ritually scarified. He carried a tall pole strung with a dozen gruesome rubber scalps, along with several barrister’s wigs. They gave the brave the appearance of a costume merchant, except for one morbid detail: Each of the white wigs was spattered with blood… red dye, rather, liberally dripped among the coarse white strands.

“You look lost.”

“Looking for a shop,” Grant muttered, fumbling Mr. Cloud’s card from his pocket.

“No. I mean really lost. Out of balance. Koyaanisqatsi, guv. Like the whole world.”

“I’m looking for a shop,” Grant repeated firmly.

“That all then? A shop? What about the things you really lost? Things we’ve all lost, I’m talking about. Here.”

He patted his bony hip, which was wrapped in a black leather loincloth. Something dangled from his belt, a doll-like object on a string, a charm of some sort. Grant looked over the brave’s head and saw the number he sought, just above a doorway. The damn ruddy was in his way. As he tried to slip past, avoiding contact with the rubbery scalps and bloodied wigs, the brave unclipped the charm from his belt and thrust it into Grant’s face.

Grant recoiled, nearly stumbling backward in the street. It was an awful little mannequin, face pinched and soft, its agonized expression carved from a withered apple.

“Here—here’s where we lost it,” the brave said, thrusting the doll up to Grant’s cheek, as if he would have it kiss or nip him with its rice-grain teeth. Its limbs were made of jerked beef, spread-eagled on wooden crossbars, hands and feet fixed in place with four tiny nails. It was a savage Christ—an obscenity.

“He gave His life for you,” the brave said. “Not just for one people, but for everyone. Eternal freedom, that was His promise.”

“I’m late for my appointment,” Grant said, unable to hide his disgust.

“Late and lost,” the brave said. “But you’ll never catch up—the time slipped past. And you’ll never find your way unless you follow Him.”

“Just get out of my way!”

He shoved the brave aside, knocking the hideous little idol out of the Indian’s grasp. Fearing reprisal, he forced an apologetic expression as he turned back from the hard-won doorway. But the brave wasn’t watching him. He crouched over the filthy street, retrieving his little martyr. Lifting it to his lips, he kissed it gently.

“I’m sorry,” Grant said.

The brave glanced up at Grant and grinned fiercely, baring his gold teeth; then he bit deep into the dried brown torso of the Christ and tore away a ragged strip of jerky.

Nauseated, Grant hammered on the door. It opened abruptly, and he almost fell into the arms of Mr. Cloud.

* * *

He next saw the image the following summer, in the District of Cornwallis. Despite the fact that Grant specialized in provincial art, most of his visits to the Colonies had been for business purposes and had exposed him to no more glorious surroundings than the interiors of banks and mercantile offices, with an occasional jaunt into the Six Nations to meet with the creators of the fine pieces that were his trade. Sales were brisk: his artisans had been convinced to ply their craft with gold as well as silver, supplanting turquoise and onyx with diamonds and other precious stones; the trend toward high-fashion American jewelry had already surpassed his highest expectations. Before the inevitable decline and a panicked search for the next sure thing, he decided to accept the offer of an old colonial acquaintance who had long extended an open invitation to a tour of great American monuments in the capital city.

Arnoldsburg, DC, was sweltering in a humid haze, worsened by exhaust fumes from the taxis that seemed the city’s main occupants. Eyes burning, lungs fighting against collapse, he and his guide crawled from taxi after taxi and plunged into cool marble corridors reeking of urine and crowded with black youths selling or buying opiates.

It was hard not to mock the great figures of American history, thus surrounded by the ironic fruits of their victories. The huge, seated figure of Burgoyne looked mildly bemused by the addicts sleeping between his feet; the bronze brothers Richard and William Howe stood back-to-back, embattled in a waist-high mob, as though taking their last stand against colonial lilliputians.

Grant’s host, David Mickelson, was a transplanted Irishman. He had first visited America as a physician with the Irish Royal Army, and after his term expired had signed on for a stint in the Royal American Army. He had since opened a successful dermatological practice in Arnoldsburg. He was a collector of native American art, which had led him to deal with Grant Innes. Mickelson had excellent taste in metalwork, but Grant had often chided him for his love of “these marble monstrosities.”

“But these are heroes, Grant. Imagine where England would be without these men. An island with few resources and limited room for expansion? How could we have kept up the sort of healthy growth we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution? And without these men to secure this realm for us, how could we have held on to it? America is so vast—really, you have no concept of it. These warriors laid the way for peace and proper management, steering a narrow course between Spain and France. Without such fine ambassadors to put down the early rebellion and ease the co-settling of the Six Nations, America might still be at war. Instead its resources belong to the Crown. This is our treasure house. Grant, and these are the keepers of that treasure.”

“Treasure,” Grant repeated, with an idle nudge at the body of an old squaw who lay unconscious on the steps of the Howe Monument.

“Come with me, then,” Mickelson said. “One more sight, and then we’ll go wherever you like.”

They boarded another taxi, which progressed by stops and starts through the iron river of traffic. A broad, enormous dome appeared above the cars.

“Ah,” said Grant. “I know what that is.”

They disembarked at the edge of a huge circular plaza. The dome that capped the plaza was supported by a hundred white columns. They went into the lidded shadow, into darkness, and for a moment Grant was blinded.

“Watch out, old boy,” Mickelson said. “Here’s the rail. Grab on. Wouldn’t want to stumble in here.”

Grant’s hand closed on polished metal. When he felt steady again, he opened his eyes and found himself staring into a deep pit. The walls of the shaft were perfectly smooth, round as a bullet hole drilled deep into the earth. He felt a cold wind coming out of it, and then the grip of vertigo.

“The depths of valor, the inexhaustible well of the human spirit,” Mickelson was saying. “Mkes you dizzy with pride, doesn’t it?”

“I’m… feeling… sick….” Grant turned and hurried toward daylight.

Out in the sunshine again, his sweat gone cold, he leaned against a marble podium and gradually caught his breath. When his mind had cleared somewhat he looked up and saw that the podium was engraved with the name of the hero whose accomplishments the shaft commemorated. His noble bust surmounted the slab.

BENEDICT ARNOLD

FIRST AMERICAN PRESIDENT-GENERAL.

APPOINTED BY KING GEORGE III

AS REWARD FOR HIS VALIANT ROLE

IN SUPPRESSING THE PROVINCIAL

REVOLT OF 1776-79

David Mickelson caught up with him.

“Feeling all right, Grant?”

“Better. I—I think I’d like to get back to my rooms. It’s this heat.”

“Surely. I’ll hail a cab, you just hold on here for a minute.”

As Grant watched Mickelson hurry away, his eyes strayed over the circular plaza, where the usual hawkers had laid out the usual souvenirs. Habit, more than curiosity, drove him out among the ragged blankets, his eyes swiftly picking through the merchandise and discarding it all as garbage.

Well, most of it. This might turn out to be another fortunate venture after all. His eye had been caught by a display of absolutely brilliant designs done in copper and brass. He had never seen anything quite like them. Serpents, eagles, patterns of stars. The metal was all wrong, but the artist had undoubtedly chosen them by virtue of their cheapness and could easily be convinced to work in gold. He looked up at the proprietor of these wares and saw a young Indian woman, bent on her knees, threading colored beads on a string.

“Who made these?” he said, softening the excitement he felt into a semblance of mild curiosity.

She gazed up at him. “My husband.”

“Really? I like them very much. Does he have a distributor?”

She didn’t seem to know what he meant.

“That is… does anyone else sell these pieces?”

She shook her head. “This is all he makes, right here. When he makes more, I sell those.”

In the distance, he heard Mickelson shouting his name. The dermatologist came running over the marble plaza. “Grant. I’ve got you a cab!”

Grant gestured as if to brush him away. “I’ll meet you later, David, all right? Something’s come up.”

“What have you found?” Mickelson tried to look past him at the blanket, but Grant spun him around in the direction of the taxis—perhaps a bit too roughly. Mickelson stopped for a moment, readjusted his clothes, then stalked away peevishly toward the cars. So be it.

Smiling, Grant turned back to the woman. His words died on his tongue when he saw what she was doing with beads she’d been stringing.

She had formed them into a noose, a bright rainbow noose, and slipped this over the head of a tiny brown doll.

He knew that doll, knew its tough, leathered flesh and pierced limbs, the apple cheeks and teeth of rice.

The cross from which she’d taken it lay discarded on the blanket, next to the jewelry that suddenly seemed of secondary importance.

While he stood there unspeaking, unmoving, she lifted the dangling doll to her lips and daintily, baring crooked teeth, tore off a piece of the leg.

“What… what…”

He found himself unable to ask what he wished to ask. Instead, fixed by her gaze, he stammered, “What do you want for all of these?”

She finished chewing before answering. “All?”

“Yes. I… I’d like to buy all of them. In fact, I’d like to buy more than this. I’d like to commission a piece, if I might.”

The squaw swallowed.

“My husband creates what is within the soul. He makes dreams into metal. He would have to see your dreams.”

“My dreams? Well, yes, I’ll tell him exactly what I want. Could I meet him to discuss this?”

The squaw shrugged. She patiently unlooped the noose from the shriveled image, spread it back onto its cross and pinned the three remaining limbs into place, then tucked it away in a bag at her belt. Finally, rising, she rolled up the blanket with all the bangles and bracelets inside it and tucked the parcel under her arm. “Come with me,” she said.

He followed her without another word, feeling as though he were moving down an incline, losing his balance with every step, barely managing to throw himself in her direction. She was his guide through the steaming city, through the crowds of ragged cloth, skins ruddy and dark. He pulled off his customary jacket, loosened his tie, and struggled after her. She seemed to dwindle in the distance; he was losing her, losing himself, stretching into a thin strand of beads, beads of sweat, sweat that dripped through the gutters of Arnoldsburg and offered only brine to the thirsty….

But when she once looked back and saw him faltering, she put out her hand and he was standing right beside her, near a metal door. She put her hand upon it and opened the way.

It was cool inside and dark except for the tremulous light of candles that lined a descending stairway. He followed, thinking of catacombs, the massed and desiccated ranks of the dead he had seen beneath old missions in Spanish Florida. There was a dusty smell, and far off the sound of hammering. She opened another door and the sound was suddenly close at hand.

They had entered a workshop. A man sat at a metal table cluttered with coils of wire, metal snips, hand torches. The woman stepped out and closed the door on them.

“Good afternoon,” Grant said. “I… I’m a great admirer of your work.”

The man turned slowly, the stool creaking under his weight, though he was not a big man. His skin was very dark, like his close-cropped hair. His face was soft, as though made of chamois pouches: but his eyes were hard. He beckoned.

“Come here,” the man said. “You like my stuff? What is it that you like?”

Grant approached the workbench with a feeling of awe. Samples of the man’s work lay scattered about, but these were not done in copper or brass. They were silver, most of them, and gleamed like moonlight.

“The style,” he said. “The… substance.”

“How about this?” The Indian fingered a large eagle with spreading wings.

“It’s beautiful—almost alive.”

“It’s a sign of freedom.” He laid it down. “What about this one?”

He handed Grant a small rectangular plaque inscribed with an unusual but somehow familiar design. A number of horizontal stripes, with a square inset in the lower right corner, and in that square a wreath of thirteen stars.

“It’s beautiful,” Grant said. “You do superior work.”

“That’s not what I mean. Do you know the symbol?”

“I… I think I’ve seen it somewhere before. An old Indian design, isn’t it?”

The Indian grinned. Gold teeth again, bridging the distance between London and Arnoldsburg, reminding him of the jerked beef martyr, the savage Christ.

“Not an Indian sign,” he said. “A sign for all people.”

“Really? Well, I’d like to bring it to all people. I’m a dealer in fine jewelry. I could get a very large audience for these pieces. I could make you a very rich man.”

“Rich?” The Indian set the plaque aside. “Plenty of Indians are rich. The tribes have all the land and factories they want—as much as you have. But we lack what you also lack: freedom. What is wealth when we have no freedom?”

“Freedom?”

“It’s a dim concept to you, isn’t it? But not to me.” He put his hand over his heart. “I hold it here, safe with the memory of how we lost it. A precious thing, a cup of holy water that must never be spilled until it can be swallowed in a single draft. I carry the cup carefully, but there’s enough for all. If you wish to drink, it can be arranged.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Grant said, recovering some part of himself that had begun to drift off through the mystical fog in which the Indians always veiled themselves. He must do something concrete to counteract so much vagueness.

“What I’m speaking of is a business venture. A partnership.”

“I hear your words. But I see something deeper in you. Something that sleeps in all men. They come here seeking what is lost, looking for freedom and a cause. But all they find are the things that went wrong. Why are you so out of balance, eh? You stumble and crawl, but you always end up here with that same empty look in your eyes. I’ve seen you before. A dozen just like you.”

“I’m an art dealer,” Grant said. “Not a… a pilgrim. If you can show me more work like this, I’d be grateful. Otherwise, I’m sorry for wasting your time and I’ll be on my way.”

Suddenly he was anxious to get away, and this seemed a reasonable excuse. But the jeweler now seemed ready to accommodate him.

“Art, then,” he said. “All right. I will show you the thing that speaks to you, and perhaps then you will understand. Art is also a way to the soul.”

He slipped down from the stool and moved toward the door, obviously intending for Grant to follow.

“I’ll show you more than this,” the Indian said. “I’ll show you inspiration.”

After another dizzying walk, they entered a derelict museum in a district that stank of danger. Grant felt safe only because of his companion; he was obviously a stranger here, in these oppressive alleys. Even inside the place, which seemed less a museum than a warehouse, he sensed that he was being watched. It was crowded by silent mobs, many of them children, almost all of them Negro or Indian. Some sat in circles on the cement floors, talking quietly among themselves, as though taking instruction. Pawnee, Chickasaw, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche… Arnoldsburg was a popular site for tourists, but these didn’t have the look of the ruddy middle-class traveler; these were lower-class ruddies, as tattered as the people in the street. Some had apparently crossed the continent on foot to come here. Grant felt as if he had entered a church.

“Now you shall see,” said the jeweler. “This is the art of the patriots. The forefathers. The hidden ones.”

He stopped near a huge canvas that leaned against a steel beam; the painting was caked with grease, darkened by time, but even through the grime Grant could see that it was the work of genius. An imitation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, but strangely altered…

The guests at Christ’s table wore not biblical attire but that of the eighteenth century. It was no windowed building that sheltered them but a tent whose walls gave the impression of a strong wind beating from without. The thirteen were at supper, men in military outfits, and in their midst a figure of mild yet radiant demeanor, humble in a powdered wig, a mere crust of bread on his plate. Grant did not recognize him, this figure in Christ’s place, but the man in Judas’s place was recognizable enough from the numerous busts and portraits occurring in Arnoldsburg. That was Benedict Arnold.

The Indian pointed at several of the figures, giving them names: “Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, Light-Horse Harry Lee, Lafayette, General Rochambeau…”

“Who painted this?”

“It was the work of Benjamin Franklin,” said his guide. “Painted not long after the betrayal at West Point, but secretly, in sadness, when the full extent of our tragedy became all too apparent. After West Point the patriots continued to fight. But this man, this one man, was the glue that held the soldiers together. After His death, the army had many commanders, but none could win the trust of all men. The revolution collapsed and our chance for freedom slipped away. Franklin died without finishing it, his heart broken.”

“But that man in the middle…?”

The Indian led him to another painting. This was much more recent, judging from the lack of accumulated soot and grease. Several children stood gazing at it, accompanied by a darkie woman who was trying to get them to analyze the meaning of what was essentially a simple image.

“What is this?” she asked.

Several hands went up. “The cherry tree!” chimed a few voices.

“That’s right, the cherry tree. Who can tell us the story of the cherry tree?”

One little girl pushed forward. “He chopped it down, and when He saw what He had done, He said, ‘I cannot let it die.’ So He planted the piece He cut off and it grew into a new tree, and the trunk of the old tree grew, too, because it was magic.”

“Very good. Now, that’s a fable, of course. Do you know what it really means? What the cherry tree represents?”

Grant felt like one of her charges, waiting for some explanation, innocent.

“It’s an English cherry,” the teacher hinted.

Hands went up. “The tree! I know, I know! It’s England.”

“That’s right,” she encouraged. “And the piece he transplanted?”

“America!”

“Very good. And do you remember what happened next? It isn’t shown in this painting, but it was very sad. Tinsha?”

“When His father saw what He had done, he was very scared, he was afraid his son was a devil or something, so he tore up the little tree by the roots. He tore up America.”

“And you know who the father really is, don’t you?”

“The… King?” said Tinsha.

Grant and his guide went on to another painting, this one showing a man in a powdered wig and a ragged uniform walking across a river in midwinter—not stepping on the floes but moving carefully between them, on the breast of the frigid water. With him came a band of barefoot men, lightly touching hands, the first of them resting his fingers on the cape of their leader. The men stared at the water as if they could not believe their eyes, but there was only confidence in the face of their commander—that and a serene humility.

“This is the work of Sully, a great underground artist,” said the jeweler.

“These… these are priceless.”

The Indian shrugged. “If they were lost tomorrow, we would still carry them with us. It is the feelings they draw from our hearts that are truly beyond price. He came for all men, you see. If you accept Him, if you open your heart to Him, then His death will not have been in vain.”

“Washington,” Grant said, the name finally coming to him. An insignificant figure of the American Wars, an arch-traitor whose name was a mere footnote in the histories that Grant had read. Arnold had defeated him, hadn’t he? Was that what had happened at West Point? The memories were vague and unreal, textbook memories.

The jeweler nodded. “Yes, George Washington,” he repeated. “He was leading us to freedom, but He was betrayed and held out as an example. In Philadelphia He was publicly tortured to dispirit the rebels, then hung by His neck after His death, and his corpse toured through the Colonies. And that is our sin, the penance which we must pay until every soul has been brought back into balance.”

“Your sin?”

The Indian nodded, drawing from the pouch at his waist another of the shriveled icons. Christ—no, Washington—on the cross.

“We aided the British in that war. Cherokee and Iroquois, others of the Six Nations. We thought the British would save us from the Colonists; we didn’t know that they had different ways of enslavement. My ancestors were master torturers. When Washington was captured, it fell to them—to us—to do the bloodiest work.”

His hands tightened on the figure of flesh; the splintered wood dug into his palm.

“We nailed Him to the bars of a cross, borrowing an idea that pleased us greatly from your own religion.”

The brown hand shook. The image rose to the golden mouth.

“First, we scalped Him. The powdered hair was slung from a warrior’s belt. His flesh was pierced with thorns and knives. And then we flayed Him alive.”

“Flayed…”

Grant winced as golden teeth nipped a shred of jerky and tore it away.

“Alive…?”

“He died bravely. He was more than a man. He was our deliverer, savior of all men, white, red, and black. And we murdered Him. We pushed the world off balance.”

“What is this place?” Grant asked. “It’s more than a museum, isn’t it? It’s also some kind of school.”

“It is a holy place. His spirit lives here, in the heart of the city named for the man who betrayed Him. He died to the world two hundred years ago, but He still lives in us. He is champion of the downtrodden, liberator of the enslaved.” The jeweler’s voice was cool despite the fervor of his theme. “You see… I have looked beyond the walls of fire that surround this world. I have looked into the world that should have been, that would have been if He had lived. I saw a land of the free, a land of life, liberty, and happiness, where the red men lived in harmony with the white. Our plains bore fruit instead of factories. And the holy cause, that of the republic, spread from the hands of the Great Man. The King was dethroned and England, too, made free. The bell of liberty woke the world; the four winds carried the cause.” The jeweler bowed his head. “That is how it would have been. This I have seen in dreams.”

Grant looked around him at the paintings, covered with grime but carefully attended; the people, also grimy but with an air of reverence. It was a shame to waste them here, on these people. He imagined the paintings hanging in a well-lit gallery, the patina of ages carefully washed away; he saw crowds of people in fine clothes, decked in his gold jewelry, each willing to pay a small fortune for admission. With the proper sponsorship, a world tour could be brought off. He would be a wealthy man, not merely a survivor, at the end of such a tour.

The Indian watched him, nodding. “I know what you’re thinking. You think it would be good to tell the world of these things, to spread the cause. You think you can carry the message to all humanity, instead of letting it die here in the dark. But I tell you… it thrives here. Those who are oppressed, those who are broken and weary of spirit, they alone are the caretakers of liberty.”

Grant smiled inwardly; there was a bitter taste in his mouth.

“I think you underestimate the worth of all this,” he said. “You do it a disservice to hide it from the eyes of the world. I think everyone can gain something from it.”

“Yes?” The Indian looked thoughtful.

He led Grant toward a table where several old books lay open, their pages swollen with humidity, spines cracking, and paper flaking away.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, turning the pages of one book entitled The Undying Patriot, edited by a Parson Weems. “It may be as Doctor Franklin says….”

Grant bent over the page and read:

“Let no man forget His death. Let not the memory of our great Chief and Commander fade from the thoughts of the common people, who stand to gain the most from its faithful preservation. For once these dreams have faded, there is no promise that they may again return. In this age and the next, strive to hold true to the honor’d principals for which He fought, for which he was nail’d to the rude crucifix and his flesh stript away. Forget not His sacrifice. His powder’d wig and crown of thornes. Forget not that a promise broken can never be repair’d.”

“I think you are right,” said the jeweler. “How can we take it upon ourselves to hide this glory away? It belongs to the world, and the world shall have it.”

He turned to Grant and clasped his hands. His eyes were afire with a patriotic light. “He brought you to me, I see that now. This is a great moment. I thank you, brother, for what you will do.”

“It’s only my duty,” Grant said.

Yes. Duty.

* * *

And now he stood in the sweltering shadows outside the warehouse, the secret museum, watching the loading of several large vans. The paintings were wrapped tightly in canvas so that none could see them.

He stifled an urge to rush up to the loading men and tear away the cloth, to look just once more on the noble face. But the police were thick around the entrance.

“Careful, Grant,” said David Mickelson at his elbow.

News of the find had spread throughout the city and a crowd had gathered, in which Grant was just one more curious observer. He supposed that it was best this way, although he would rather have had his own people moving the paintings. The police were being unwontedly rough with the works, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

Things had gotten a little out of hand.

“Hard to believe it’s been sitting under our noses all this time,” said Mickelson. “You say you actually got a good look at it?”

Grant nodded abstractedly. “Fairly good. Of course, it was dark in there.”

“Even so… what a catch, eh? There have been rumors of this stuff for years, and you stumble right into it. Amazing idea you had, though, organizing a tour. As if anyone would pay to see that stuff aside from ruddies and radicals. Even if it weren’t completely restricted.”

“What… what do you think they’ll do with it?” Grant asked.

“Same as they do with other contraband, I’d imagine. Burn it.”

“Burn it,” he repeated numbly.

Grant felt a restriction of the easy flow of traffic; suddenly the crowd, mainly black and Indian, threatened to change into something considerably more passionate than a group of disinterested onlookers. The police loosened their riot gear as the mob began to shout insults.

“Fall back, Grant,” Mickelson said.

Grant started to move away through the crowd, but a familiar face caught his attention. It was the Indian, the jeweler; he stood near a corner of the museum, his pouchy face unreadable. Somehow, through all the confusion, among the hundred or so faces now mounting in number, his eyes locked onto Grant’s.

Grant stiffened. The last of the vans shut its doors and rushed away. The police did not loiter in the area. He had good reason to feel vulnerable.

The jeweler stared at him. Stared without moving. Then he brought up a withered brown object and set it to his lips. Grant could see him bite, tear, and chew.

“What is it, Grant? We should be going now, don’t you think? There’s still time to take in a real museum or perhaps the American Palace.”

Grant didn’t move. Watching the Indian he put his thumb to his mouth and caught a bit of cuticle between his teeth. He felt as if he were dreaming. Slowly, he tore off a thin strip of skin, ripping it back almost down to the knuckle. The pain was excruciating, but it didn’t seem to wake him. He chewed it, swallowed.

“Grant? Is anything wrong?”

He tore off another.

* * *

“His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, September 1989.

THE NINETIES: FIRST-PERSON READER

Looking at the stories I published in the first half of the Nineties, I see an almost smug confidence, a swaggering sense that I knew where I was going with my fiction and was in full control of my career. At times I would like to slap myself. But I know now that nature itself would soon be doing the slapping.

Within a few years, we had a child, and then another. I could no longer think of my stories as my children, having real actual children. Like many others before me, I found it very hard to focus on writing. My greatest ambition was to sleep.

In my search for more options, not to mention pure escape, I took to playing and reviewing videogames. Fascinated by overlooked possibilities for storytelling in games, I found myself (and my family) soon transported bodily into the game industry. Most of my writer friends seemed puzzled by the move. Seeing it from their point of view, it probably didn’t make much sense to give up a quasi-literary career to engage in a form of entertainment as disreputable in the ’90s as comics had been in the ’50s.

But its very luridity made it irresistible. As the child of teachers, who had made his living in such respectable fields as typing and filing, writing and selling books, I had finally found a career of which my parents could disapprove!

WARTORN, LOVELORN

It was summer in the wine country, in the cleft of a hilly vale steeped in green heat. I had a noseful of dust, pollen and sex. Our sticky bodies separated slowly as we sat back in the remains of our picnic, the white cloth dirty and disheveled. Carcasses of roast game hens and rinds of soft cheeses were strewn about. The dry, greedy earth had drunk most of the vintage from a toppled bottle, and what remained we quickly swallowed.

My companion rose, gathered her cast-off skirt and blouse, and went into the trees while running a hand through her blonde locks and smiling back at me. As I twisted the corkscrew into the mouth of the last bottle, I heard a muted whine, a soft explosion, the beginnings of a scream—all in the shady confidence of the forest.

I called to her without remembering her name. She did not answer.

I started to rise, then remembered my own nakedness. My gun lay out in the dust, tangled in my trousers. As I scrambled over the tablecloth, twigs broke and leaf-mould crackled in the woods. I claimed the gun and turned to face the forest. Where were my guardians?

A shadow moved between the trees in hazy webs of light. I saw a glint of red-gold, like the heart of a forest fire. No one had hair like that except my hosts, the royal family.

“Prince?” I called, thinking that somehow he had discovered my indiscretions with his sister last night; and now, in retaliation, had murdered the innocent I’d picked up at the edge of the woods.

The figure with the flaming hair stopped behind the tree where my friend had fallen. I heard a low chuckle, and despite the heat I felt a chill. That was not the Prince’s laughter.

“Don’t move!” I cried, my finger less than steady on the trigger.

Out of the shadows she came, still laughing. The rifle strap cut between her breasts, her weapon holstered so that I knew she did not intend to fire on me. Even so, her eyes were a fury.

“Princess,” I said.

She mocked me with a shake of her head. “Dear Prince, whatever will I do with you? Was it only last night you filled my ears with promises of fidelity? This is a poor start.”

“You’ve gone too far,” I said. “That girl—”

The Princess took a step into the sunlight and her hair turned molten. “Was she important to you?”

“She was innocent,” I said, momentarily blinded by her hair but pretending otherwise, not trusting her for even a moment with the knowledge of my vulnerability.

“Should that have saved her?” she asked, her voice tiptoeing around me through spots of glare. I tried to follow her with my gun; she was toying with me.

“If you’ve a fight to pick with me—”

“Oh, come now. If my father insulted your mother, would she go out of her way to slap him in the face? Don’t be ridiculous. She’d pay her soldiers to fight, and plenty of innocents would die. This little ‘love’ of yours was in my way.”

“I didn’t love her,” I said. “You needn’t have bothered.”

As the glare receded, and her face went into shadow, I saw the Princess stoop to snatch a pear from our picnic and take a bite. I lowered my gun and began to dress, she stared at me with a curious smile while the juice ran down her chin, her throat. She was dressed like a huntress, in soft brown leather and tall boots. As I began lacing up my shirt, she stopped me with a touch. “Don’t,” she said.

“Are you mad?”

Her grip tightened on my wrist. She clenched her teeth behind her smile. “Will you tell on me? Why not carry as before? Only I will ever know that once you broke our promise.”

I tore my arm away from her. “What do you want? We’ve had our pleasure but it can never happen again. What if we had been discovered last night?”

She took a step closer, pressing against me, her smell aphrodisiac. “It would have simplified everything. We would be planning a spectacular wedding now. It’s what our parents want: the children of both countries formally wed.”

I kicked through the remains of the picnic and fled into the woods, knowing that she was on my heels. A few yards into the shadows I came upon the body of the girl whose sweat and musk still flavored my tongue. Fallen leaves clung to the wreck of her face. As I leaned against tree trunk, the Princess caught me from behind, her nails cutting into my ribs. She twisted me toward her, biting at my lips. I stumbled against the tree, fighting her off, but she grabbed my hair and we both went down into the loam. She was naked beneath her brief leather skirt.

“I don’t want this,” I said. My body hinted otherwise.

“We’re two of a kind, Prince, and you know it.”

I made myself relax. She believed my imitation of submission; her eyelids narrowed, pupils drifting to one side. She wasn’t seeing me, though her hands were all over my body. She trembled, already close, so close that I could feel myself being sucked along with her.

Then I looked through the grass and my body went cold. She was looking at the twisted limbs, the torn belly, the sun-browned breasts draped in a bloodied blouse. The tree trunk obscured my view, but I knew the Princess had a clear sight of my dead lover’s gory face.

“My God!” I rolled free of her. She lay panting in the grass, her body wracked by spasms. I tore myself away from the sight and ran toward my car and my guardians, toward the borders of home.

* * *

My private jet left the Princess’s airspace shortly after sunset; it was another hour before we circled and came to earth. That was time enough for her to destroy the old pattern of my life, as I soon discovered.

Instead of the black ultralight carriage that normally awaited my return, an ugly armored vehicle idled on the airstrip. Arqui’s car. In constant fear of assassination, he never traveled in anything less secure than a street tank. Inside, Prime Minister Arquinian sat breaking pencils and cleaning his fingertips.

“You’ve done it now,” he said as I took an uncomfortable seat beside him. “Mind telling us what happened over there?”

By “us” he meant himself and the Queen Mother, who watched from a two-way in the roof.

“How much do you know?” I asked, casually opening the wet bar which the P.M. never left behind.

“How much?” I could see he was in a rage. “They’ve declared war! It’s finished now, all the treaties. Five years of my life, you ruin in a pleasure jaunt that was meant to ease tensions.”

“It was fate,” I said with a shrug.

“Well, what happened?”

“I met the Princess.”

“The Princess,” Mother said, as if she understood perfectly. She had been a princess herself once. “You two had a fight? A lovers’ tiff?”

“Lovers!” Arquinian waxed apoplectic. “My God, and it came to this? The casualties are already past counting. Can’t you talk to the girl, reason with her, if she’s the cause?”

I shook my head, raised my hands. “There’s no reasoning with her, she’s in a passion. I’m all she wants.”

“Well!” said my mother, trying to hide her improper amusement from the P.M.

“Then it’s your fault,” said Arquinian.

“I haven’t killed a soul.”

“You haven’t patched things up, either. This is juvenile behavior.”

He shook a finger at me, as if I were still a child to be reprimanded—but I seized it and bent it backward, out of view of my mother, watching his face whiten while I whispered.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Arq. She’s irrational. How can I reason with such a girl?”

“I’ve reasoned with far worse, young man, and so must you. She must be stopped. This war especially must stop.”

I relinquished his finger, now properly sprained, and he took it away without showing his distress. But the blood had drained from his ultimatum:

“If you don’t do something, Prince, we might turn you over to her.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Arqui,” said my mother. “We’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

I peeked out the window, saw that we’d reached the city. “Look, there’s nothing I can do if her father sends armies on her word. The whole family must be insane. I’m surprised you’d risk me in negotiations. She killed my consort, that’s what started it.”

“You think I don’t know you better than that?” said Arquinian.

“I don’t care what you know.”

With that, I unlatched the door and leapt to the street. The Prime Minister and my mother, for once in accord, screamed after me, but Arqui didn’t dare leave his movable fortress. He ordered the drivers to give pursuit, but a military procession, brass horns blaring, marched in the way and several foot soldiers vanished beneath the tank treads before it could be halted. I ducked into an alley, leaving familial duties behind, and dodged through street after street, thankful to be home again.

All I needed now was a place to stay.

* * *

For three days I hid in a garret, writing sentimental battle odes and drinking cheap wine. I could find none of my old slumming companions to drink with me. For all their brave treasonous talk and rebellious posturing, they had conceded quietly enough to military induction and now were soldiers, mired in mud and gulping gas at the front, too stupid to command planes or even to push buttons in proper sequence from the safety of underground bunkers.

My greatest poetry was penned during the endless hours of midnight airstrikes. I was touched by the Princess’s persistence in striking at the heart of my land. It suited her twisted sense of the romantic. I hated to think she had inspired me, and I fought the idea with increased quantities of wine and pills, but the constant explosions were anodyne to my melancholy, and for the first time in my life I found myself able to harness my passions. However, waking one sunset to reread my morbid ballads, I began to wonder if she might have been correct in drawing parallels between us. My longest poem was a complex conceit in which ballistic equations were subtly derived from, and thinly concealed, the curves of her figure, the clash of phosphor lightning in the highlights of her hair. It ended on a black battlefield, and by the time I laid down my pen, I was shivering in an erotic fever.

Unable to purchase wine or water, and starving for breakfast, I left the confines of that close little room. The smell of bodies and cordite played a part in sending me out into the streets and back to my family, who had by now moved into the Emergency Palace.

The Emergency Palace was a perfect replica of our usual homestead, except that every one of its ornate windows opened onto nothing but dirt, rock and roots. It held the same temperature year-round, wherefore my mother preferred it to the regular Palace. Her shingles rarely bothered her here.

“I’ve come not to surrender,” I told her as she sat in state among her fawning courtiers and slightly more dignified lapdogs, “but to state my case.”

“Really, dear, it’s no concern of mine. Shall I tell Arqui you’re here?”

The Prime Minister had overheard my announcement. He appeared from behind an electric arras, eyes alight at the words with which I greeted him: “Set it up, Arq.”

And so that very night I was flown to the front over what appeared to be a scale model of luminous craters and stalled war machines. Naturally the Princess could not wait for a reasonable hour; but then, I was not interested in waiting. I wanted to see what would come of the affair.

At an underground airfield I was transferred to a war-scarred limousine which was chauffeured up a slight ramp to that perpetual amusement park whose theme is war.

A cease-fire had been called to facilitate negotiations, but plainly the land had been in some upheaval. Fires of hell fried the obsidian sky, leaping above generous mounds of cadavers, the usual battlefield fare. Although it was summer and no rain had fallen for weeks, the earth showed soaked and sprouting a crimson mildew in the headlights. Upturned helmets lay scattered on the road like battered tortoise shells, dippers full of blood. The tangled bodies became less distinct from the muck as we crossed into no-man’s-land.

And there in the worst of it, like a neon saloon in a nightmare, the Princess had parked her bus of state. As we pulled alongside, I commanded my aides to wait calmly no matter what happened. I gave thanks for my tall boots as I waded through the massacre to the bus. A chauffeuse was out polishing the windshield while another took a chamois to the chrome fenders. Mangled hands like squashed starfish reached out from under the tires.

Instead of knocking, I pressed my face to the glass folding door and said, “I hope you appreciate this.”

She opened the door with a shiny lever and gazed down at me from the plush driver’s seat. If I had expected her face to be streaked with tears or otherwise ravaged by my rejection, I would have been disappointed. Her demeanor was military, unperturbed.

As I climbed in, she said, “Before you say a thing, let me assure you that I have considered your desires before my own. I know that you, like myself, might thrive on new pleasures—while retaining certain favorites to which you may return again and again without exhausting their fascination. Therefore, I offer the portable services of my bus. This is only a taste of what awaits you at home.” She pulled aside a curtain that hung across the cabin, unveiling a living gallery of nudes smeared with fluorescent body paints and soaked in ultraviolet light: a lurid spectrum of humanity, displaying a variety of genders, some surgical. I was touched to see she had included a sex-anemone, for my Nanny and first mistress had possessed one such; although while Nanny’s had been a graft, moored in her flesh, this anemone was detached, a lonely polyp growing from a pair of fleshy vegetable thighs, devoid of personality. For the Princess, while she might concede to the pleasure-giving powers of many unexpected elements, would never allow any of them to compete for my intellectual attentions. Her human slaves, to similar effect, had the dull grins and sunken temples of the lobotomized.

“There should be something here to suit you,” she said.

“You overestimate my appetite,” I replied. “How can I consider pleasure in this setting?”

I leaned past her and switched on the headlights. A bright swath of charnel horrors appeared before us. It been there all along.

“What can you offer them?” I asked.

Her body began to shudder, wracked by spasms welling from her womb. Only her eyes remained unmoved, fixed on the scene beyond the windshield. She snagged my wrist in her nails, gasping, “Please, Prince, take me.”

“Say ‘fuck,’ dear. ‘Take’ isn’t your sort of euphemism.”

I considered refusing her, as I had refused the offer of her living cargo. But the blood and the sweating night and now this honest show of desire had worked me up to a fine point. I gave her what she asked for, while she stared out the window at the field of death which was all that would ever issue from her womb. I could not look at it myself. I turned my head to the wind-wing and watched the chamois moving slowly back and forth in the hand of a chauffeuse whose doe-like eyes held mine until that trembling instant when, eyes closing, I jerked and forced the Princess into the horn.

The wailing summoned my guardians from the car. They stood before us, knee-deep in bodies, their guns erect but blinded by the headlights.

“Turn out the light,” she said, hitching herself back into the seat.

I did so.

“Come home with me, Prince.”

“I can’t do that. You’ve been unfortunate enough to meet me at the height of my reckless youth. This is the only time I have to be wild and passionate, to develop the emotional artistry that must serve me in the slow grind of petty politics.” I lifted her hand and kissed it. “Should I apologize for winning your heart? It’s a skill of mine, honed to perfection—too sharp, I think—but I will put it aside when I put on the crown.”

“Why can’t you be like other men?” she said, rising from her ultraviolet pout.

I laughed. “Now I understand the devastation on your other borders. You’re entrenched in the affections of ‘other men.’ Would all those wars end if we married?”

“I will always hate the others, but not as I hate you. You’re the only one who dared run from me.” Uncomfortable with all those nudes watching us, I pulled the curtain closed again. “I was trying to preserve the landscape.”

“Fuck the landscape. You can’t pick a bouquet without gouging the earth.”

“And you’ve picked me a lovely bouquet of bloody flesh.”

“I? Pick flesh for you? I’m not courting you, Prince.”

“What do you call this?”

She sat back and stared haughtily at me. “Negotiation.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

She smiled. “Are you always so moody after sex? I’m sure you’ll feel differently tomorrow. We’ll get an early start, take a slow drive through the wine country….”

“There’s not much left of it, judging from the photographs I’ve seen.”

“You shouldn’t have retaliated. You’ll spoil our honeymoon.”

“I didn’t start this war.”

“Yes, you did. By running. Your country can’t be too pleased with its Prince. Who’ll follow a coward? If you don’t give me what I want, this war will go on forever. I’ll assassinate my brother—I’ve been poisoning him slowly anyway—and the power will stay in my hands. I’ll never marry. I will destroy you. The generation that grows up beneath you will be born to attrition. Society has a long memory for blame, and they’ll lay their lot to your cowardice. It will be your war then.”

“My very own personal war?”

“Which you can’t fight without approval. The people will count the bodies and weigh them against yours. You have only one, and you’ll lose it.”

I sat down on the topmost step and rested my chin in my hands. “I don’t know anymore, Princess. You have my mother’s approval, don’t you?”

Her laughter rang like a cracked bell. “This marriage, my darling, was arranged long ago. I’ve merely tried to reconcile you to it. I think it’s something we could both enjoy. It wasn’t my idea, you know. We’re so alike that you should have guessed I wouldn’t look forward to putting my neck in a yoke, regardless of the partner.”

“Not your idea?”

“Do you think that two children would be allowed to plunge their countries into total war? Our parents have let this war come about, prince, in order to draw us together.”

My hair prickled. “Who told you this?”

“I discovered it clue by clue, over the years. It’s obvious when you comprehend the pattern.”

I rose from the steps. “But how can you go along with it, knowing what you do?”

Her eyebrows arched up. “It suits me. By playing along, I get all I desire. Best of all, I get you.”

“A lousy trade. You’ll sacrifice your freedom and then you won’t want me. Not on our parents’ terms, you won’t.”

I was glad to see her considering this.

“Look,” I said, “what if I said you can have me? You know that in the only way that matters, I am already yours.”

She leaned closer. Her chauffeuse watched us with eyes like moons. “Yes?”

“But I don’t want to live in your land, Princess, and admit it, you have no fondness for mine. If we married, you would have to live in my country.”

“We can break with custom.”

“If you follow it now, even to get what you want, tradition will trap you forever. Listen, my bloody darling. Listen to what I propose.”

Her hand slid into mine.

“Pitch the war with all your will,” I said. “Drive your father until he howls. Be a cancer in his heart. Attack, my love, and never stop. Let there be ever newer weaponry, mountains of bodies. Let our love never stagnate in treaties. If we forsake peace, we can slake our lust forever.”

She looked out over the ragged fields, the sloppy graves. I could see my vision playing in her eyes. How easily it would spread, out of the wine lands and over the hills, blighting crops and felling forests, drenching the world in blood.

“And you’ll be mine?” she asked huskily.

“Yes, yours always. We will meet thus, in the midst of death, pretending to discuss the terms of an impossible peace. For as long as we have each other, peace will never come.”

“You are mine!”

“And you are mine, Princess. And now there is something we share.”

“A war.”

“Our war.”

“Yes.” Tightening her grip, she pulled me in again. “Yes.”

When I finally descended from the bus, my escorts stood stiffly around the limousine, sucking on perfumed cigarettes. They gasped at the sight of blood on my face and hands, the nail marks and bruises. The Princess’s bus roared and lumbered away, grinding through the carnage. I watched it until the taillights vanished, and thought I heard gunfire beginning in the distance. They couldn’t know it yet, but the cease-fire had ended.

“There was trouble?” asked an aide.

I pushed past him to the car, saying brusquely, “There will be no truce, no compromise. Take me home.”

* * *

“Wartorn, Lovelorn” copyright 1991 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in There Won’t Be War, edited by Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister (1991).

GASOLINE LAKE

The dachshund looked like a slab of ancient beef jerky, dabbed with glue and rolled in lint. It teetered on three stumpy little legs that had dried in unnatural positions while the fourth had cracked clean off, leaving a bit of slightly ragged hem, dog fringe. Though there didn’t seem to be much need for a flea collar, one hung around the petrified neck like a reminder of better days for dog and fleas alike. The eyes were dusty raisins. There was no way to examine the mouth without broken jaw bits ending up in either hand, but the muzzle was slightly parted, and the tongue could be seen to have receded all the way back into the dark cavity of the throat like a frightened snail. The dachshund felt warm to the touch, but that was from being left sitting in the sun. If you sniffed your fingers after stroking the hard brown flanks, you could still detect a faint, undeniable odor of dog.

“This is Fritzy,” said the Rehydrator.

Everybody stepped back from the display table at this announcement, as if it were obscene that something so dead should bear a name—and especially a name spoken with such obvious fondness.

The people of Gasoline Lake, Oregon, looked with renewed suspicion at the bulky truck and the man who had driven it into town in the heat of this December afternoon, when ordinary folk were just rising from a daylong sleep in cool bunkers. They had heard of Rehydrators, but never seen one. What he wanted here was anybody’s guess. The tall, gaunt man wore a shiny new Mylar hat out from under which poked wispy strands of thin red hair. His nose was badly burned. He wore a robe of white fabric, blousy enough to hide all the pore-sucking pumps and reprocessing tubes he must be wearing beneath it. Most of the Gas Lake gawkers were hardly so modest, even in late afternoon; they wore their pisspores proudly, in plain sight, and, where not sucked at by the conservation suits, their skin was painted with sunban oils, or artificially blackened by melanin therapy. Facial features showed a mixed crowd of Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Rim. The Rehydrator scanned them as if they were a book he’d heard curious things about and immensely looked forward to reading.

“Fritzy was born in Gasoline Lake,” he said. “If you check his tags, you’ll see they were issued right here about twenty years ago. Expired by now, I guess. I’m just bringing him home, folks. Bringing him home.”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks for it,” said Earl Taws, owner of the Miscellany Market, whose display window was crowded with deflated soccer balls, purses of cracked pink plastic, faded Hello Kitties, unstrung squash rackets, and other dusty, sun-bleached objects. “It’ll go good with my new wooden Indian,” he said, at which there was general laughter.

“That’s a generous offer, sir,” the Rehydrator said, “but I’m afraid this dog is not for sale. It’s a gift. A gift to your town’s benefactor, Galvin Orlick himself.”

“Galvin Orlick?” The name went up from every mouth.

“Fritzy here was Mr. Orlick’s dog. I’m returning him to his rightful owner.”

“Galvin Orlick’s been deader than that dog of his for twenty years, mister.”

“Dead, you say?” the Rehydrator asked, with a broad wink at all of them. “What makes you think that Fritzy’s dead?”

“Well, shit,” said Marlys Runyon, giving the dachshund a sound whack with the back of her hand. “How did I get that idea?”

Everyone laughed, and Marlys squinted at the Rehydrator with an ironic grin, the end of a long string of baccorish clenched in her brown, steadily chewing teeth.

The Rehydrator laughed right along with all the rest. “And Galvin Orlick is dead, you say? Now, how did that happen?”

“Just like his dog here,” Marlys said. “He dried out.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say, and to that, I have this answer: what’s been dehydrated can be rehydrated. I have no doubt that was Mr. Orlick’s original intention—both in his case and in Fritzy’s here.”

“You saying this dog ain’t dead?” said Earl Taws.

“I’m not saying a thing I can’t prove. And a demonstration is worth any amount of talk.”

“Don’t go ruining that dog by getting it all soggy. My offer still stands—fifty dollars for the beast, as is. Can’t promise to take it off your hands if you wreck it up.”

“The dog’s not for you, sir, and I intend him to be in proper shape for presentation to his rightful owner. Now, please, everyone, stand back.”

“You saying you plan to revive old Orlick?” said Marlys, coming closer.

“Please, ma’am, you must stand back.”

The Rehydrator fit a mask of shiny white plastic fiber over his face; his eyes bulged out of clear goggles. He reached under the display table and brought up a black valise and a big plastic tub. When he opened the case, rows of clear vials with black caps clinked inside it.

“Now, I’m going to need some water.”

The crowd took on a menacing demeanor, none meaner than Norris Culp, C.P.A., who took it upon himself to speak for the others. “If this is what you’ve been leading up to, you charlatan, you’ll end up wishing you had that dog for a pillow tonight in the city jail!”

“No need to threaten me, Sheriff, if that’s what you are. Just talking to myself.” As he climbed a short flight of folding steps and pushed through a canvas flap into his truck, several watchers laughed at Norris; one said, “Howdy, Sheriff.”

The Rehydrator reappeared with a plastic jug full of pure blue water, five gallons of it, cradled in his arms. All through the crowd, dry tongues darted like lizards over lips parched and cracked as alkali flats. Eager

fingers snatched at plastic tubes and sucked at the hot, stale, recirculated water till their pisspores were half-empty, but it didn’t satisfy. The water in that jug looked fresh and cool as if it had just been hauled sweating from a deep spring.

“Yuh’re not gonna waste that on a dog, are yuh?”

“No more than necessary, citizen; fear not.”

“You—you better be careful,” said Norris, showing the other face of the law now. “That’s an open invitation to thieves.”

“Thieves, Sheriff? In Gasoline Lake? You all seem law-abiding citizens to me.”

He set Fritzy gently in the plastic tub, then delicately upended the jug and shook it like a vinegar bottle, sprinkling the corpse with what seemed an endless shower of clean water. To the citizens of Gasoline Lake, it looked like enough water to bring back the forests and crops that were only photographic memories to most of them; water enough for bathing and swimming and for sheer luxurious waste—which is what the Rehydrator seemed to be doing. Wasting water on a dead dog!

But when he set the jug down, they saw that he’d used hardly any. Thirst had deluded them yet again.

The dog now sparkled with bright drops of water like so many little lenses stuck in the tufted hair. Not many Gas Lakers would have missed the chance to suck that water from poor old Fritzy’s hide if the Rehydrator had turned his back. But he didn’t give them a chance. Taking two vials from his valise, he emptied them simultaneously into the tub, letting the streams mingle in midfall. White, reeking fumes volcanoed toward the unblinking sun. The Rehydrator pulled on a pair of thick black gloves and bent headlong into the chemical steam, busying himself over Fritzy. When the clouds dissipated, they saw him massaging the beast, working the stinking potion into flesh and fur, palpating the creature’s gummy eyelids, bathing its stump, forcing his fingers down its throat and working elasticity into the suddenly lolling pink tongue. Apart from the mask, he resembled nothing so much as an ordinary man bathing a dog—a felony performed only rarely in the past three decades, and always in great privacy; a once-familiar sight that now held the audience so enrapt that he might have been building ziggurats single-handed or demonstrating practical levitation, like any other fakir.

And strangest of all, Fritzy, like any ordinary dog, was soon shivering and whining at the water’s touch, licking his thin black lips, his shiny brown eyes bulging in a pantomine of terror, as if he were being flayed for the oven rather than simply returning to a semblance of lively, clean-smelling dog—a dog none would mind petting till he’d taken his first good roll in the carcass of a worm-eaten crow.

The crowd broke into gasps of amazement, then into applause. This was too much excitement for Fritzy. He broke from his groomer, jumped out of the tub and straight into the dust of the roadside, where he rubbed his muzzle in the dirt, dog tags jangling, and rolled and wriggled on his back in the road with three legs kicking air and the one stump twitching as if it would have liked to join them. Then he jumped to his feet and shook wildly, spattering the nearest gawkers with mud and grit and some of that stinging spray that had accomplished the act of revivification.

Norris Culp looked into the smoking tub, then quickly poked under the display table to see where the counterfeit wooden dog had gone. The Rehydrator grinned and bowed like a magician. He let Fritzy scamper through the crowd, and finally called him over and fed him a bone-dry biscuit, watching the faces soften toward him as the first few folks came sidling up to ask how it was done. He shook his head—“Trade secret”—and then their hands, politely declining offers of dinner, noting the way they looked at that nearly full bottle of pure blue water. There was a great deal of excitement in the crowd, but it didn’t distract him. He was the only one, in fact, who noticed when Marlys Runyon—whose name he had yet to learn—took off running.

* * *

Corey Orlick, nearly eighteen years old, stood in the spreading shade of a big plastic oak and peed thoughtfully on his Uncle Galvin’s grave. When he was finished, he wiped his eyes, sucked a tear from the back of his hand, and shook out a few more drops, careful to direct them into the spreading golden funnel at the foot of the plot. On the headstone, under the engraved legend HERE NAPS GALVIN OSPREY ORLICK, a digital readout showed the year’s accumulated moisture, plotted against a slowly shifting curve indicating how much precipitation was still needed over a goodly span of years before old Galvin might conceivably consider ending his well-deserved “nap.” In the afternoon glare, Corey could hardly read the figure, but he knew it was still too low to matter. He’d tacked on only a few more cc’s, but his pisspores felt dangerously light and low, rustling against his skin.

His incautious pissing was a futile gesture, a waste of precious reserves, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d been coming out here twice a week for a year now, praying for his uncle’s revival, praying old Galvin might rise up and see the things being done in his name—and with his money. Corey made up for all his wasteful, wishful pissing by digging evaporation pits in his yard and throwing in stray bits of garbage he sneaked from his job at The Succulent Steak; letting the sun suck all moisture from the scraps to condense on the plastic covers, where he lapped it up like rubbishy dew each evening when he rose. But since last week, when Mr. Bell had caught the dish-wiper with her pockets full of cactus peels, Corey had cut back on his thieving, which meant cutting back on his grave-watering as well.

“Oh Uncle,” he moaned. “If only you’d wake up. By the time the rains come, there won’t be a thing of yours left!”

A woodpecker rapped sharply at the trunk above his head, making the whole tree reverberate with a hollow sound. Clouds of dust sifted over him. Nature seemed intent on bringing down the plastic tree, so tall and green and out of place among the sere and barren hills. The oak was artificial, but the cool shade beneath it was real enough. This was the only place in Gas Lake where Corey felt anything like comfortable these days.

At that moment he heard footsteps scuffing past on the road below the hill. Ducking behind the tree, he spied Marlys Runyon running past with a tight, anxious expression, frantically slurping up her tobacco rope as if it were a strand of limp yucca spaghetti. Her look suggested that some plan of hers had gone awry, which made his heart gladden. He watched till she disappeared, then he crept down the far side of the hill and made his way through the stumps and ashes toward town.

* * *

Marlys cursed when she saw the last few inches of baccorish come twisting out of her pocket, crawling steadily toward her mouth. Where would she get the money for another?

She thought of Medford Bannister, and laughed at herself. To think she’d been planning to give her news away!

At the edge of the dunes, she cut left, avoiding on one side the sand that burned her bare feet and, on the other, fields full of fire thistle. Between the two regions was a tough mat of grabgrass, almost cool, the best place to walk. She hurried along till she saw Medford’s gleaming roof, then cut across the dunes as fast as she could.

The house was half-buried after a day of wind; every few hours a powerful blower evacuated clouds of sand. If Medford ever neglected this task, or if the blower broke down, the house would be buried inside a day and might never surface again. Medford could have lived in town, safe behind the grabgrass barriers, but that would have exposed him to busybodies.

Marlys’s feet blistered before she reached the shade of the porch. Medford opened the door the instant she arrived, alerted to her approach by his alarm system. She rushed in and leaped into a chair, raising her feet and screaming, “Ice!” Before she finished the word, Medford was already pressing a huge lump of it against her soles, letting the precious stuff run between her toes and his fingers, dribbling onto the floor.

“You’re so reckless!” she said. So rich, she meant. Her sighs were ecstatic. The lump quickly melted away for no purpose except to numb her; just as it vanished, he stroked the last sliver down her calves, her inner thighs, making her slippery. She twisted, and he stumbled aside, grinning with frustration.

“I didn’t come out here for that,” she said.

“Couldn’t help noticing you’re just about out of rope. Only natural to think—”

“I’d sell myself for a twist of tobacco? You’re slimier than you look, Med.”

He backed away sheepishly, pulling the gold wire bands of his spectacles back over his ears. “Marlys, you know I don’t think of you that way. I can buy all the sex I need, but I love you.”

“Anyway, I have something else to sell.”

He looked suddenly crafty. “How much?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is first?”

“You’re not carrying anything, so it must be information. I know you won’t tell me what you’ve got until I pay. So I ask you again, what’s your price?”

The phone rang. Medford’s grin widened.

“Don’t answer that!”

“Your info just depreciated, that it?”

“If you answer, I won’t tell you a thing.”

“Needn’t worry yourself, hon; you’re overexcited. Of course I won’t answer if you don’t like it. Now… how much?”

She waited till the phone stopped ringing. Satisfied that he’d buy the news from her, she answered, “A coil.”

“That all? Hold on a sec.” He backed into the house, though he usually carried more than enough cash on his person. If he really loved her, he should have given it to her outright as a gift. But she’d made it clear a few times that she didn’t like accepting gifts from him. So she sold him the things he could have for free, and gave for free what others had to pay for. He’d received a whole collection of her dried-out horny toads, gratis.

He walked back in the room a few minutes later, empty-handed, looking smug.

“Well?” she said.

“Just checked my messages. Hear there’s a Rehydrator in town.”

“Shit!” She jumped from the chair, staring toward him. “You cheap—”

He slapped a thick brown coil into the hand that was reaching for his throat. “A deal’s a deal, Marlys. I was saving this last one for you anyway.”

“Why, thank you, Medford. What a gentleman.”

She kissed him, spat out her last inch of rope, nipped the end of the new one between her teeth, and unreeled several feet of it till the thick bulk fit in her pocket. The first chew on a fresh rope was heavenly. She sat down to suck on it while Medford picked up the piece she’d spat, and wiped the spot with his handkerchief before throwing both into the kitchen recycler.

“You still want to hear it?” she said.

“I told you, I got a call. Rehydrator’s come around saying he’s going to rejuvenate Galvin Orlick, and apparently he proved it with a dead dog.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?”

Medford shrugged. “I’ve seen these stunts before.”

“Medford, I was there. The guy’s no faker. That dog was like an old sanded-down floorboard till he doused it. Next thing you know, it was running in circles, pissing on stumps.”

“It’s an old trick, Marlys, no reflection on you for falling for it. They’re confidence men, all these Rehydrators. Just like the Rain Men.”

“But the process works. I’ve done it myself.”

“You’ve dried things out, Marlys, but have you made them live again?”

She shook her head. “Well, no. I never learned that part.”

“Exactly. You nor anyone else. That’s the essence of the scam. Galvin may have believed the lungfish process worked, and the people who fall for rehydrators may believe it, but we know better.”

“You don’t think he knows, do you? It’s a weird coincidence, him coming around right now.”

“No, how could he?”

“Still, we should be careful. I’d like to check him out.”

“Be my guest. But I’m sure this piker will take off as soon as he sees there’re already sharks in our pond.”

“Meaning you and me?”

Medford opened the icebox for another cube and came at her with it melting and pooling in the palm of his outstretched hand. “Honey, at worst it might require a little orchestration. That guy’ll be gone before this cube gets done melting.”

“I’m not letting you waste another one,” Marlys said, and, leaning forward, she took it between her teeth, holding it there until her mouth was full of ice water and the searing pain exquisite.

* * *

In the first slow easing of the day’s heat, as the streets of Gasoline Lake filled with people starting to go about their business in the dusk, the Rehydrator saw three figures coming toward him down the dusty road, looking less impressive than their long eastward shadows. The one he’d called “Sheriff” was among them, though he hadn’t believed for a minute that the man really was any such thing. In fact, the obvious sheriff was first of the three, her polished star glinting orange in the late-evening light.

Fritzy ran out and barked at them as they approached the truck. The Rehydrator sat down on the steps. “Settle down, Fritzy. These look like friends.”

He spoke loudly, hoping this was true.

“You’re the Rehydrator?” the sheriff asked. She was a tall, sunbaked woman with frazzled yellow hair. She wore a light beige blousy uniform over her pisspores, and carried a sleek gun in a breakaway holster. Ammo darts were lined up along her belt.

“That’s right.” He put out his hand. “Hope I’m not breaking any ordinances parking out here. I plan to come into the Town Hall and apply for whatever permits I’ll need just as soon as it’s open.”

“It’s open now,” said Culp, the man who’d accused him of being a charlatan. “There’s a fifty-dollar fine if you don’t—”

“Settle down, Norris; I’ll take care of this,” the sheriff said. “We used to be concerned about open fires around here, but you can see there’s nothing left to burn these days. Just don’t flick matches out at Gasoline Lake. Since you’re not harming anybody, and you seem to have something to offer the town, we’ll just treat you like any other visitor.” She glowered at the clerk. “With courtesy.”

“I am a visitor,” the Rehydrator said.

“I heard you have something a bit more complicated in mind. Something to do with Galvin Orlick.”

“I came to see about reviving him.”

The sheriff didn’t speak for a moment. She seemed to be judging him from what she could see.

“A lot of people think he can’t be revived,” she said at last.

He scooped up Fritzy. “I revived Orlick’s dog.”

“How did you say you got ahold of that pup? Galvin’s buried in a sealed vault. If it was interred with him….”

“I understand his body is checked periodically—that he has custodians.”

“He does,” said Norris Culp indignantly, “and I’m sure they would have noticed if his dog went missing.”

The sheriff nodded. “His tomb—and his estate—are overseen by the Bannister office. Gas Lake’s oldest law firm.”

“A town this size has more than one?”

“That’s a prerequisite, son,” said a short, plump, graying man, stepping forward to shake the Rehydrator’s hand. “In a grievance, one firm can hardly represent both parties. I represent the other. Lawrence Wing, Esq. I hope if you have any trouble with Norris here or the Town Hall folks, you’ll call on me.”

His hand was soft and dry, but in the gloom the Rehydrator couldn’t read his eyes.

“Is it possible the dachshund never was in the tomb with Galvin?” Wing asked.

The Rehydrator shrugged. “Could be.”

“We still have a problem,” the sheriff said. “Galvin Orlick didn’t want to be revived until the drought had ended. We’re thirty hard years into this one, and it could last another seventy, eighty more—might never end, really. From what I’ve heard, Galvin couldn’t stand even ten years—and they were damp by comparison to these last. What makes you think he’d appreciate being revived, even if you could do it?”

“He’s dead,” Culp said flatly. “Not just dried-out—dead.”

“Bullshit,” Wing snapped.

“Only a lawyer like you could twist things around to make it seem otherwise.”

“Only a lawyer like Med Bannister could confuse the issue in the first place!”

“You see the basic problem,” the sheriff said, separating Wing and Culp.

“I apologize,” Wing said to the Rehydrator. “There’s a touchy question of whether, in his present condition, Orlick can be considered alive or not. And if not, there’s the question of what should be done with his estate—liquid and financial.”

“Well, if I were to revive him, he could settle the matter himself, don’t you think?”

“He’s dead!” Culp said. “And only you, Wing, would defend him.”

“Well, I have to admit that’s apparently true,” Wing said to the Rehydrator. “You might say I’ve been defending Galvin in the public interest ever since his existence first came into question. Pro bono, I might add, since I have no access to the Orlick trust—unlike Bannister, who was the first to think up the tricky question.”

“Bannister,” said the Rehydrator, recognizing the name. “Orlick’s custodian?”

“Damn right. Medford Bannister, Jr. He’s been living off the estate for years, sucking it dry, if you ask me, in the process of questioning his benefactor’s existence.”

“You take a one-sided view of these things,” Culp said irritably.

“Perhaps, Norris. But unlike Galvin’s so-called custodian, I stand to profit nothing from my perspective except a small moral victory, perhaps the pleasure of partaking in a precedent. Don’t forget that I knew Galvin.”

“I could solve your problem with a quick procedure,” the Rehydrator said.

“It sure would be a lot faster than working it out in the courts,” said the sheriff, the last bit of sunlight twinkling in her eyes.

“Sheriff!” Culp exclaimed. “You can’t mean you condone this!”

“I’m impartial, Norris. I’m also curious.” She petted Fritzy’s snout, letting the dog lick her fingers. “You say he was dried stiff this afternoon?”

“Everyone who saw it will vouch for me,” said the Rehydrator.

“Not everyone,” Culp said. “I’m convinced it was a sleight of some kind. I’ve seen other magicians who could do as much.”

“Sleight of hand would have failed miserably in Fritzy’s case,” said the Rehydrator. “I can demonstrate my process again with any preserved specimen you care to contribute.”

“No kidding?” said the sheriff. “I’ve got this little dried horny toad. If I brought it around, could you… you know?”

“I’d be delighted to revive it, providing it hasn’t been pickled or stuffed.”

“No, Marlys Runyon gave it to me as a gift when I first came to Gasoline Lake. She did it herself. She runs a small-time trade in them—sort of a front for her other work. Lots of men in town collect her horny toads.”

The Rehydrator made a sweeping bow. “Anytime. Until I get my bearings, I’ll be right here.”

The sheriff beamed at him. “Well, that’s all. Don’t mean to seem suspicious of strangers, but I had a few requests to check you out, and I can’t deny the citizens their peace of mind.”

“I understand. Thanks for the welcome.”

“Good night, now. I’ll be back with my horny toad tomorrow.”

“Good night to you,” said Lawrence Wing, taking the Rehydrator’s hand again.

Norris Culp strode down the road without a word, turning on his heel once to wait till the sheriff followed.

The Rehydrator watched them go, then sat and waited for his next visitor to get up the courage to come forward. He’d seen someone lurking about in the shadows of the burned woods. Finally, as expected, a skinny young man crept forward. The Rehydrator felt a puzzling sympathy for the fellow even before he spoke.

“M-Mister?” the boy said. “I-I missed your show today, but I heard about it later. I heard what you came for, and it worried me. You’re asking for trouble. I thought I better warn you what’s really going on around here.”

“I appreciate that, son. Would you like some water?”

“Yes, sir!”

The Rehydrator reached back inside the truck for a jug and a cup. When he offered the cup, the boy sipped slowly, sighing and smacking his lips after each little sip.

“This is delicious. Thank you, mister.”

“Not at all. Now, why don’t you have a seat and tell me your name.”

“I’m Corey. Corey Orlick. Calvin was my uncle—my father’s brother. My dad died last year. Now I’m the last living Orlick in Gas Lake.”

The Rehydrator sighed and sank down beside the boy, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Is that right? Exactly what kind of trouble am I asking for?”

* * *

Corey worked all night at The Succulent Steak, trimming needles off the big green arms, slicing them into inch-thick slabs, juicing aloes. Tonight he could hardly concentrate on his work. By the time his shift ended, it was nearly light. He took off along the road out of town and found the Rehydrator’s truck parked where he’d left it. Fritzy yapped softly as he rapped on the side. A moment later the Rehydrator poked his head out through the canvas flap, blinking sleep from his eyes.

“Ready?” Corey asked.

“I’m not on your schedule,” he said, stumbling out to sit on the steps and pull on his sandals. He strolled yawning to the edge of the campsite, facing away from Corey, taking a somehow formal stance toward the rising sun. At first Corey thought it was some religious thing, but then he heard a drizzling sound and realized that the Rehydrator was pissing.

“What’re you doing?” he cried, grabbing the cup he’d drunk from the previous night, nearly knocking over the Rehydrator in his haste to catch the stream. The man jumped back, as surprised as Corey, pulling his thin robe shut. Corey saw in that instant that the Rehydrator wasn’t wearing pisspores at all under the robe; his sweat was free to evaporate into thin air without recapture, wasted in the same way as his urine.

They stared at each other in embarrassed confusion for a minute, Corey holding the empty cup, until the Rehydrator grinned and took it from him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess that is wasteful.”

“Hell, you were going right in the dust, mister. Nothing can grow there. I mean, if you have to waste it, wait’ll we get to Uncle Orlick’s grave. I sometimes do it there.”

He didn’t think it would be polite to say anything about the man’s missing pisspores. Such open wastefulness was bad enough.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” the Rehydrator said. “I’m a bit profligate with the water, I guess. It’s just that my truck’s full of it.”

“Full?” Corey looked at the vehicle, never having guessed that so much could be kept in one place. He hadn’t looked inside. “But—but you must be rich. What’re you doing traveling around like a….”

“Like a bum, rich enough to waste water? You’re making me feel immoral, Corey. I’ll have to mend my ways, with your help. First, though, let’s see your uncle’s grave.”

They put Fritzy in the truck and set off walking through the sere, stump-ridden hills. The land around the town was mainly free of sand, thanks to the driftwalls and acres of matted grabgrass that surrounded it. Corey took a shortcut through a cactus orchard, keeping well away from the poisonous black spines that bounced around them as the heavy green arms bobbed in a hot, sterile wind. The moment the sun broke free of the horizon, the wind filled with sand, dust, and thistles. They bent forward into it, Corey covering his face with the dust veil clipped to his collar, the Rehydrator pulling on his white mask of plastic mesh. The sky was orange as a needle held in a flame, and growing whiter every minute. The Rehydrator lagged behind, stumbling and coughing even though the wind died down slightly. Finally he came to a complete stop, crouching with his head between his knees.

“You bring any water?” Corey asked.

The man shook his head.

“That’s stu—not too smart. You better have some of mine.” He unclipped the tube from his pisspores, happy to see that the suit had inflated after last night’s deep drink. The Rehydrator took the tube between his lips, sipped, and pushed it away with a gagging sound. “What—what’s wrong with it?” he choked.

Corey sipped experimentally. “Tastes fine to me. You be all right?”

“How much farther?”

“About a half mile, I guess.”

The Rehydrator got to his feet, readjusted his Mylar cap, and peered down the trail—such as it was. “Is that water up ahead?”

Corey laughed. “That’s the lake.”

“It is! It’s a lake!”

The Rehydrator’s enthusiasm boosted him forward. The lake was clear near its edges, almost the same shade of white as the sky, but it darkened toward the depths, and in the center was a deep orange color, like liquid rust. It seemed to waver vaporously in the heat, causing the dunes on the far shore to ripple and shimmer. Corey stopped on the beach, well back from the little dust-speckled mercury wavelets the wind stirred up, but the Rehydrator rushed ahead, taking long strides.

Corey screamed at him. He was going in!

He caught the man from behind and hauled him back, upsetting both of them so they landed in a tumble on the cracked banks.

“What’s wrong?” the Rehydrator asked. “I was just going to cool my feet.”

“There’s a good reason they call it Gas Lake, mister—though it’s not gasoline exactly. Used to be a factory over the hill—same old plant that made the Orlick fortune. They dumped stuff here, some kind of toxic liquid. If it were water, it would’ve evaporated years ago, but it doesn’t. It just sits there shimmering. My dad told me it’s a vapor with high surface tension—not even the wind can disperse it. You can’t smell fumes unless you’re right on the surface—which is good, because it’s supposed to be pretty flammable.”

“My God,” the Rehydrator said, shaking his head in confusion. “I almost walked into it. I’m going to listen to you more carefully from now on, Corey.”

“I’m surprised you’ve gotten along without me this long, mister. No pisspores, wasting your pee. Living with all that water has made you careless.”

The Rehydrator didn’t seem to hear him. His tongue looked white and swollen, his eyes glazed over.

“Oh no,” Corey said. “Get up, can you? Come on, lean on me. It’s not far.”

They stumbled along the edge of the lake, then cut back into the hills. Ahead Corey saw the reassuring branches of the big plastic oak, offering little at this hour but the promise of shade to come. He practically had to drag the Rehydrator up the hill and sit him on the western side of the trunk, the coolest spot. He shoved his tube back in the man’s mouth, this time to no complaint. He felt his pisspores deflating as the Rehydrator sucked and sucked.

“O.K., that’s enough.” Corey pushed him away. “You’re gonna owe me a refill when we get back to your truck.”

The Rehydrator mumbled his assent. Corey crouched and watched him, wondering at the tenderness of his pale skin, as if he had spent more time than was natural inside that truck of his and never built up a tan. Even living mainly at night, it was impossible for most people to avoid getting baked and burned by the sun. Water must have allowed this man some incredible luxuries.

Suddenly Corey heard voices and footsteps coming up the road past the hill. He crouched down behind his uncle’s gravestone as Marlys Runyon and Medford Bannister came into sight.

“Where’d they go?” Medford said.

“Keep your voice down,” Marlys scolded. “They’re probably at the gate.”

Corey tapped the Rehydrator till his blurry eyes opened, and put a finger to his lips for silence. “Can you move yet?”

“I’ll try,” the man whispered.

Corey led him over the crown of the hill, through thickets of sage and artemisia, between waving stalks of parched mullein, avoiding a cactus patch whose location he’d learned from painful experience. They finally came out at a point where the trail ended at a shorn-off side of the hill. Marlys and Medford had just reached an equivalent point on the road below.

“See?” Medford said. “No sign of them.”

At that moment the Rehydrator stumbled on the crumbly earth, falling into drought scrub that crackled like applause. Corey swore and forced himself to stand up.

“What’re you doing here?” he demanded, trying to take the offensive.

“I should ask you the same thing,” Bannister said.

“He’s trying to break into the tomb,” Marlys said. “It’s obvious.”

“I have every right to be here,” Corey said.

“And I as well,” said Bannister. “In fact, I was just coming out to perform my custodial service.”

“What a coincidence,” said Corey. “Then we can all check together to make sure that Uncle Galvin’s O.K.”

“Lucky timing,” said the Rehydrator, finally getting to his feet.

“What’s he doing here?” Marlys said.

“I asked him along,” Corey said. “He’s gonna prove my uncle’s alive—prove it once and for all.”

Medford scowled. “I’m not empowered to allow strangers in the vault.”

“You were bringing in Marlys,” Corey said. “I can bring my friend in if I want.” He grabbed the Rehydrator’s elbow. “Come on; it’s tricky footing.”

They made their way down carefully to level ground.

“Don’t be stupid, Corey,” Marlys said when he was near her. “That guy’s a stage magician—he’s using you.”

“You know all about using people, don’t you?” Corey said.

“Why, you little—”

Medford took hold of her arm, twisting it slightly. “Now, now.”

She wrenched herself away from him, furious.

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Medford said. “I’m—”

“That’s Medford Bannister, the one I told you about,” Corey said. “He’s a snake, and Marlys Runyon—she’s something worse.”

“I know you have a poor opinion of me, Corey,” the lawyer said. “But you’re going to have to grow up and see how the world works. You can’t blame me for your uncle’s oversight in not providing for you. I know you feel slighted, but—”

“Who cares what he thinks?” Marlys said. She walked up to the side of the hill and gave it a hard kick. The metal door made a booming sound.

“That’s right,” Corey said. “It doesn’t matter. But you’d better open that door and show me my uncle.”

Medford smiled and took a magnetic key from his robes. He pressed it against the lock panel, twisted, and, with a whirring sound, the gate swung inward. A breath of air cool as midnight wafted out of a corridor big enough for all of them to walk abreast. Sunken lights switched on as they entered, and a soft pinging sound followed them down a ramp, like an alarm signaling their presence to the sleeper within.

The casket sat in the center of a round, domed chamber. Corey hadn’t been here since he was a boy, but there wasn’t much to forget. Four square pillars stood at the points of the compass around the casket, each bearing various indicators and controls. The container itself was tear-shaped, with a curved, mirror-silver lid that warped their reflections as they passed between the columns. As Corey reached out to touch the surface, he saw greasy streaks disturbing the pristine silver, the stains of hands, and something in his heart clenched up.

“Open it,” he said.

“There’s no call for that,” Bannister said.

“Open it, I said! Someone’s been here!”

Bannister pursed his lips, adjusted his spectacles, then bowed slightly in acquiescence. He worked some combination of controls on each of the pillars, and a hissing sound emanated from the casket. Slowly, the lid lifted. Corey stared into the receptacle in disbelief, although his suspicions had been confirmed.

“He’s gone,” he whispered, an unnecessary but irresistible (and accurate) description of what everyone could plainly see.

“My God,” said Medford Bannister.

“How about that,” offered Marlys Runyon.

“That’s what woke me,” the Rehydrator mumbled, but Corey hardly heard him.

“What did you do with my uncle?” he screamed.

“Not a damn thing,” Bannister said, his composure slipping, his forehead beaded with sweat. “I—I don’t know how this could have happened. No one else has a key.”

“Someone could have made one—if you didn’t do it.”

“Calm down, Corey,” the Rehydrator said. “Maybe he’s around here someplace.”

“If he’s anywhere, he’s in Bannister’s safe.”

“My God, what would I stand to profit from absconding with my own client? This only complicates things.”

“Oh yeah? As much as if you’d left him here for the Rehydrator to revive? You’d do anything to avoid that. And now you have.”

Corey spun away from them, plunging toward the disk of daylight at the end of the tunnel. The Rehydrator called his name, but Corey kept going. He had to find his uncle’s body, even if it was an impossible task; he couldn’t rest until he’d convinced himself it was impossible. Galvin might be anywhere—in someone’s cellar, buried in the dunes, tossed in the ocean or the lake… anywhere!

He knew he wasn’t being rational, heading off on a search by himself, but he couldn’t stop now. He had to do something.

Outside, blinded, he nearly plowed into a saguaro cactus. He would call Larry Wing, his dad’s old friend. Larry was always offering his help.

As he remembered the Rehydrator, he felt bad for a moment. How could he leave someone so vulnerable at the mercy of Medford Bannister and Marlys Runyon?

Well, it was a tough place, Gas Lake. The guy would just have to fend for himself.

“That’s what woke me….” Now, what the hell did that mean?

* * *

Marlys turned away from the tunnel where Corey had vanished, and glared at the Rehydrator. “Look at you standing there, watching everything. You’re the cause of all this, I hope you know.”

“Now, Marlys, calm down,” Bannister counseled.

“What’s he doing here anyway?”

“I don’t believe I have anything to contribute at the moment,” the Rehydrator said. “Not with the body gone. I suppose you should tell the sheriff.”

“Lorna?” she laughed. “She couldn’t find dust on Earl Taws’s shelves.”

“He’s right, though,” Medford said. We have to report this.”

“Maybe if I had a description, I could help look for him,” the Rehydrator said.

Marlys’s laughter echoed in the close chamber. “He looked like that old dog of yours before you soaked it. But with one less leg.”

“Come on,” Bannister said. Well leave everything as it is.”

They filed out of the chamber. The Rehydrator lingered at the threshold, reluctant to reenter the blazing world that looked even hotter now than it had when they went underground. But he trudged along behind them toward town, letting them pull ahead, too hot to keep pace. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, his nose began to run. When he wiped it, a streak of blood gleamed on the back of his hand.

Dizzy. The other two looked far away. He called out weakly, his nose now so full of blood that he felt he was drowning in it. Marlys glanced back briefly, and must have seen him with blood running down his face, but she only smiled and slipped her arm through Bannister’s, and moved off even faster.

Help, he whispered.

Then the sun hit him like a hammer, knocking him flat in the middle of the road.

* * *

He dreamed he was back in the cool, dark chamber—not in Orlick’s chamber, but in his own. It was a long dream, a dry dream, a drought dream—but at the end of it was water, glorious, burning water, filling his cells, pouring in his face, till he woke up swimming in it.

He woke in the dream only, reliving his memories of waking in the cool, secret vault that was the twin of Galvin Orlick’s. He remembered the dark cell, the lights coming on slowly around him, the lid rising as he sat up in a pool of foaming, vaporous liquid like a man who’d fallen asleep in his bath and slept for twenty years.

Thirst had been his initial sensation. Thirst and a maddening confusion—amnesia. He had found a huge cache of water jugs and drank till he was sick, but he didn’t find memories. In an adjacent chamber, he found the truck, and wondered at its purpose. He found messages that had been left for him to read when he awoke—notes reminding him of an obligation he must fulfill in exchange for his long, cool sleep. Obligations to a man named Galvin Orlick. The name meant nothing to him.

“If you’re awake, there are only a few reasons why,” read one message written in glowing letters that scrolled across a little screen at the foot of the vacuum-sealed bed where he had slept:

The first possibility is that the drought has ended, in which case you are under no obligation to me. Go your way in the new green world. Another possibility is that my rest has been prematurely disturbed. In this case, you must investigate my current condition, awakening me if necessary, according to the instructions and chemicals you will find in the truck. It is also possible that you will be awakened if my financial conditions erode below a certain level, in which case I must ask you to check on my affairs, again reviving me if necessary to put them in order. Do not attempt to resolve them yourself. I am certain you will not shirk these small duties, remembering the weight of your obligations to me, the vows you swore, and the anxiety with which you took your leave from present affairs. Trusting you, I am—Galvin O. Orlick.

Examining various instruments in the chamber, he discovered that the drought showed no sign of ending. He learned that he had slept for twenty years. Maps showed him his present location, and that of Galvin Orlick. He carefully read the instructions for practicing revival on Fritzy, who slept in a tinier version of the tear-shaped casket, but he decided to delay this experiment until he might get the most from it. He also found a gun.

Many more things were left unclear, however, his name but one of them. He could not uncover the cause of his “obligation.” Apparently it had been squeezed from his brain along with the original waters, and had not returned when his cells were drenched afresh.

Why not simply walk away from his obligation? What could he possibly owe a man he had not seen in twenty years?

The answer lay in his realization that after twenty years he would be utterly alone in the world—alone except for that other. If he did revive Orlick, then he might learn his identity and the nature of the debt he had awoken to discharge. Ultimately that was what drove him out into the hot, dry world. What other purpose did his life have except the one hinted at in all these notes?

He had loaded the truck with water, leaving most of it untouched in the cache. Then he had opened a secret gate into a sere, weedy wilderness, and driven up into it. The truck was solar-powered, and there was no dearth of sunlight to drive it. That first day the heat had nearly killed him. He left the chamber just after dawn, and within a few hours he had stopped a dozen times to drink and cool down. Even the shade was like an oven. The glint of heatlight on the glass dazzled and dizzied him. Finally he had passed out in the driver’s seat, crashing the truck into a clump of brush. That was when he fell on Fritzy and broke off the dachshund’s leg. He had lain there in a faint until sunset, dreaming feverishly of his cool bedchamber, dark dreams, dreaming almost of the lifetime twenty years behind him….

And now these dreams abandoned him again, and he rose once more in a dark place to the touch of water. A cool cloth rough as a cat’s tongue licked his brow.

He opened his eyes and saw the sheriff bending over him. She smiled. “That better?”

“Where am I?”

“My office.”

“It’s—it’s so cool.”

“Rank has privileges.”

She stopped stroking him. He realized she had laid wet pads all over his face. He peeled one off and found that it was green and oozy, a strip of succulent.

“Borrowed these from the steak house next door,” she said.

“I fainted.”

“In the road. Good thing I went back to check on Orlick’s grave. You were breathing dust. Another hour out there, and you’d have been a crispy critter. Dehydration would have killed you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He touched one of the steaks to his tongue and sucked on it, drinking the green juices. It tasted salty from his skin.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked, sitting down in a spring-backed chair. Her metal desk was covered with plastic printouts and carved wooden animals—antiques.

He sat up and found that he’d been sprawled on a couch. “Sure,” he said.

“Why don’t you have a pair of pisspores on? We checked your truck and didn’t find any—oh, I gave Fritzy some water while we were there. Did someone steal ’em while you were lying in the road?”

He swung slowly forward. “No, Sheriff. You won’t find any. I didn’t have any to steal.”

“That looks pretty suspicious, you know. I also got a look at how much water you carry. That’s a dangerous load, you realize, don’t you? Most people would build a fortress around a supply like that. I found a gun, too. Not a dart gun, but the real old type, using gunpowder and bullets—the kind that strike sparks and’ve been illegal for years because of it.”

“You must have looked pretty carefully.”

“Fritzy seemed hungry. I gave him some kibble. Didn’t recognize the brand, though. It claimed to have meat and grain in it—not just cactus products. By then I was almost ready for that.”

He realized that he couldn’t bear her suspicion. The secrets he’d been hiding weren’t even his to hide—they belonged to a man he couldn’t remember meeting. It looked as if that man might never be found. If Galvin disappeared or proved incapable of being revived, the Rehydrator would be alone in this place—an alien. It was time to start taking responsibility for his own destiny. He needed people. Needed friends. Corey was one, and maybe now the sheriff could be one as well—if he trusted her.

All right, he thought. I’m telling her.

“Sheriff,” he said, “I don’t have a pair of pisspores for a stranger reason than you’d ever think. There’re plenty of other ways I’m not equipped or suited for this place—this drought.”

“Exactly how have you been getting along, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The truth is, I haven’t been getting along at all.”

He told her everything.

* * *

Lawrence Wing, Esq., listened closely to Corey, punctuating the narrative with various noncommittal sounds. Even when Corey had finished and Wing started giving his advice, it was hard to tell what the lawyer personally thought and what he merely recommended in his professional capacity.

“You know, I’ve defended Galvin for nearly ten years now without any real input from your father, rest his soul, or you, Corey. Galvin never asked for my help, you know. He thought he’d get a better bargain from Bannister, and maybe he did, for a while. But that was Bannister Senior. If he’d looked twice at Junior, he might have worried a little bit. Medford never showed signs of following in his father’s footsteps. He was a troublemaker, a lot like Marlys Runyon, though with plenty of family money to give him a gloss of respectability, and a good education to sharpen his cunning. Marlys never had those opportunities. She’s crude but effective.”

“I know. She used my father,” Corey spat.

“I was aware something went on there, though the details—well, I never thought it was my business.”

“After my mother died, he wasn’t in his right mind—”

“Who would be?”

“—and she started coming around, pretending she wanted to help us out, saying we needed a woman’s touch around the place, though the touch she had in mind was a different one. She was looking to see what access my dad had to Galvin’s money. Soon as she realized Bannister held all the strings, she dumped him hard—even tried seducing me just to shame us both. It helped kill him, all that misery heaped so high.”

Wing regarded him soberly, lips pursed. “I don’t want to add to your own misery, Corey, but there may have been more going on there than you guessed. Marlys and Medford were partners since before you were born. She was probably on a fishing trip for Medford’s sake when she tried to get close to your daddy, see if old Galvin had left any loose ends hid from his lawyer.”

“You mean the whole time she was living with us, she was really working for Bannister?”

Wing nodded slowly. “Guess I knew more about that situation than I realized. I’m sorry we never talked before, Corey. I hope we’ll keep in contact from now on.”

Corey jumped to his feet. “Well, why even wonder who stole Uncle Galvin? It’s obvious they did it! They snatched him away so he couldn’t wake up—and now there’s not even a body for you all to argue over whether it’s alive or not. They’ll take everything!”

Suddenly he’d had all he could take. He collapsed in a plush, overstuffed chair and sobbed into his open hands.

“There now, son. You’re not helpless. I’ve been fighting them with the law all these years because that’s my way, and because I felt I owed it to Galvin even if he was too proud and penny-pinching to ask for my help in the first place. See what it cost him in the end, that infamous thrift?”

“I—I can’t pay anything either, sir.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, son. The point is, there’s no way for me to move quickly on this one. I’m all mired down in law; it’s the only swamp the drought couldn’t touch. For every move I make, Medford sees me coming a mile off and has all the time he needs to plan a countermove. Meanwhile, he could ship that body out of here or burn it in a bonfire for all I know.”

“Well… I’m not a lawyer. I’m not bogged down.”

“Exactly why I’m telling you all this, in a cautious, advisory sort of way. Maybe there’re things you can do that I can’t even counsel you about, because if I did, I might be telling you things that go against my professional ethics—not that there aren’t plenty of my peers who have no qualms about going out and doing such things themselves.”

Corey leaned eagerly over the desk. “And you can’t suggest anything? Anything at all? Are you sure?”

Wing yawned hugely. “My, my, look at the time. It’ll be noon soon. I should be in bed.”

“Please,” Corey said.

The lawyer winked. “I’ll bet Bannister’s in bed, too, and Marlys with him.”

“But I can’t get near his place. It’s booby-trapped.”

“And you wouldn’t catch him red-handed anyhow. He’s too smart for that. What you want to do is check out his possible stashes—and Marlys’s. Now, I know there’re no alarms around old man Runyon’s place….”

* * *

The sheriff came for him at sunset, knocking lightly on the side of the truck until he woke. Fritzy scampered down the steps and started nuzzling at a pocket in her uniform.

“You’ve got something he wants,” the Rehydrator said.

She pulled a dried lizard from the pocket and let it dangle just over Fritzy’s nose.

“I see. Come on in. Help yourself to some water.”

She climbed in and sat on a folding stool, and covered her cup with a hand when it was half-full. “Too much at once, and my pisspores start sloshing. Thanks.”

He gulped two cups in straight succession, trying to purge the dust that seemed to have gathered behind his molars; he poured a bit more into his hands and ran them through his hair until he noticed her wincing. Feeling like a fool, he let them drop to his sides, wondering if it would be more polite to lick them dry. Would he ever be comfortable here?

“I don’t suppose you remember anything else about yourself?” she asked. “Anything that might’ve come back to you in a dream?”

“No more than when I first woke,” he said. “I feel like a robot or something, with a few programs missing. I mean, I speak the language, I know some of the routines, but I have no past. I guess those tissue samples you took didn’t turn up anything?”

“Nothing yet. It’ll take a few days to follow up all the possible records. You’ve been away twenty years, so chances are whatever’s still on file is archived pretty deep. If nothing turns up, then I’d say old Galvin Orlick went to some pains to erase you before he wrung you out.”

“Maybe… maybe I wanted that. Maybe someone was following me, and that was the only way I could think to escape.”

“Or maybe you’re a robot, like you said. But I don’t think so.” She tapped him lightly on his chest. “I heard a heartbeat in there yesterday. And you’re not the fugitive type.”

“Sheriff…”

“Why don’t you call me Lorna?”

“Lorna, all right. I wish there were something you could call me. ‘Rehydrator’ sounds like a spare part—which is appropriate. A spare part for something they don’t make anymore. I’m obsolete.”

“No. You just don’t know where you fit in yet. Why don’t we give you a name? You came here with all this water—you know, something like that. Waterman. Water. Walter?”

“Walter,” he repeated, meeting her eyes. “Thank you, Lorna. You’re so nice to me. There’s nobody… nobody close to you around here? You’re not married or anything?”

She shook her head. “Gas Lake’s a small town, and I’m not from around here. I sort of got into law enforcement through a civil service fluke—turned out I was pretty good at it. But the people here won’t exactly open up to me—they keep their distance. You know. They all have secrets I’ll probably never know.”

He put his hands on hers. “I’m from out of town, too.”

“Farther than that. Looking in your eyes, it’s like looking down a tunnel into the past.”

He let her gaze into that tunnel for a moment, wishing he could see what she saw. Maybe she could find answers to his questions in there.

Suddenly Fritzy started howling.

“Sheriff!” A man’s voice, nearby. “Sheriff?”

“My deputy,” she said. She went to the canvas and peeked out. “What is it, Skelton?”

“Edgar Runyon’s looking for you. Claims he caught Corey Orlick trespassing on his property. He wants us to come out and arrest the kid.”

“All right, I’m coming.”

She turned back to him, absently slapping the horny toad into her open palm. “Damn that boy. You know what he was after, don’t you?”

“His uncle.”

She nodded. “Still, it saves me the trouble of coming up with a better excuse for poking around out there. You’re welcome to come. It’s cooled down quite a bit.”

“Be right with you.”

When she was outside, he pulled on his sandals, took another swallow of water, and pulled out the gun—the “antique” Lorna had found when she searched the truck. As with an unpredictable number of other things, he remembered how it worked. Illegal, she’d said. But he felt like he needed something for himself now. Not knowing his identity, how would he recognize his enemies? The strap fit snug around his ankle.

* * *

They found Corey strapped to a chair in an earthen-walled cellar; the only light came from a dim shake-lamp hanging from a hook above the entry. He’d been bound so tightly that his hands were bloodless white. His face was red from trying to shout through his gag.

“Get him out of that chair, Edgar,” Lorna said.

“Don’t want him slipping away, Sherf,” said the hunched, wheezing old man who had led them down the steep dirt steps.

“Right now, or I’ll arrest you for human-rights violation. That’s sheer torture.”

The old man produced a knife and sliced through the clear plastic straps. Lorna undid the gag.

“I didn’t do nothing!” Corey spat. “Old geezer—I was just cutting through his property, that’s all.”

“Stealing prickly pears, he was!” old Runyon said. “I’ll beat the crap out of him if I see him round here again.

“Out,” Lorna said to Edgar. “Now.”

He grumbled, but retreated up the steps. The Rehydrator crouched down and helped work the blood back into Corey’s cold fingers. The boy gasped at the pain.

“Not too smart, Corey,” Lorna said. “I thought you had more sense.”

“I—I wasn’t stealing prickly pears.”

“I know. You were looking for Galvin.”

Corey started to protest, but he didn’t have the heart. His head sank forward, and he spoke in a lower tone. “I had to, Sheriff. He’s my uncle; he’s all I have left in the world—that’s what nobody seems to realize.”

“We understand, Corey, but you can’t go breaking into people’s privacy.”

“But if you ask to come in, they’ll just hide whatever they’ve got to hide!”

“Well, that’s their right. But the truth’ll come out, Corey; you have to believe that.”

“Why should I?”

“I know it’s frustrating, but… but did you see anything?”

He shook his head. “No. He grabbed me too fast. There was a big burlap sack of yucca roots in the corner over there, but he hauled them away.”

“Hm. I’ll just ask him about that sack. Make him think he’s under suspicion. See what we stir up.”

They came up out of the hard-baked earth and stood under the stars. Edgar Runyon was waiting for them with a shake-lamp fading in his hands. He shook it vigorously when they appeared, squeezing out the last bit of light. “They’re putting you away for a long time, boy!”

“Edgar,” Lorna said, “what’ve you been keeping in that cellar?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“I’m conducting a search of the neighborhood. I could come back with papers, if you like, and extend the search to the rest of your property.”

He looked around nervously, scuttling from foot to foot. “It’s a root cellar, Sherf. I keep roots down there when I have them.”

“Corey says he saw a bundle down there—something about as big as a man wrapped in burlap, which you dragged off.”

“That was yucca root, Sherf! I didn’t want him messing with it.”

“What could he have done, bound and gagged like that? Mind showing me the sack, Edgar?”

He didn’t answer for a moment.

“Edgar?”

“All right, all right.” Still grumbling, he walked away until he reached another flight of steps carved in the sun-pounded earth. When his head had vanished below the surface, Lorna started swinging her high-power flashlight over the Runyon place, picking out entrances to more burrows, mounds of rusting junk, the glinting mesh of plastic fencing, and beyond all that the rows of Runyon’s cactus crops, looming black giants with wicked, spiny arms.

“He is nervous about something,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s here.”

Edgar reappeared a moment later, dragging a huge sack. “Here you go.” He tossed it down at her feet.

Lorna scarcely glanced at it. “Thanks, Edgar. I shouldn’t have bothered you. We’ll be taking off now.”

“Well, you’re very welcome!” he shouted as they strode out the front gate onto the road. “You’d think I was the goddamn thief!”

Deputy Skelton was waiting for them on the road, at the wheel of the sheriff’s buggy. “Why don’t you stay here?” Lorna said. “Keep an eye on Edgar tonight. If he goes anywhere, I want to know.”

“How’ll you get back to town?” he asked.

“We’ll walk. It’s a nice night for it.”

They didn’t speak much on the way back. Near Town Hall, Lorna repeated her admonitions to Corey and said good night to Walter.

“Walter?” Corey said.

“That’s my name.”

“I was wondering.”

Corey and Walter walked on. Earl Taws waved from the front of the Miscellany Market, where he was out dusting the feather headdress of his wooden Indian. “My offer still stands on that dog of yours, sir! If he ever dries up again, that is.”

“He’s not mine to sell,” Walter replied. “Thanks anyway.”

A moment later they passed the Succulent Steak, and Corey ducked into the restaurant. Walter heard a man’s voice raised briefly in anger “Late again!”

He walked on alone. As he neared his truck, a shadow stepped out from behind it. A woman.

“That your dog in there?” she asked. “He sounds kind of sick.”

Walter ran up the steps, hearing a soft whimpering that was even now getting softer. He threw back the canvas flap and saw Fritzy.

Poor Fritzy. The dachshund lay on his side, squirming slowly, creaking with a sound like two pieces of wood rubbed together. His black eyes were dull. The lids closed partially and didn’t open again. The tongue was white and dry, receding into the mouth, and the pale gums were lusterless, lacking saliva. He patted the animal, horrified at the feeling—as if he were stroking a piece of scruffy driftwood. Even as he touched him, Fritzy stiffened and apparently died. The last appearance of moisture—the tears in Fritzy’s eyes—quickly evaporated.

“I’ll be damned,” the woman said, having climbed in behind him. It was Marlys Runyon. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it now. You really must have the power to revive things—the lungfish things.”

He fell heavily onto his cot, his mind numb with shock.

“Temporary,” he muttered. “Only temporary.” He found himself squeezing the fat of his wrists for signs of dehydration, for flesh that peaked when pinched like overbeaten egg white.

“Don’t take it so hard,” Marlys said, settling next to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “That poor little thing already lived his natural life. You should be glad you could give him even a few more days.”

But he wasn’t thinking of Fritzy. He was thinking of himself as he repeated the words, “Only temporary.”

“If you’re so upset, why not throw on some more of your chemicals and juice him up again?”

“Yes.” It was the obvious thing to do, but obvious things weren’t occurring to him right now. At any moment he himself might start to dehydrate, might go stiff and wooden like Fritzy—and who would be able to restore him?

He pulled the plastic tub out from under the cot; the black valise sat in it, along with the white plastic mask.

“Let me give you a hand,” Marlys said. She reached into the bag and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Are these the instructions?”

He nodded, his fingers trembling as he took various vials from the valise. “Maybe you could read them to me. I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

She flattened out the instructions while he placed Fritzy in the tub, and read them out to him as he uncapped bottles and poured their contents over Fritzy. She turned away coughing when the fumes rolled up, and went out beating the canvas curtain to clear the air. When she came in again, Fritzy was alive, shivering under Walter’s fingers, whimpering. The dachshund jumped down and shook all over; going to the water bowl, he lapped it dry.

“Thank you,” Walter finally said, when his own shaking had subsided. “I—I didn’t know that could happen.”

“Doesn’t bode too well for Galvin Orlick, I guess, if you ever do revive him.” She shook her head sympathetically. “I’m only glad I was here to help out. Really, I just came to be neighborly. I know I made a bad impression. Corey, you see, he’s kind of prejudiced against me on account of his father and I got pretty close after his mother died.”

Walter nodded. “Well, he’s just a kid. Could I get you anything? Some water?”

“Oh no, no thanks. I’ve got plenty.” She started to back out of the truck. “You look like you might want to be left alone.”

“Really, I—I don’t mind company. It’s just, I don’t know many people here.”

“Have you eaten? We’ve got a good restaurant in town, if you’d like to go over.”

“I’d like that,” he said, kneeling down to pet Fritzy’s damp coat. He did feel grateful for her help. And he had a reason to gain her trust, if he could. She had seen how to use the revival chemicals, and that might be important if… if he started to hear his own limbs creaking, if his own eyes dried out. Maybe he could teach Corey and Lorna the process, but in the meantime, Marlys was his only potential savior.

* * *

Corey couldn’t believe it when Walter the Rehydrator came in with Marlys Runyon. They took a corner table. He wanted to rush up and yell at her to get out, but he didn’t have the right. Walter seemed simple, but he must know better than to trust her; he must be trying to get information out of her, taking advantage of being a stranger to pretend he didn’t know her reputation. All the same, Corey wished he’d warned Walter about her in certain terms, because a guy who walked around without pisspores and relieved himself in sterile dust couldn’t be all that smart.

Walter smiled at Corey and waved, but then Mr. Bell called him back into the kitchen. Mr. Bell was in a bad mood, sending him here, sending him there. By the time he next got out of the kitchen, they were already gone. Walter had hardly touched his green fried agave patties.

He was packing scraps of rind into the condenser, when he heard loud voices up front, and suddenly Walter burst into the kitchen. “Corey!”

“What is it? What happened?”

Mr. Bell pushed through the swinging door, glowering at them.

“Mr. Bell, can I—”

“You cannot. You came in late, and you’re not half through your shift.”

“Law says I still get a lunch break.”

“I saw you back here wolfing down prickly pears. If that doesn’t count, then—”

“I gotta help my friend.”

“Help him on your own time.”

“I am. I just quit.” Mr. Bell gaped at Corey as he grabbed Walter’s hand and hauled him back into the night. “It’s Marlys, isn’t it? I should’ve warned you away from her. I thought I had.”

“But she’s been with me the whole time.”

“What whole time?”

“While we were eating, someone broke into my truck and stole a bunch of water jugs.”

“The fact Marlys was with you makes it even more likely it was her doing. She just kept you distracted while her friends went about robbing you.”

“She said she—she didn’t need water.”

“Everybody needs it, Walter. She gets all she can drink from Bannister, who’s been sucking it out of my Uncle Orlick’s private reserve. But even Bannister’ll take more if he can get it.”

“Then it could have been anyone, if you’re all so damn thirsty.”

“Could have, but I know Marlys. She’s had you staked out since you first rolled into town, and no one else would dare get in her way. Except maybe me.”

They ran to the sheriff’s office in Town Hall. The office was empty, but Corey heard voices in the holding cells in back, and the door was ajar. He peered in and saw Deputy Skelton gazing into a cell where some red-faced old geezer was yelling for his lawyer.

“Is the sheriff here?” Corey asked.

Skelton strolled toward him, smiling, and shut the door behind him. “Mescal bum—out-of-towner. He doesn’t need a lawyer; he just needs to sleep it off.”

“Where is Lorna?” Walter asked.

“She’s in the field. What seems to be the matter?”

“Someone broke into my truck and stole some water.”

The deputy looked angry. “Now, who’d do a thing like that? Come on. I’ll have you fill out a report.”

“We know who did it,” Corey said. “Marlys set him up. Hey, why aren’t you still out there watching Edgar?”

Skelton puffed up with anger. “Are you my boss, kid?”

“We’ll fill out that report later,” Walter said, taking Corey by the arm before he could answer. “See you, Deputy.”

Out in the hall, Walter said, “Where does Lawrence Wing keep his office?”

“Good idea. He’s right upstairs.”

Wing was in his office, looking consternated. His face darkened further when Corey and Walter appeared. “Corey, I’ve got some troubling news. Fortunately there’s an order in place regarding information sharing, or I’d never learn a thing.”

“What is it?”

“According to the control devices in your uncle’s tomb, he wasn’t stolen from his container—he was actively revived. Whether it was a malfunction or the result of tampering, I have no way of knowing right now.”

“Revived? You mean he—he’s alive?”

“I mean he must’ve gotten up confused and walked right out of there himself, several days ago.”

Corey felt as if he’d been hit on the head. “Walked? Then he’s out there someplace!”

“My God.” Walter turned even paler than usual. “I know what it was like for me out there, with plenty of water. Can he still be alive?”

“Out in the dunes, wandering around with no water? There’s no way… no way.”

Corey’s throat choked up. Walter put a hand on his shoulder.

“Sheriff should know about this,” the lawyer said.

“Deputy Skelton wouldn’t tell us where she is,” Walter said.

“I can radio her direct.” Wing went into another room.

“Corey,” Walter said, “I want you to come with me before this search gets going. I want to teach you the lungfish remedy.”

“Me?”

“I need someone trustworthy to learn it. You see, I’m afraid I—I might dry out myself.”

Corey felt a double pang of grief. “You? You mean—”

Walter nodded. “Fritzy and I were dehydrated together by your uncle. I was revived only a few days ago, to come and help Galvin. And I won’t have a chance to do that unless I can stay wet. Why don’t you come with me and try to keep your hopes up, and I’ll tell you everything I know. Maybe Galvin found a cool hole to lie in. Maybe he’s got extra water with him. You never know.”

“You don’t have to cheer me, Walter. I never knew him anyway. If he really is dead, I won’t even know what I lost. I think I might just be glad to have all this trouble behind me. If he’s dead, I’d just like to know, so I can get on with my own life.”

Walter patted his shoulder. “Don’t be so gloomy, Corey. Come on.”

* * *

But when they reached the truck, the valise full of chemicals was missing. He hadn’t noticed earlier, thanks to the strewn water bottles and other damage the thief had caused.

“What’s wrong now?” Corey asked.

“I feel pretty stupid. She really duped me good.”

“Marlys? I told you she’d do anything for water.”

“That’s not all she got. Come on; we’d better hurry.”

“Where?”

“Just come on.”

They hurried down Main Street, and as they passed the Miscellany Market, he noticed a stray feather lying in the street under a lamp. The wooden Indian was gone, and so was Earl Taws. A CLOSED sign hung on the front door, though it was not yet dawn and seemed too early to shut down.

At Town Hall they went straight to the sheriff’s office. This time it was completely deserted. Walter looked through the glass panel into the holding-cell area, but Skelton was nowhere to be seen, and all the cells were empty now.

Out in the hall, they passed Lawrence Wing hurrying down the stairs. “I got word to Lorna,” he said. “She’ll meet us out at your uncle’s burial mound. We can take my buggy.”

Two minutes later they drove up from a parking garage into the predawn light. The sky was licorice-colored in the west, but to the east the stars were fading before a rosy front. Wing sped out of town, driving indiscriminately over sage and cactus patches, ignoring the roads. Walter held on for his life, trying to spot familiar landmarks in the paling world.

“Where’s the lake?” he asked Corey.

“Over there,” Corey said, pointing off to the right. “But in the buggy you don’t have to worry about thistles and sand, so it’s faster to cut around through the hills.”

Walter leaned over to shout in Wing’s ear: “Cut over to the lake!”

“But Lorna’s at the tomb.”

“We’ll take the long way round to meet her. Just go past the lake.”

Wing cut sharply to the right. Minutes later Walter saw the flush of shimmering liquid ahead of them. The sky was a watercolor dream, and Gasoline Lake looked like the bowl in which some heavenly painter had rinsed those brushes. He remembered how he had nearly thrown himself in at first sight. Now looking at it, the thought was about as appealing as a swim in paint thinner.

Still, this was a thirsty, thirsty world, and the lake was the most likely lure for a thirsty man who didn’t know better.

Or rather, the most likely place for such a man to be found.

Walter didn’t believe that Galvin Orlick had been traveling under his own power.

He was remembering, from some past existence, that wooden Indians didn’t wear real feathers.

“Stop here,” he shouted just before they got down to the beach. “Let it coast—we need silence.”

The lawyer cut the motor, and they glided out onto the strand, plaques of parched mud snapping under the tires. By the pale orange light, he scanned the beach from shore to shore. Suddenly Corey’s arm swung up. “There.”

A cluster of dark specks were massed on the far shore, below the brink of a dune that glowed like a mound of orange sherbet. Walter’s mouth watered at the memory. “Go!”

The motor kicked on, and they swung around the lake. He kept his eyes fixed on the specks as they drew closer, resolving into figures, some vaguely recognizable. Suddenly the people started to scatter. There were more than he’d thought at first, more than he would have believed. As the buggy took the curve of the shore, he saw another coming around Gasoline Lake from the direction of the burial mound with its tall, lonely plastic oak.

“That’s the sheriff!” Corey said. “See, she’s cutting them off. Who are they?”

“The question is,” said Lawrence Wing, “who aren’t they?”

People scattered, trapped between the cars, but there really wasn’t anywhere for them to go. A few scrambled up the side of the dune, but that was fruitless, for as much progress as one made, another would set off an avalanche and bring them all back to the bottom again and again. Most of the others ran into the lake and stopped before they’d gotten very far, as if their skin was already burning; they looked dizzied by the fumes.

The buggies hemmed them in. Lawrence stopped and hopped out carrying a long, sleek weapon, something like a shotgun loaded with darts. “Don’t strike any sparks around here,” he cautioned Walter.

On the other side of the group, Lorna picked up a megaphone and ordered everyone to stay where they were, including those in the lake. Walter recognized Deputy Skelton, Norris Culp, Earl Taws, Edgar Runyon, and Corey’s boss, all out in the shining tide, all looking mortified at having been caught.

Walter and Corey walked to the water’s edge.

A man lay sprawled facedown on the baked mud, his fingers splayed, the collar and shoulders of his suit rumpled and torn by clutching fingers. His hair and shirt were soaking wet, shimmering with the vapors of Gasoline Lake. For a moment, Walter thought they were too late, that he was already dead—again or for the first time. Then his body spasmed weakly, and he started to cough.

They turned the man over. Walter pulled off his Mylar hat to shade the man’s red face. He’d seen him earlier that night, shouting for his lawyer in the holding cell. Apparently he’d gotten his wish. Medford Bannister stood just offshore, wearing a defiant expression, up to his ankles in Gasoline Lake.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Lorna said, walking up to them.

“I don’t know,” Walter admitted.

But Corey was nodding. “Same as his pictures, it’s him. Uncle Galvin?”

The old man sputtered and opened his eyes. “That—that’s my name! I’ve been trying to remember! What the hell’s going on here? You here to help me, or you in with the rest of them?”

“I’m your nephew. I wouldn’t dream of hurting you. You’ve been asleep for twenty years.”

Galvin sat up. He didn’t look quite so old anymore, though he was obviously worn-out by what he’d been through in the past few hours.

“Twenty years? And the drought’s over? It sure doesn’t look like it’s over. Twenty years, and you woke me up for this? To be dragged around in the night and have my head stuck in turpentine? Jesus, my eyes burn like hell.”

Corey opened the spigot of his pisspores and let recycled water drain into his palms. He splashed it into Galvin’s eyes, without much apparent effect.

“Let’s get him back to town,” Lorna said. “Mr. Orlick, I’m the sheriff of Gas Lake. I’ve got some questions for you.”

“Sheriff? Where’s my damn lawyer?—that’s what I’d like to know.”

She lifted her gun to point at Medford Bannister, who smiled sheepishly and shrugged.

“Him? But he was the main one trying to drown me! All I remember is, I came awake in what I think was a jail cell, some woman pouring chemicals all over me, and the next thing, I’m hustled off here with everybody trying to kill me.”

Marlys, the Rehydrator thought. Marlys had stolen his chemicals and revived Galvin. He suddenly remembered what the sheriff had said once—that Marlys knew how to dehydrate things. She must have dried out Fritzy, in order to learn how to rehydrate him. The process didn’t reverse itself naturally after all. A sense of relief nearly flattened him.

Corey said, “They wanted to make it look like you woke up on your own and staggered over here for a drink and died in the lake. That way they could solve the problem of whether you were alive or not once and for all, and make it look like an accident—your own fault.”

“Galvin,” Lawrence Wing said, coming down to the water’s edge, “I think you’ll need another lawyer now.”

“Jesus Christ, Larry, is that you?” Galvin said. “You look like shit! How old are you?”

“Almost your age now, Galvin. You shouldn’t speak till you’ve looked in a mirror. Come on; we’ll give you a hand.”

Walter bent over to help them lift the old man, and as he did, he felt something brush his calf under his robes. He realized too late what it was.

“Drop the old buzzard,” said Medford Bannister. “Drop him, and then nobody move.”

They let Galvin down gently. Walter turned around and saw Bannister standing in the shallows with his old gun. It was pointed right at Lorna.

“Skelton,” he said, “get over there and take the sheriff’s gun.”

“I don’t know,” the deputy started to protest in a shamed, whining voice.

“Come on; they can’t outnumber us. We’ll take care of them and no one’ll ever know better. We all know how to keep a secret, don’t we?”

He grinned. The mass of townspeople out in the lake began moving slowly toward shore, confident now. Walter started to back off, but the gun in Medford’s hand swung toward him, the hammer cocked back to strike. He stopped where he was and put up his hands.

“I built this town,” Galvin Orlick growled.

“It belongs to me now,” Medford said.

Out of the corner of Walter’s eye, he saw Corey moving, hidden behind Lawrence Wing. The boy slowly took the lawyer’s gun and raised it with the barrel between Wing’s body and arm, nestled in his armpit. His finger trembled on the trigger, ready to fire, when someone on the lake spied him, and a shout of warning went out to Bannister.

Medford Bannister whirled and fired, and that was the last they saw of him.

As the hammer fell, it struck a spark. Not only the gunpowder charge, but the whole lake, exploded.

A roiling ball of flame licked up from the shores, boiling back into the heart of the lake, exploding inward and outward at the same time. The sound was beyond deafening; it was a solid impact to which every bone in Walter’s body responded like a tympanum. The force of the blast hurled him over the mud and into the dune, where he lay covered in sand until the heat of the burning lake subsided, and the heat of the sun took its place.

He wiped sand from his eyes and looked over the shore, marveling at the blackened bowl where the lake had lain.

Wisps of fire still clung to a sunken plain of what looked like charred and tarry melted rubber. The foul smoke was visibly clearing, but he felt as if the reek of burning might never leave his nostrils.

He saw a few more survivors likewise coming to their senses on the bank of sand. Lorna and Corey and Lawrence Wing lay tumbled about. A few other townsfolk lay staring in horror at the lake where their conspirators had perished.

Galvin Orlick stood up, stretched, and began cursing methodically. “My kind of town,” he said, and shook his head.

* * *

“There I lay,” Corey’s uncle said, with a wistfulness turned instantly bitter. “And not long enough by far.” He aimed a toe at one of the meters on his headstone. Liquid crystal spurted over his shoe. Galvin crouched and fondly patted Fritzy’s head. The dachshund seemed to remember him.

“Well, son, let’s get going. I’m not crazy about this place, and there’s a wind coming up.”

“A big one,” Corey agreed. “Gonna be shoveling sand tomorrow.”

Corey had use of a police buggy, now that the force consisted of Sheriff Lorna alone. She had offered to make him a deputy.

“I wish I could help that friend of yours,” Uncle Galvin confided as they drove back. The road wavered under waves of sand. “My own memories are as spotty as his, I’m afraid. Still, I’m glad to see I’ve got some money to help him out with his search. What about you, Corey? What are your plans? You going to stay around and help me rebuild Gas Lake?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Galvin. Are you sure you wouldn’t just like to junk the place and start over?”

Galvin shook his head. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel fully awake yet, and damn if these pisspores aren’t the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever worn. I’m having trouble concentrating on anything except how to keep them from chafing.”

“You’ll get calluses, Uncle; don’t worry. You’re not… not thinking of going back to sleep, are you?”

“Sleep? Are you nuts? The way I woke up, I’m afraid to so much as take a nap.”

* * *

Walter sat in Lorna’s office and watched the sunset through the double-paned windows. She came in after a few minutes, holding a folded-up piece of plastic computer printout. Her expression was pretty mixed.

“You’ve got something, don’t you?” he asked.

She nodded, biting her lip. “It’s an address in California. A place you used to get mail. I suppose you’ll be going there right away.”

He nodded, taking the plastic, but not yet looking at it. “Lorna, why stay on here? Gas Lake’s a ghost town now. Does it really need a sheriff?”

She smiled sadly, walked to the window, and stood there for a minute staring down at the empty streets filling with sand, at lights that wouldn’t come on tonight. Power was off everywhere, and it would stay off; none of the public utilities were operational because there was no one to operate them. The streets were filling with sand, buildings erased in the grainy wind, like a vision of what Gas Lake was soon to become.

“Lorna?”

He saw her fingers fumbling at her breast; they came away with her badge. She looked at it for a moment, then set it down on the windowsill. “When were you thinking of leaving?” she said.

* * *

When Marlys woke, the house was dark. She scrambled out of Medford’s bed and moved through the house, touching switches, shouting commands to the voice controls, but all to no effect. The power was out, and where was Medford? She had waited all day for news, figuring he was busy with the culmination of their plans. He hadn’t wanted her involved in the final action—everyone else must contribute, since they all expected a share of Galvin’s water, but Marlys had done enough. He was a cautious man, Medford. He left nothing to chance. She had to trust that he’d get back soon—before dawn, at least. What time was it, anyway?

She glanced at her watch, then stared at it.

The time was twelve noon.

She went to a window and opened the blinds, and saw nothing outside but darkness.

Solid darkness.

Leaning very close, she realized exactly how solid it was. Trillions of tiny grains pressed right up against the glass.

Marlys backed away with a scream barely held in her throat. Why hadn’t the blowers gone on? Because the power was out, she told herself. But why was the power out?

She hurried to the back door, punched for it to open, but none of the controls were working. She opened the panel for manual operation, and quickly spun the knobs.

The door opened inward, letting a sliding river of sand stream into the porch room. She tried to force it shut, but the sand kept pouring in, unstoppable. She backed out of there, closed the inner door, and went into the kitchen to try the phonescreen. It didn’t respond. Nothing responded.

She gnawed her baccorish three times faster than usual, as if it would help her to think. She had to stay calm. Panic was dangerous in a situation like this.

All right. She was buried. But Medford kept plenty of water and plenty of food in the cellar; she could survive a long time if she had to. With the case of revival chemicals, she could rehydrate Medford’s entire collection of horny toads and eat them fresh. Yes, if something had gone wrong and Medford didn’t come looking for her and the power never came on again, she could live under the dunes—possibly for years. And one day the wind would clear the sand away for just a moment. She would wake to find a thin light trickling through the windows, a hint of sunlight visible through the sand; ever vigilant for this opportunity, she would shatter the glass and climb to the surface and escape.

Someday all that might happen, yes. It was the best scenario she could imagine at the moment. There were plenty of worse ones.

She spat a mouthful of tobacco juice right on Medford’s polished real-wood floor. Let him come and wipe it up. She sucked up another few inches of tobacco, chewing furiously, and tried not to think about what might happen when she ran out of rope.

* * *

“Gasoline Lake” copyright 1991 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 1991.

WUNDERKINDERGARTEN

The One and Only Entry in Shendy’s Journal

Dabney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the bare linoleum floor! Nexter reads pornography, De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special favourites, and thumbs antique copies of Hustler which really is rather sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m exaggerating now (for effect) because all of us can walk quite well; and anyway, Nex is capable of a cute little boner, even if it is good for nothing except making the girls laugh. Well, except for me. I don’t laugh at that because it’s more or less involuntary, and the only really funny things to me are the things people do deliberately, like giving planarian shots to a bunch of babies for instance, as if the raw injection of a litre of old braintree sap can make us model citizens and great world leaders when we finally Come of Age. As you might have guessed by now, when I get a learning overload I have to write. It is my particular pornography, my spinning-around-and-passing-out, my food-spitting response to too much knowledge absorbed too fast; it is in effect a sort of pH-buffering liver in my brain. (I am informed by Dr Nightwake, who unfairly reads over my shoulder from time to time – always when, in my ecstatic haste, I have just made some minor error – that “pH in blood is buffered by kidneys, not liver”; which may be so, but then what was the real purpose behind those sinister and misleading experiments of last March involving the beakers full of minced, blended and boiled calf’s liver into which we introduced quantities of hydrochloric acid, while stirring the thick soup with litmus rods? In any event, I refuse to admit nasty diaper-drench kidneys into my skull; the liver is a nobler organ far more suited to simmering amid the steamy smell of buttery onions in my brain pan; oh well-named seat of my soul!) In short, writing is the only way I have of assimilating all this shit that means nothing to me otherwise, all the garbage that comes not from my shortshort life but from some old blender-brained geek whose experiential and neural myomolecular gnoso-procedural pathways have a wee bit of trouble jibing with my Master Plan.

I used to start talking right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others; I was aware of a pleasant warmth growing in my jaws and pharynx, a certain dryness in the back of my throat, and a distant chatter like jungle birds in jungle boughs singing and flitting about through a long equatorial afternoon, ignoring the sound of chainsaws ripping to life in the humid depths at the rainforest floor. Rainforest, jungle, I haven’t seen either one, they no longer exist, but they shared certain descriptive characteristics and as far as I can tell, they could have been no more mighty than our own little practice garden just inside the compound walls, where slightly gene-altered juicy red Big-Boy radishes (my design, thank you very much) grow to depths of sixteen feet, their bulbous shoulders shoving up through the asphalt of the foursquare court, their bushy leaves fanning us gently and offering shade even to adults on those rare afternoons when the sun tops the walls of our institution and burns away enough of the phototropic haze to actually cast a shadow! And there I sat, dreaming that I was a parrot or a toucan or macaw, that my words were as harmonious as flights of birds – while in actuality the apparent beauty of my speech was purely subjective, and induced in my compatriots a mixed mood of irritation, hostility and spite. Eventually, though no one acted on their resentment (for of us all, I am the pugilist, and Likki has never disturbed my experiments without feeling the pummeling wrath of my vulcanized fists), it came to be quite apparent to our supervisors, who heard the same complaints in every post-injection counseling session, that the injections themselves were unobjectionable, the ensuing fluxflood a bit overwhelming but ultimately worthwhile (as if we had a choice or hand in the outcome of these experiments), and the warm milk pleasingly soporific; but that the one thing each of the other five dreaded and none could abide were my inevitable catachrestic diatribes. The counselors eventually mounted a campaign to confront me with this boorish behaviour, which at first I quite refused to credit. They took to amplifying my words and turning them back on me through earphones with slight distortion and echo effects, a technique which backfired because, given my intoxicated state, the increase in stimulus induced something like ecstasy, perhaps the closest thing I have yet experienced to match the ‘multiple orgasm’ descriptions of women many (or at least nine) years my senior, and to which I look forward with great anticipation, when I shall have found my ideal partner – as certainly a woman with my brains should be able to pick a mate of such transcendent mental and physical powers that our thoughts will resonate like two pendulum clocks synchronizing themselves by virtue of being mounted on the same wall, though what the wall represents in this metaphor I am still uncertain. I am also unsure of why I say ‘mate’ in the singular, when in fact I see no reason why I should not take many lovers of all sorts and species; I think Nexter would probably find in my erotic commonplace book (if I kept such a thing) pleasures more numinous and depraved than any recorded or imagined in Justine or The Story of the Eye. The counselors therefore made tapes of my monologues and played them back to me the day after my injection session, so that I might consider my words in a duller state of mind and so perceive how stupid and downright irritating my flighty speculations and giddy soul-barings truthfully were. Having heard them, I became so awkward and embarrassed that I could not open my mouth for weeks, even to speak to a mechanical dictascriber, and it was not until our main Monitor – the one who received distillate from The-Original-Dr-Twelves-Himself – suggested I study the ancient and academically approved art of writing (now appreciated only by theoreticians since the introduction of the dictascriber, much as simple multiplication and long division became lost arts when calculators grew so common and cheap) that I felt some of my modesty restored, and gradually grew capable once again of withstanding even high-dose injections and marathon sessions of forced-learning, with their staggered and staggering cycles of induced sleep and hypnagoguery, and teasing bouts of wakefulness that prove to be only lucid dreams, followed by long periods of dreaming that always turn out to be wakefulness. It was particularly these last that I needed full self-confidence to face, as during these intervals I am wont to undress in public and speak in tongues and organize archetypal feats of sexual gymnastics in which even Nexter fears to participate, though he always was the passive type and prefers his women in two dimensions, or in four – as is the case with those models who spring from literary seeds and caper full-blown in his imagination, where he commands them with nine dimensions of godlike power above and beyond those which his shadowy pornographic puppets can attain.

Therefore I write, and become four-dimensional in your mind, while maintaining absolute dominion in my own – at least until the next injection, when once more I’ll be forced into a desperate skirmish for my identity, repelling the plasmic shoggoths of alien memory from the Antarctic ramparts of my ancient and superior civilized mind. I think at times that I have received the brain-juices of impossible donors – Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the hermetic Franz Bardon, Kahuna Max Freedom Long; impossible because they all died long before Dr Twelves’s technique was perfected (or even dreamed of), though each of this strange trinity groped clairvoyantly toward predicting the development, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, of the Twelves Process. Consider HPL’s silver canisters, carried by aether-breasting space swimmers, bearing the preserved living brains of worthy philosophers on information-gathering tours of the cosmos, like space-probes with tourists aboard; though Lovecraft never speaks of whether these dislocated entities were capable of boredom or of dreams throughout the long hauls from Yuggoth to Andromeda, bound to be more tedious than a Mediterranean cruise. But Lovecraft is too popular an obsession these days, since the politically embarrassing emergence of R’lyeh, and I have plenty of others more obscure and less practical. Better poets, too.

But why call them obsessions? They are influences. Good influences – too many of them, and too good, as if they had been shaved of all their interesting edges before they were injected. It’s this that bothers me. Whatever there is of interest in me is accidental – a synergy between a constellation of old coots’ shared synapses. Nothing I can do about it but run riot in the privacy of my mind, gallop screaming down the narrow dark corridors left between the huge shambling wrecks of old personalities wrenched into position on a fundament too soft and shoggothy to support them, each new structure blocking out a little more of the mind’s sky, trapping me – whoever I am/was – down here in the dark garbagey alleys with the feral rats that used to be my own dreams. Mine is a Mexico City of a mind, all swamp and smog and encrusted cultures standing on/smothering each other, tottering wrecks, conquerors and guerillas locked in a perpetual Frenchkiss snailsex carezza of jammed traffic, everyone gasping for breath.

One breath.

I am beginning to feel fatigue now. The initial shocky rush wearing off. Cramping in my wrists and forearms, fingers. Likki has stopped her spinning, regained consciousness, and a more normal pinkness is returning to her cheeks, and Dabney is actually eating up all he spat out, while Nexter is closing the last of his magazines and giving the rest of us a thoughtful, pragmatic look. And Elliou, shy little Elliou who becomes almost catatonic after her injections, says, out of the counselors’ hearing, “We gotta get out of this place.”

The Aide’s Excuse

I was in charge of night-watch on the nursery, yes, but it was a big task for one person, and mainly it was automated. I was really just there for the human touch. The orphans were usually very good, easy to keep quiet, always occupied with their tasks and research. Of course, they were just children, and with all they were going through you had to expect the occasional outburst from a nightmare, bedwetting, pillow fights, that sort of thing. We always demanded obedience from them, and discipline for their own sakes, and usually they were good, they did as we suggested; though a bit of natural childish rebellion sometimes showed through.

But we never never expected anything like the chaos we found on that last night. The noise, the smell – of something rotten burning, a horrible spilled-guts stench, the scream of power tools. It sounded like they were being slaughtered in there, or murdering each other. It sounded like every kind of war imaginable. I can’t tell you the thoughts we had, the feeling of utter helpless horror.

It took us hours to break the doors down, they had done something to the locks, and by then everyone was working on the problem – which of course was what they wanted, to completely distract us with the thought that our whole project was coming to a violent end before our eyes. And we did believe it at first. The smoke was so dense there was no entering. Plastic continued to burn, there were toxic fumes, and from somewhere unimaginable all that charred and bloody meat. The metal walls had been peeled back, the wiring exposed, the plumbing ripped out, the floor itself torn right to bedrock. Impossible to believe anyone could have survived it.

But they hadn’t. They were long gone. We found the speakers, and those ghastly instruments they’d made from what had been the nursery computer’s vocalizer, turned all the way up. They were naughty, naughty, naughty…

From The Twelves Fiasco: A Fiscal Post-Mortem

…Which of the six children gained access to the index of neurodistillates is still uncertain, and short of confession from one of the gang themselves we may never know, so cleverly was the trail concealed. There are literally no clues remaining from which to reconstruct the incident – thus helping to explain why no member of the project staff was able to anticipate or prevent the eventual revolt.

What is certain, however, is that the Six selected their injections carefully, screening the half dozen they settled upon from among literally hundreds of thousands of possible stored distillates. The descriptive records pertaining to each donor were safeguarded by ‘unbreakable’ encryption methods, which nonetheless must have been broken within a mere seven days, the period of time elapsed between Shendy Anickson’s sole journal entry (which cuts off when the Six apparently first began to conceive the plan, unless this too is a false lead), and the latest possible date at which the distillates could have been removed. It remains a greater mystery how they gained access to the storage vault, considering that it is 32.7 kilometers from the Twelves Center, that the children possessed no vehicles more advanced than push-scooters, and that the vault is protected by security systems so advanced that they may not be discussed or described in this report. Twelves Center itself is modeled after a high-security prison installation which has to date foiled every attempt at escape.

Their criteria for selecting donors is only slightly more explicable:

Obviously, the six subjects had access to virtually all historical and contemporary records that did not directly threaten their own security or the integrity of the experiment. Limitless research was encouraged. We know from pathtracking records that the children evinced an unusual interest in unseemly topics – predominantly the lesser byproducts of Western culture – ignoring almost completely the consensus classics of world literature, visual art and music, and those figures of history most commonly regarded as important. They treated these subjects almost casually, as if they were too easily grasped to be of any interest, and concentrated instead on what might be called the vernacular icons of time. It has been suggested that in this regard they showed their true age; that despite the interlarding of mature mental matter, they were motivated by a far deeper emotional immaturity – which goes a long way toward explaining their fascination with those “pop” (that is, “popular”) phenomena which have long been regarded as indicative of an infantile culture. It mattered little to the Twelves Six that the objects of their curiosity were of utter insignificance in the grander scheme; in fact, they bore a special affection for those figures who were obscure even as “pop” artifacts. Rather than focusing, for example, on Michael Jackson or Madonna, Andy Warhol or William Burroughs, figures whose stature is at least understandable due to the size of their contemporary following (and who are therefore accorded a sort of specialised interest by sociostatisticians in the study of population mechanics and infatudynamics), the Six showed most interest in such fringe phenomena as the fiction of Jack Sharkey, the films of Russ Meyer, Vampirella Comics (especially the work of Isidro Mones), the preserved tattoos of Greg Irons, Subgenius cults, and the music of anonymous “garage” bands.

It is no wonder then that, turned loose in the brain-bank directories with an extensive comparative knowledge of coterminous culture, they sought out figures with a close spiritual kinship to those they had studied at some distance. Of course, few of their pop favorites were donors (one geriatric member of Spot 1019 being the sole exception), so they were forced to find acceptable analogues. Unfortunately (from the comptroller’s point of view), in the first years of Twelves-ready brainmatter harvesting the nets were cast far and wide, and selective requirements were extremely low. Every sort of personality was caught in the first sweep, some of them possessing severe character defects, sociopathy, tendencies to vandalism and rebellion, and addictions to crass “art.” Without being more specific (in order to protect survivors and relatives of the original first-sweep donors, who may themselves be quite well adjusted), we can state that the Six carefully chose their antecedents from among this coarser sort of population. They did, in fact, willfully select their personality additives from among the most exemplary forms of the planet’s lowlife…

A Witness

How do we know when they’re coming? Kid, there’s a whole network – if you know how to crack it – keeps us up to date. They’re always one step ahead of the law, that’s what makes it so exciting, so you have to stay on the hop. One time we were at a show, me and my lover Denk, Wunderkindergarten’s been playing less than ten minutes – but those minutes were like a whole lifetime compressed down to this intense little burning wad of sensation – and suddenly it’s sirens, lights, smoke grenades going off. Cops! We were okay, you don’t go without being prepared, knowing all the exits. They kept playing, playing – five seconds, ten, the alarms going off, the smoke so thick I lost hold of Denk, everyone’s screaming at the Six to run for it, get out of there, don’t risk it, live free to play another day, but the music’s still going and Shendy’s voice is just so pure cutting through it like a stabbing strobelight cutting back at the cop rays, and then I’m trapped in the crowd, can’t even find my feet, and I look up overhead, the smoke’s clearing, and there’s just this beautiful moment where everything is still and her voice is a single high pure note like she can do, a perfect tone with words in it all tumbling together, and above I see the vultures floating over us in their big gunboats – but then I see it’s not the cops at all, kid-o-kid, it’s the Six up there, and I swear Shendy’s looking right at me waving out the hatch of the ship as it lifts away spraying light and sound – and the backwash blows away the last of the smoke and we look on the stage, there’s six naked cops standing there, strapped up in their own manacles looking stunned and stupid, holding instruments, this big bitch with a mike taped to her lips and she’s screaming – it fades in, taking over from Shendy’s voice as they lift away, until all you can hear is the cops in misery, and our laughter. There’s nothing they could do to us – we’re too young – but we still got out of there in a hurry, and talked about it for weeks, trying to figure out how they did it, but we never did. And a few weeks after that, somebody gets the word – “Show’s coming…” And it all starts again.

The Song They Sang

This is our song this is our song this is our sa-aw-ong!

It goes along it goes along it goes a-law-aw-ong!

This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!

It goes along it goes along it goes on way too long…

Huh!

You can’t hold us – any more.

You can’t even tell us when to – take our naps.

We can’t stomach your brain feeding – your program juices.

We’re not worms with goofy cartoon eyes – we’re not your saps.

Huh?

This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!

It goes along it goes along it goes a-law-aw-ong!

This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!

It goes along it goes along it goes on way too long…

Tell it, Shen!

Your brain matter my brain patter what’s it mean and what’s it matter flattened affect stamp and shatter babysitter’s a madder hatter what you want with myomolecule myelin sheath’s the least that she can do can you can’t you can’t you can’t you do kee-kee-kee-kootchi-kootchi-coo bay-bay-bay you bay-baby boy stay-stay-stay I’ll show you super-toy here’s your brain and here’s your brainiac suck my skull you racking maniac I can ro-oo-aar my voice is hii-ii-igh I-I can crawl between your legs and kick you’ll die-ie-ie I-I can make no sense since I can sense no maybe I can still remember I’m just a ba-a-aby you wanna cradle me daddy you wanna rock me mum I can still feel your fingers in my cal-lo-sum no more no more you’ll twist can’t catch what you can’t resist your voices inside my head I shout and I scream they’re dead no I can’t hear you now won’t milk your sacred cow hafta haul your own shit now I’m climbing on top a your tower I’m pissing all over your power I’m loving it when you cower go change your OWN FUCKING DIAPERS YOU OSSIFIED DINOSAUR FREAKS I WISH A COMET’D COME DOWN AND COVER THIS WHOLE WRETCHED PLANET IN BLACK BLACK UTTERLY BLACK DEEPER THAN THE PIT SO YOU’D CHOKE AND DIE IN THE UGLY LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE AGES AGO IN YOUR TRASHHEAP CITES cuz I will ride that comet I’ll steer it down from the sky and after all the smoke subsides then so will I-I-I-I-IIIIIII I.

Interview

XUOVOMOMO: You’re the voice of the Six, aren’t you?

SHENDY ANICKSON: I’m cursed with the gift of gab, yeah.

NVM: Is it your philosophy alone you spout, or a mutual thing the Six of you share?

SA: We don’t know what we think until I say it; I don’t know what to say until they think it for me. Six is one. I’m only the mouth.

NVM: But are your thoughts – any of your thoughts – your own?

SA: What are you – hey, kid, fuck you, all right? You think because I got a few doses of the Twelves, I can’t think for myself?

NVM: I thought –

SA: I’ve worked hard to forge my own personality out of all that mess. You think it’s been easy?

NVM: – that was your whole message.

SA: Message? What message?

NVM: That you were full of so many personalities you couldn’t tell which were your own – you never had a chance to find yourself.

SA: Sure. My psyche formed in the shadow of huge archaic structures, but me, I grew in the dark, I’m one of those things, a toadstool, I got big and tall and I knocked those old monsters down. I don’t owe them a thing. You can get strong, even Twelvin’ it. We turned the whole process against the dults. That’s our message, if you can call it anything. To the kids today, don’t let them stick their prehistoric ideas down your craw – don’t let them infect your fresh, healthy young minds with their old diseases. If you have to Twelve, then inject each other.

NVM: Now you’re sounding like Shendy the notorious kiddie-rouser.

SA: You gonna blame me for the riots next? I thought you were sympathetic.

NVM: Our subscribers are curious. Shouldn’t they be able to make up their own minds?

SA: I never incited any riots. The fact is, every kid already knows what I’m singing. It’s an insult the way dults treat them – us. As if we’re weak just because we’re small. But hey, small things get in the cracks of the street, they push the foundations apart, they force change from underneath and erode the heavy old detritus of banks and museums and research centers.

NVM: Should adults fear you?

SA: Me? What am I but some experiment of theirs that went wrong in a way they never imagined but richly deserved? No… I have everything I need, it’s not me who’s coming after them. They should fear the ones they’ve been oppressing all these years. They should fear their own children.

NVM: What are your plans for the future?

SA: To grow old gracefully, or not at all.

I’m with the Band

The whole ‘tot’ = ‘death’ connection, it was there in the beginning, but none of us could see it.

I can’t deny it was an attractive way of life, we had our own community, Twelving each other, all our ideas so intimate. We felt like we were gardeners tending a new world.

This was right after the peak of the musical thing. Wunderkindergarten was moving away from that whole idea of the spectacle, becoming more of a philosophical movement, a way of life. It had never been just pure entertainment, not for us, the way it hooked at you, the way Shendy’s voice seemed to come out of our own mouths, she was so close to us – but somewhere along the way it became both more and less than anyone supposed.

I was in the vanguard, traveling with the group, the official freezeframer, and we’d been undercover for so long, this endless grueling existence, constantly on the run, though it had a kind of rough charm.

Then it all changed, our audience spoke for us so eloquently that the dults just couldn’t hold us back any more, we had turned it all upside down until it became obvious to everyone that now we were on top.

Once you’re there, of course, the world looks different. I think Shendy had the hardest time dealing with it because she had to constantly work it out verbally, that was her fixation, and the more she explored the whole theme of legitimacy, the more scary it became to her. You could really see her wanting to go backward, underground again, into the shell – at the same time she was groping for acceptance, as we all were, no matter how rebellious. We were really sort of pathetic.

Elliou was the first to drop out, and since she and I were lovers then, after I broke up with Shendy, naturally I went with her. We started the first Garten on Banks Island, in that balmy interim when the Arctic Circle had just begun to steam up from polar evaporation, before the real cooling set in.

It was really beautiful at first, this natural migration of kids from everywhere, coming together, all of us with this instantaneous understanding of who we were, what we needed. We had always been these small stunted things growing in the shadows of enormous hulks, structures we didn’t understand, complex systems we played no part in – while all we really wanted to do, you see, was play.

That was how most of the destruction came about – as play. “Riot” is really the wrong word to describe what we were doing – at least in our best moments. The Gartens were just places where we could feel safe and be ourselves.

It didn’t last, though. Shendy, always the doomsayer, had warned us – but she was such a pessimist it was easy to ignore her.

The Six had been the original impetus – the best expression of our desires and dreams. Now the Six were only Five. We found ourselves listening to the old recordings, losing interest in the live Five shows.

Then Five turned to Four, and that broke up soon after. They went their own ways.

Then Elliou and I had a huge fight, and I never saw her again.

The Gartens disintegrated almost before they’d planted roots. Hard to say what the long-range effects were, if any. I’m still too much a product of my childhood to be objective.

But forget the received dult wisdom that puberty was our downfall. That’s ridiculous.

It was a good two years after I left the Garten before my voice began to change.

A Quote For Your Consideration

Intense adolescent exploration, as far as we know, is common to all animals. Science’s speculation is that such exploring ensures the survival of a group of animals by familiarizing them with alternatives to their home ranges, which they can turn to in an emergency.

– Barry Lopez

Where Are They Now?

Elliou Cambira: Wife, mother, author of Who Did I Think I Was? Makes occasional lecture tours.

Dabney Tuakutza: Owner of “Big Baby Bistro” snack bar chain. Left Earth’s gravity at age thirteen and has resided at zero gee ever since, growing enormously fat.

Nexter Crowtch: Financier, erotic film producer, one-time owner of the Sincinnati Sex-Change Warriors. Recently convicted of real estate and credit fraud, bribery of public officials. Awaiting sentencing.

Corinne Braub: Whereabouts unknown.

Likki Velex: Conceptual dance programmer and recluse.

Shendy Anickson: Took her own life.

Shendy’s Last Words (First Draft)

I’m sick – sick to death. There’s nothing to say but I still have the vomitous urge to say anything, just to spew. My brain feels burned, curdled, denatured. Scorching Summer came too early for us orphans. Straight on into Winter. I don’t remember Spring and know I’ll never see another. Too much Twelving, none of it right – it wasn’t my fault, they started it, I ran with what I was given/what they gave me till I ran out of things to say, new things, meaningful things. Nothing to push against. My mind was full of big ugly shapes, as bad as anything they’d ever injected, but these I had built myself. I’d knock them down but the ruins covered everything, there was nowhere to build anything new. I knew who I was for the first time, and I hated it. Straight from infancy to adulthood. Adolescence still lies ahead of me, but that’s only physical, it can’t take me anywhere I haven’t been already. Everything’s spoiled – me most of all. I wanted to start again. I wanted to go back to what I was before. I got this kid, this little girl, much younger than me, she reminded me of myself when I was just starting out. I Twelved her. Took a big dose of baby. It was too soft; the shoggoths came and almost melted me. The brain slag turned all bubbly and hardened like molten glass plunged in icewater; cracks shot all through me. Thought to recapture something but I nearly exploded from the softness. All I could do to drag myself out here to R’lyeh Shores. Got a condo – bought the whole complex and had it all to myself. Corinne came out to visit on her way to disappearing. She brought a vial of brainsap, unlabelled, said this was what I was looking for, when I shot it I’d see. Then she went away. I waited a long time. I didn’t want another personality at this late stage. Twelve. Killed me to think that I was – finally – twelve myself. And that’s what I did. I Twelved Myself. I took the dose Corinne had brought – just this morning – and first I got the old urge to write as it came on, but then the shock was too great and I could only sit there hang-jawed. It was Me. A younger me. They must have drawn and stored the stuff before the first experiment – a control/led/ling substance, innocent unpolluted Me. The rush made me sick so sick. Like going back in time, seeing exactly what would become of me. Like being three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve all at once. Like being a baby and having some decrepit old hag come up to me and say, this is what you’re going to do to yourself, what do you have to live for anyway? see how awful it’s going to be? you think you’re cute but everyone will know how ugly you really are, here, why don’t you just come understand everything? And baby just drools and starts to cry because she knows the truth is exactly what she’s being told by the stinky old hag who is herself. Is Me. All at once and forever. This is final. What I was looking for – and I’ve ruined it. Nowhere newer; no escape hatch; no greener garden. Only one way to fix what they broke so long ago. I loved to hate; I built to wreck; I lived to die. All the injections they doped and roped me into, not a single one of them convinced me I should cry.

* * *

“Wunderkindergarten” copyright 1992 Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in In Dreams (1992), edited by Kim Newman and Paul McAuley.

THE VULTURE MAIDEN

With the development of our socialist system, the social system for the natural extinction of religion was established.

— Ganze Prefecture Policy on Religious Freedom Chapter 5, Section 1: “Freedom of Religious Beliefs is a Long-Term Policy That Will Prevail Until the Natural Extinction of Religion.”

I.

The Spring Festival began at sunrise with the roar of a giant kangling carried by two monks and blown by a barrel-chested third who stood on the highest wall of the Shining Hill monastery’s central temple. Golden light, like the voice of the horn made visible, lanced into the gray shadows that covered the broad valley as the sun peered through a notch between distant peaks capped with violet snow. Frost evaporated from the tufted brownish grasses, mingling with low, icy vapors that made the sky appear to shimmer like a silken tapestry. In the hall below, the crashing of cymbals rose to overpower the kangling’s dying wail, and then came the low, deep-throated chanting of the monks. The rocky hill behind the monastery began to glow with a warm, honeyed light.

As the monks turned away from the sun and toward Shining Hill, carrying their immense horn back into the building, the sunlight touched a plume of dust rising from the road to the monastery. Along that road, from the direction of the nearby village, a convoy of six trucks drummed and rattled. Ahead of them walked a long procession of villagers bearing scarves and wildflowers, sacks of nuts and grain and other offerings. The trucks sounded their horns, scarcely slowing as they approached the crowd; villagers scattered quickly, pulling each other out of the way, shouting warnings to those ahead. They moved to the roadside and glowered at the passing vehicles, saying nothing, not daring to curse the drivers because they knew that such words hung in the air and joined with other unwise things they might have uttered in a moment of despair, and eventually ended up in an official’s file so that one day the speaker might be summoned to a brief “interview” and never be seen again in the village. This was even more likely now that the ledhon rukhag, the work gang whose trucks these were, had been dispatched to the village.

The trucks reached the Shining Hill monastery just as the hill began to lose some of its legendary luster. They parked on the rutted earth before the main building. When the engines died, the sound of chanting filled the silence. High-pitched bells were ringing and pure songbowls singing, their weird wavering notes as piercing as the thin air that scoured Zhogmi Chhodak’s nostrils, threatening him with yet another nosebleed, when he opened his door and stepped down from the first truck. This was spring? His feet were numb despite the heavy boots and thick woolen socks he had brought from Beijing; a shock of cold passed through his soles and up his legs, as if the very earth were trying to stab him, as if the elements of the Tibetan Autonomous Region harbored an irrational enmity and would strike him down if they could.

Full of regret at leaving the warmth of the heated cab, he surveyed the grounds of Shining Hill. The local Democratic Management Committee had promised to meet his work gang on the steps of the main building, but there was no sign of them. The compound was sorry-looking, half-finished, no better than some prisons he had toured, despite all the money the monks had requested for restoration so that Shining Hill might attract a tourist trade. That was no longer a priority, however. Tourists had brought welcome money into the TAR, but too many other contaminants traveled with them, diseases for which no inoculant existed other than total isolation. Capitalism was a greater scourge than the bitter winds that swept the high Tibetan plateau. Under the current protection of martial law, Zhogmi could act without caring how the propagandists of the Dalai clique would interpret his actions. He had a sort of freedom here.

Zhogmi Chhodak could not imagine a more isolated place. He longed for the busy streets of Beijing, the cultural center of the world. He shared a common ancestry with the villagers, but nothing else. The Party offered incentives to mainland Chinese who moved to Tibet, but so far there had been few migrants to this region. In Lhasa and some other parts of the TAR, the indigenous population was outnumbered more than ten to one by immigrants; would that it were so here. The villagers were a primitive, superstitious people. The shame they caused Zhogmi sharpened his determination to bring them forward, though still he cursed his Tibetan blood, which had landed him in this remote outpost. One could almost imagine that the Revolution had never reached this spot—except that the rubble of the monastery still showed the marks of mortar shelling, and the hill was in places torn by craters made when he was a boy.

The chanting in the temple continued unabated, and the villagers on the road were nearer. Zhogmi’s men stood shivering in their coats, stamping on the hard dirt, blowing on their hands. His driver had gone around a corner of the temple to urinate, so Zhogmi opened the driver’s door and bleated the horn. It sounded feeble after the kangling’s roar, and had no apparent effect on the ritual. Nonetheless, within seconds there was a stir inside the temple entrance, and four men hurried down the steps to greet the trucks.

“Zhogmi! Welcome!” said a broadly smiling man, speaking in a hushed voice, as if not wishing to impinge on the sounds coming from the hall. Jowo Tenzin was Tibetan, paunchy and balding, and dressed very inappropriately in a native chuba that did little to disguise his bulk. As leader of the Democratic Management Committee, that agency which oversaw the functioning of the monastery, Tenzin was responsible for enforcing the policies of the Nationalities and Religious Affairs Bureau Commission. He seized Zhogmi’s hand and shoulder, bringing him up the steps toward the entrance. The other three DMC members, dressed more suitably in the khaki or dark-blue uniforms of the Republic, greeted Zhogmi more cautiously.

“The seasonal ceremonies are just beginning,” Tenzin said breathlessly. “If you wish to see—”

“I have no desire to see misguided displays of superstition.” Zhogmi pulled from Tenzin’s grasp and took a stand on the topmost step, just outside the temple entrance. He could smell a rancid burning odor and a perfume of incense. “Nor should you indulge in such behavior.”

“Indulge? I don’t encourage a thing—I merely permit what the law allows.”

The youngest DMC member, a Chinese man named Jing Meng-Chen, moved closer. “We monitor the ceremonies only to ensure their legitimacy. It is all too easy to subvert the rites with irrelevant commentary disguising a political purpose.”

Zhogmi nodded his approval, and waited to see if Tenzin agreed. Jing Meng-Chen clearly would have been a sensible choice to head the DMC, but it was not uncommon to secure the sympathy of locals by entrusting some authority to a malleable Tibetan. Such flexibility, inevitably, also played a part in counterrevolutionary conduct. Since Jing Meng-Chen did not seem the sort to compromise principles for the sake of personal gain, Zhogmi decided that he was the man to carry out his bidding.

“I appreciate your devotion,” he told Jing Meng-Chen. “However, further observation will not be necessary this morning.

“That’s fine,” Jowo Tenzin said happily. “They are a trustworthy lot.”

“On the contrary,” Zhogmi said, and watched sharp creases suddenly divide Tenzin’s broad brow. “The ritual will be stopped immediately.”

“But… but really!” Tenzin protested. “That’s quite illegal.”

“Not under the circumstances,” Zhogmi said.

He saw that Jing Meng-Chen did not question his command, and in fact seemed ready to carry it out. “Put an end to that racket,” Zhogmi told him.

“Yes, sir.”

“And take some of my men along if you think you’ll need help.”

Jing Meng-Chen glanced at the machine guns in the hands of the work team.

“That won’t be necessary, sir.”

“Nonetheless—it’s best for efficiency.” He signaled several men toward the temple.

“Appreciated, sir,” said Jing Meng-Chen. He turned back into the temple, followed by several soldiers of the work team. The other two DMC men also went inside, though Jowo Tenzin remained on the steps exhorting Zhogmi for an explanation.

“Last night I reviewed the monastery’s accounts, Jowo Tenzin, and I found much to trouble me. Government grants have apparently vanished; huge amounts were withdrawn to make purchases for which no invoices appear; and there are numerous unauthorized expenditures. Unless and until you can explain each of these discrepancies, I am seizing the monastery’s assets. No money shall be withdrawn from the monastic account either by monks or the DMC.”

“But—but there are day-to-day requirements. The monks must eat.”

“They shall earn a useful living doing necessary public works, as they should have been all along, instead of wasting resources on this ruin. What tourist would visit Shining Hill? It has no historic significance.”

“To the villagers—”

“Would you encourage nostalgia for the old days of feudal oppression? Buddhism itself teaches the danger of attachment to illusion and material things.”

Jowo Tenzin’s stricken look told Zhogmi that he had made the right first move in stanching further waste and uncovering deceit.

“What do you know of Buddhism?” Tenzin whispered.

“I have served in the Tibetan Buddhist Guidance Committee and the Tibetan Buddhist Association.”

Zhogmi had been aware for some time of the approach of the villagers. They stopped at the yard before the temple and anxiously looked toward the entrance. The presence of the work gang discouraged them. Zhogmi’s men faced the growing crowd, guns at the ready. They had seen such crowds before, and the villagers had seen such men. No one wished to move. But the day was warming, the hampering ice in Zhogmi’s joints beginning to thaw. The sky shimmered like silk, like a thangka painted in unreal colors.

In the temple the monks fell silent.

Jowo Tenzin said quietly, “Perhaps if… if you waited until later, after the ceremony, it would benefit your plans. Many of them have brought offerings that might make up for the debts—”

“This monastery is not permitted to tax or take donations from the people,” Zhogmi said sharply. “They already struggle to live with what they have. You dare not encourage religious parasites!”

“I only—”

At that instant, someone inside the temple let out a cry, scarcely muffled by the stone walls. A burst of gunfire answered it. Bullets must have ricocheted from the ceremonial bells and bowls, for a hideous, metallic, many-voiced music followed the sound of the guns. This fractured wailing was drowned out by the screams of the villagers, who in that instant rushed the trucks and crowded toward the temple steps.

Zhogmi’s gun was already in his hand, but the size of the mob startled him. He sprang back into the entryway while other men of his team ran forward to defend it. Broad pillars inside the door offered excellent cover while they fired down into the crowd. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jowo Tenzin dash down a side corridor; other monks rushed about, trying to find cover. He squeezed off several shots over the heads of the villagers, who, after their initial indignant charge, had realized the futility of their position and begun falling back behind the trucks. Most were already running down the road toward the village. A few bodies struggled on the bare ground before the temple, and then it was over.

Zhogmi called a cease-fire. There had been no answering shots from the mob, not even a flung stone. It occurred to him that they had charged the temple out of concern for the monks; but in the moment of their assault, he had felt claustrophobic, on the verge of being overwhelmed. Now that feeling passed. The work team was in control

Jing Meng-Chen stumbled from the interior of the building, holding his hand to a bloody shoulder. “One of your men fired,” he reported.

Zhogmi pulled the man’s bloodied hand away from his shoulder; the skin was gouged, but the wound looked minor. “How did this happen?”

“A stray bullet—it’s nothing.”

Gesturing to one gunman to follow, Zhogmi headed toward the central hall. “Are they still resisting?” he asked Jing Meng-Chen.

“Still?”

Beyond a row of columns, they came into a vast room where the smell and smoke of incense were inseparable from those of gunpowder. Several dozen monks lay prostrate, bald heads covered with their hands, trembling and whimpering. Zhogmi’s men stood over them.

“Good,” Zhogmi told them. “Did any run off?”

“One tried.” A lone monk sprawled in a corner; it was hard to tell where his maroon robes ended and the blood began. Zhogmi crossed the room to a hallway beyond it. There were small, dark alcoves here, plenty of hiding places. He indicated that his gunman should follow the corridor to the right; he went to the left with Jing Meng-Chen.

“Jowo Tenzin ran this way when the shooting started,” he said quietly. “I’m not sure I trust him.”

“He is not to be feared,” said Jing Meng-Chen. “At worst a coward.”

“A coward in his position can do much harm.”

Someone stepped into the corridor ahead of them—a man too wiry and small to be Jowo Tenzin. He carried a long dagger cocked in one hand, red wetness gleaming at the tip.

Zhogmi ducked sideways and fired a single shot. The figure slumped back through a doorway, letting out a wheezing cry. Jing Meng-Chen shouted and ran past Zhogmi, through the door.

“Careful!” Zhogmi cautioned, fearing that he had only wounded the assassin. He crept to the threshold and saw on the floor, by the light of a weak electric lamp, the object he’d mistaken for a dagger.

It was a paintbrush.

Inside the chamber, Jing Meng-Chen knelt beside the wounded man. The wall behind him was streaked with red—some of it carefully applied in the outline of a large figure, but the rest sloppily dashed and smeared and dripping. A red streak showed where the man had slid against the wall as he died. He was small and slender, with gray hair and delicate hands that had just stopped trembling.

Jing Meng-Chen turned toward Zhogmi Chhodak, his face unreadable. Zhogmi did not know what to say; but he need not explain himself. Any accident in these circumstances was excusable.

At that moment, Jowo Tenzin pressed into the chamber. “What happened here? What—oh my! Oh no!”

Tenzin rushed to the frail old man, cradling him in his arms. Jing Meng-Chen backed away and bowed slightly to Zhogmi before announcing in a neutral tone, “He’s dead.”

Tenzin cried, “Why Gyatso Samphel? What did he do?”

“He attacked Zhogmi Chhodak,” Jing Meng-Chen said sharply. Zhogmi shifted uncomfortably, despite being grateful for the support.

“Attacked? I—I don’t believe it. He never would have hurt a soul.”

“Perhaps we came too near his precious mural. You knew Gyatso Samphel. If he thought his maiden goddess was in danger, nothing would stop him from protecting her.”

Zhogmi looked at the wall with new interest. It was ancient stone, part of the original temple, the surface chipped and shattered. Traces of faded tints lingered among dabs of bright new color—mostly red—that had been so recently applied. The form of a maiden might have been taking shape there, but the lines were so vague and incomplete that he could hardly imagine her.

Tenzin went back to ministering hopelessly over the corpse. “This is terrible,” he kept saying. “Terrible.”

“We should get the bodies out of the temple,” said Jing Meng-Chen. “It will be best to dispose of them somewhere away from the village.” Zhogmi was glad for the young man’s efficiency. He felt that he could safely surrender this task to him.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am unfamiliar with the area…”

“Leave it to me, sir. I would be pleased to see this through.”

Tenzin gave his DMC associate a look of utter horror. It was enough to convince Zhogmi that he had found himself a trustworthy aide.

Zhogmi went back to the central hall, where the monks still lay in abject surrender on the stone flags.

“The Shining Hill monastery is clearly the proper focus for our investigations,” he announced to them and to his men. “We will relocate from the village this afternoon and make our base here. All restoration work is hereby suspended until a full investigation has been concluded and approved by the United Front Work Department. I notice that Shining Hill is particularly rocky; once broken down to the proper size, the stones should make excellent material for roadbeds. I will distribute work orders for all monks, provided they can prove that they did not participate in this act of counterrevolution.”

There was no response, but he did not expect one. His men went to work with their usual efficiency, rounding up the monks. They ordinarily lived in cramped dormitories and shabby little outbuildings clustered on the hillside behind the temple; but until a system for monitoring them could be established, he ordered they be kept in the central hall for easy observation. Many of the TAR’s major monasteries were overseen by two or more army contingents. On a tour he’d taken of the Ganden monastery near Lhasa, he had passed through three checkpoints where pilgrims were identified and searched while approaching the monastery; the monks themselves required passes from the DMC in order to leave the grounds, and were always thoroughly searched before reentering. Given the primitive local conditions and the size of his force, Zhogmi could only dream of establishing such order—but it was something to aim for.

It felt good to cut through the administrative nonsense and take direct action. He was finally making his presence felt. Last night, wading through paperwork—confused ledgers and bank statements—he had nearly despaired of achieving anything here. But now it looked as if this would not be a wasted assignment after all.

Only one thing still troubled him: the memory of a small man darting out with a blade that had magically transformed into a paintbrush.

If he kept his mind clean and clear, his principles firmly in sight, then he need feel no pangs of conscience. What good was the old man’s mural, after all? It had no value, no purpose except to reinforce religious thinking. An aura of superstition clung to this place, like the soot of incense that smudged the temple’s walls. He must not let it cloud his thoughts.

Zhogmi strode down the steps of the temple, keeping his eyes away from the speckled trails in the dust where things recently had been dragged out of sight. He looked out over the quiet valley and took a deep breath. There was never enough air at this altitude to fill his lungs. At least his sharp headaches had ceased to come so frequently; he supposed he was finally acclimating, though he didn’t like the reminder that his ancestors had dwelt on this high plain, their blood adapted to absorb greater concentrations of oxygen than those of sea-level inhabitants. Biologically, he supposed he should have felt at home in Tibet. If he did well in his post—as he intended—the Religious Affairs Bureau would station him here indefinitely. He hated that thought, but hated even more the idea of being in conflict with his duty. He must strive to be at peace with himself. With sufficient promotion, he might one day return to a centralized post, a position of power in Beijing.

He walked around the side of the temple, looking up toward Shining Hill. As the day warmed toward noon, it looked like simply another bare Tibetan slope, a treeless mound, and the monastery merely a heap of ugly slabs and broken rock with tattered prayer flags flying.

Something else was flying, he noticed. Dark specks circled near the peak of Shining Hill.

Vultures.

II

On the far side of Shining Hill, just below the crest, lay a broad slab of brown-stained granite where Jing Meng-Chen worked quietly and quickly with a sharp curved knife, cutting deftly through tendon and muscle, ripping cords of sinew, twisting bone from meat. A woman’s thin brown arm came loose from her shoulder; he laid it on the rock beside its twin, then started in on the legs. While he worked, he whispered the few words of the Bardo Thodol—The Liberation Through Hearing—that he remembered, wondering if the woman’s spirit could hear him, wondering if she saw the vultures that circled overhead and waited just out of reach on the flat rock that formed their table. Toward the edges of the rock, some were already feeding. Broad-winged shadows crossed over him again and again as he worked, stitching patterns on the stone that were, in their own dark way, reassuring. Some things, at least, had not changed; some traditions, when disguised as necessary surreptition, could still be carried out. The elaborate rites of the Bardo Thodol were well on their way to being forgotten, but the vultures would never lapse in the duty nature had given them.

Five more bodies lay in a row on the rock behind him. He had sent away Zhogmi Chhodak’s men when they’d finished carrying the bodies up to the rock, and they had been eager to leave when they saw what he intended. And Jing was grateful to be alone, to mourn in his own fashion, as he cleanly cut the lines that had attached him to these lives.

As he worked, he gathered small identifying articles from each victim—a turquoise ring, a string of mani beads—which he would give to their families later. Only Gyatso Samphel, whose body was the last in line, had no living relative. Jing Meng-Chen had been closest of any to the old artist.

Jing Meng-Chen was not Chinese; his Tibetan name—the name his parents had given him—was Dorje Wangdu. His family had lived near Shining Hill for generations, following old ways of life, with some of their sons joining the monastery, some daughters going to the nunnery, which survived only as a bomb-blasted heap down in a cleft of the hill below the table rock. Most of his ancestors had been trained in the necessary rites of sky burial. It was the rock of the Vulture Maiden.

Shining Hill had for ages been known as the “Shining Hill of the Vulture Maiden,” but that name had been considered too unsavory by communist officials when they came through with their maps seeking likely tourist sites, applying new Chinese names to places that already had ancient Tibetan ones. The Vulture Maiden was a revered local deity, an ancient goddess traditionally associated with this peak, this specific rock. The early Bonpo sorcerers had appeased her with magic and traded offerings for her favors. The great Indian saint Padmasambhava had challenged her to a magical battle on the condition that if he defeated her, then she must become a defender of Buddhism. The Vulture Maiden, failing to injure him, had become a ferocious protector of the faith. Today her powers were more spiritual than temporal, but it had not always been so, according to the stories old Gyatso Samphel had told Jing Meng-Chen when he was a boy:

“Many hundreds of years ago, a band of Mongol brigands attacked our village,” the old artist had once told him. “They plundered the stores, then assaulted the nunnery on Shining Hill. There was no monastery in those days. The Vulture Maiden was worshiped there by twelve nuns. In fact, her incarnation dwelt among them as a beautiful girl. It was she who met the marauders as they rode over Shining Hill. The chief robber was stunned at the sight of her, not knowing that she was a goddess, thinking her nothing but a lovely maiden. He vowed that if she willingly surrendered herself and became his bride, he would spare the other nuns. She agreed in order to spare her sisters suffering, but of course he was lying. No sooner had he put her on his horse than the chief robber ordered his men to take the nunnery. The Vulture Maiden rose straight up in the air, huge wings appearing from her shoulders, and into the nunnery she flew, locking the gate behind her. The furious robbers set fire to the building—which in those days was made of wood. As the smoke and flames began to rise, cries came from inside the nunnery, but gradually these cries became hoarse and strange, until finally the roof collapsed in an explosion of sparks and clouds of smoke. At that moment the brigands saw thirteen huge vultures rising from the pyre, circling into the sky. The Vulture Maiden, you see, had reverted to her proper form, and taken her devotees with her. And since that day, the vultures have watched over Shining Hill.”

“What of the robbers?” Jing Meng-Chen had asked.

“Ah, they fled the wrath of the Vulture Maiden, but they couldn’t run fast or far enough. Eventually, unable to eat or sleep for fright, they toppled from their horses and died where they fell. And then… they were eaten by the nuns!”

Today, as Jing Meng-Chen worked, there were substantially more than thirteen vultures in view; it was as if they had come from all over the mountains to this offering. They were all shaggy, weather-beaten birds; any one of them looked ancient enough to be one of the original thirteen. But which, he wondered, was the Vulture Maiden? Gyatso Samphel had said she could take any form—that, in fact, the beautiful maiden and the hideous bird were really the same thing… for the dead, when offered up in a sky burial, perceived the vultures as beautiful women coming to carry them to heaven.

Jing Meng-Chen hoped that these innocent dead, villagers and monks, might find some beauty in their last sight of earth. They had seen such ugliness in recent decades. If only the Vulture Maiden had turned them all into vultures when the occupying armies flooded into Tibet; when, instead of one nunnery, thousands were destroyed. As vultures, they could have circled above their land, screeching out the vanity of conquest, reminding the Chinese that one day they would stagger and fall, and the waiting birds descend.

But no miracles had aided Tibet in recent years. The Vulture Maiden and the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the dakinis and spirits of water and rock and sky, all had stood helpless before the weapons and overpowering numbers of the Red Chinese army. In the late 1950s and into the early ‘60s, the crushing might of the mainland had been brought to bear on the peaceful, unprotected people of Tibet. Their ragtag army, equipped with ancient muskets and rifles that they were scarcely trained to use, fell quickly. The physical devastation of war and occupation was horrible, but even worse was the constant psychic torture.

Shining Hill was far removed from the centers of fighting. Dorje had been a toddler when the troubles first reached his village, though there had been a Chinese prefect in the region for several years, his authority nominal and his attempts at enforcement halfhearted. Then one day a cadre of enthusiastic young Communists had arrived to commence the village’s reeducation. For a time the populace had grudgingly conceded to the demands of the cadre and learned to spout socialist maxims; but they soon grew to hate and resist the fanatical lessons, which were full of attacks on their beliefs and traditions, undermining their cultural identity. The core of this resistance came to be located in Shining Hill monastery, a huge and sprawling brother to the smaller but thriving nunnery on the far side of the hill. The monastery was a village in itself, patrolled by gangs of vigilant dob-dob, or fighting monks, who for years, though studying side by side, had fought for narrow margins of advantage within the monastery. With the arrival of the Chinese, the gangs had joined as allies. It was they who launched the first and last open demonstration against Chinese rule…

Little Dorje Wangdu had heard the thunder from Shining Hill and seen the plumes of smoke and dust. He joined his family in running to witness the battle. The monks had slings and stones and a few old rifles, but raking machine-gun fire kept them from the ramparts of their best-defended buildings, and cannon soon blasted even the thickest walls into rubble. The weapons of the army formed an impenetrable wall below the monastery, keeping back the villagers; no one could have ventured into that field without being crushed. The people watched in helpless horror. Occasionally, chips of shattered stone, flung by the fury of an explosion, stung their faces. For Dorje Wangdu, the sight itself was a cruel shard that buried itself in his brain, never to be dislodged.

Nor were the months that followed any easier to forget. The vultures stayed thick as snow clouds over Shining Hill. His father and older brother spent days dragging bodies from the ruined monastery and nunnery, taking them to the rock table, doing their accustomed work. They came home in shock, their faces stretched taut by a grief they dared not show before the soldiers for fear of being punished as sympathizers. For the eyes of authority, they wore masks of stone—visages hewn from the bedrock of their rage and sorrow. They managed to look neutral, even obedient. Jing Meng-Chen had molded his own features in their likeness, and the imitation of obedience had served him well ever since.

One terrible night, leaders of the cadre had come to rouse Dorje’s family for an emergency thamzing, or struggle session. These were regular features of village life under the cadre, but never had Dorje’s family been the target of the session—and never had the child himself been forced along. He was scarcely old enough to understand when his parents were accused of conspiring with monks and nuns to read from the forbidden Bardo Thodol while performing sky burials; there were other charges he did not understand. Some accusations, his parents and brother denied; others, they silently accepted. The villagers were forced to join in the accusations, to criticize the family’s betrayal of socialist principles. Many were in tears as they stammered out condemnations at the cadre leader’s prompting. Finally Dorje’s father flew into a rage, screaming at his old friends and companions, demanding they stand up to the Chinese and fight as the monks had done.

The meeting hall grew quiet. Jing Meng-Chen still remembered the fear Dorje Wangdu had felt in that silence, and the way the cadre leader had smiled very patiently, as if he understood everything; he still remembered how the cadre leader had taken out his gun and knelt beside him, whispering very soothingly to Dorje Wangdu as he fit the shiny gun into the little boy’s fingers.

At first, Dorje Wangdu did not understand how or why he had come to be the center of attention. The gun glittered very prettily, and it felt cold and heavy in his hand. He had always wanted to hold one, so he did not understand why his parents’ faces suddenly filled with dread.

The cadre leader showed him how to aim the gun, directing the boy’s arm until it pointed at his father. Dorje Wangdu looked into his father’s eyes and saw that they forgave him, but he didn’t know why he should be forgiven, or what he was about to do. Then the cadre leader’s finger gently pressed the boy’s finger, which lay lightly and nervously upon the mysterious trigger. And there was a sound….

A sound….

Dorje Wangdu died in that moment. Died as his father died. His soul stepped away from his body and watched his father fall. The disembodied spirit watched the cadre leader instruct the sad, dead little boy to repeat this action twice more, so that his mother fell, and then his brother. And the cadre leader, being very pleased with the boy’s uncompromising adherence to principles, thereupon adopted him and gave him a shiny new Chinese name, which was necessary because Dorje Wangdu was dead, and his body needed a new name to suit the lifeless force that inhabited it.

He had dwelt in the village, but apart from it, ever since. The cadre leader had eventually transferred to another village, but was not permitted to bring along a Tibetan child. Jing Meng-Chen remained behind, living on the welfare of the villagers, which was sparing—for though many pitied the orphan, their fear and mistrust were greater. He had lived too long with the Chinese.

Only Gyatso Samphel had reached out to him.

On the table rock, Jing Meng-Chen came at last to Gyatso’s body. Soon his work would be done. It was grisly work, yes, but it was honest and necessary, and not nearly as grim as the work he would continue when he had finished here, when he would return to the monastery to do the bidding of Zhogmi Chhodak.

He laid the old man gently on the stone. Dusty black birds flapped around him, impatient for him to finish; they were already busy feeding elsewhere, tearing strings of raw meat, circling up with bloody bones they sometimes dropped when fending off others with snaps of their black beaks. But the vultures were far less fierce and agitated than his thoughts….

Jing feared he had betrayed himself when Zhogmi Chhodak shot Gyatso Samphel. He had been unable, in that moment, to suppress a cry of grief; and afterward he’d had to force himself to wear a mask thrice as emotionless as any he’d ever adopted, in order to dampen Zhogmi’s suspicions. Nor had Jowo Tenzin’s look of disgust been easy to ignore. Tenzin knew how much Gyatso had done for him. But there was no other way to survive among the Communists; that much Jing knew. One must be even colder, even more extreme than the worst of them, in enforcing regulations; one must pretend to a bottomless servility in following orders; and one must finally feign utter stupidity or else risk being branded an intellectual… and thinkers, under this regime, rarely survived. If the villagers and the monks and his fellows on the Democratic Management Committee considered him coldhearted, ruthless, servile, and stupid, all this was to his credit in the eyes of the overlords. And in the end, through such deception, he might better serve those who neither loved nor trusted him, but to whose service he had devoted his life: the Tibetans. His people.

So I serve you now, Gyatso Samphel, he thought, as the curved knife sliced through flesh, snagged on sinew, twisted in deep sockets of bone to sever the stubbornest points of attachment. I free you from the suffering of this earth and offer you up to the Vulture Maiden you loved.

Gyatso Samphel had spent his youth in the Shining Hill monastery, training as a religious artist, painting murals and thangkas. After the destruction of the monastery, he had been the lone survivor with exact knowledge of the Vulture Maiden’s iconography. As he told Jing Meng-Chen, each image was precisely and geometrically constructed, her limbs always in certain sacred proportions and configurations, the hues of her skin and feathers always mixed to a precise shade of red. There must be so many jewels precisely arranged in her ornaments, and the sacred weapons and flowers and bells she held in her many hands must be thus and thus without exception, since each possessed a deep significance to those capable of understanding and explaining the illustration. Gyatso Samphel had not studied long enough to learn the significance of each ornament, but it was enough that he could reproduce the image exactly. Others might be versed in its analysis, but if none of them had the skill and training to reproduce the Maiden properly, she might still be lost. He had carried her image in his memory and nowhere else for three decades, since the destruction of the temple, when the soldiers had chipped the Vulture Maiden’s image from the one wall that had escaped annihilation in the shelling. When permission and funds finally came to restore the temple, money was set aside specifically for Gyatso’s restoration of the Vulture Maiden mural. First the temple itself had been rebuilt around that remaining scarred wall. When the outer structure was complete, Gyatso—excited almost beyond his ability to bear—had begun ritually to prepare his paints. Only today, on the auspicious occasion of the first Spring Festival allowed in the prefect in decades, had he begun the actual painting.

A few fine outlines were all he had committed to stone. And now the image of the Vulture Maiden, which Gyatso had preserved for all these years, was lost forever. What remained of her was decaying in the head that Jing Meng-Chen now severed from the frail shoulders, the sunken chest. Gyatso had been ill for the past year. Only the dream of completing his Vulture Maiden had kept him alive—but dreams could not stop bullets.

No inner strength could finally keep Jing Meng-Chen from collapsing. He hugged the pathetic head to his chest, pressed his own cheeks to the old man’s lifeless ones, weeping helplessly. Hearing a rattle of stones on the hillside behind him, he spun around frantically, fearing discovery.

But it was no one. No one but a great vulture, the largest he had seen today, sitting at the crest of Shining Hill. It raised its wings and rose into the air, screaming hoarsely, blotting out the sun.

Jing Meng-Chen was seized by a sorrow that might have belonged to Dorje Wangdu. Something inside him came loose with a tearing pang, and he offered it up in a kind of sky burial, just as he offered the head of his last and only friend.

The vulture swooped low and snatched the round head from his fingers. He watched the creature rise and rise, spiraling upward until she was a tiny speck vanishing like an ash into the sun’s pyre.

III

The abbot Gelek Thargey stammered and lied and contradicted himself throughout the first part of his interview. Judicious use of an electric cattle prod helped strengthen his memory and increase his eagerness for self-criticism, but ultimately Zhogmi had to admit that the abbot knew nothing about the misappropriated funds, and was simply concerned with hiding certain noncelibate activities that might have been frowned upon in feudal Tibet, but that were scarcely his concern—especially since he carried orders for mandatory sterilization of two-thirds of the village women, with the additional proviso that 80 percent of existing pregnancies would be terminated immediately. Thus, the counterrevolution would be cut off at its source, and the Tibetan population reduced to a manageable level. He dismissed the abbot, who needed some help returning to the central hall; his shit-spattered legs could scarcely carry him.

More coherent but equally damning was the testimony of Tomo Rochi, the monastery’s nierba, or treasurer and storeroom keeper. Having heard his abbot’s screams, he threw the monastery’s books wide open for Zhogmi’s perusal. It quickly became obvious that most of the funds allocated for restoration had never reached the monastery. Because the DMC was responsible for disbursing all moneys, he understood that he must turn his real attention to the officers themselves. There was nothing more despicable in his eyes than a corrupt administration. Jowo Tenzin was, of course, his first suspect, but it would not be so simple to subject him to direct questioning. Those who had appointed Tenzin were still in power. Zhogmi dare not accuse him without undeniable evidence.

He instructed his team to continue interviewing the monks, confident that more obvious and easily crushed dissidence would be uncovered among them. Even such small-scale victories boosted morale. By nightfall the work team—except for a small contingent that had remained in the village—was fully situated in various drafty cells of the main temple. The monks were housed in the main dormitory—already prisonlike and easy to patrol; a few others were charged with feeding them. The fractious monk who had incited the Spring Festival uprising, the first one shot, turned out to have been the head cook. Zhogmi would not vouch for the quality of the food the cook’s frightened assistants prepared. It was another demonstration of the principle that criminal activity injured mainly the criminals themselves.

Zhogmi took a chamber in the main temple for himself. After preparing a bowl of noodles on a small camp stove, he sat huddled on his cot, wrapped in blankets, trying to keep from freezing. The stone walls and floor sucked all the warmth from the air; his oil-burning heater was useless against the endless chill. The work team’s voices and laughter echoed through the building, but scarcely filled it. Still, it was a more reassuring sound than the mournful, morbid chanting of the monks would have been. His mood was black. He kept thinking for no good reason of the old man he had shot, and the paintbrush, and that chipped wall smeared with blood of exactly the hue that had tipped the brush.

After a restless hour, in which sleep began to seem ever less likely, Zhogmi rose—still fully dressed and wrapped in a blanket—and took a lantern into the hall. Night had turned the temple into a cave; he feared a wrong turn might lead him into the bowels of the earth. Then he saw on a threshold the tear-shaped pattern left by a paintbrush, with a few bristles caught in the dried red pigment.

He stepped slowly into the room and played his light over the wall, looking for the suggestive outlines he had seen that morning.

The light trembled in his hands.

For a moment he thought it was an illusion, but he held his breath and moved forward to examine the wall. There was no mistaking it. A painter had been at work. In defiance of his orders, the restoration had continued!

What this morning had been a few curved outlines, now formed a solidifying shape. The figure looked almost feminine, but there was something grotesque about the shape of the head. He knew it was not unusual for these barbaric figures to possess a multitude of arms, but here the shoulders and limbs were blurred—probably through the artist’s haste—and poised in a position that made little sense in terms of human anatomy. Where before, the figure had been hollow, with no inner color other than that of the wall, now it was a deep, rich red, as if the old man’s blood had soaked into the stone and spread to neatly fill the contours.

None of these details surprised him nearly as much as the sheer fact that it had been painted at all. Who would have dared? And how could they have managed it, with the temple occupied all day by the work team?

Some rogue monk must be hiding in the temple, or coming and going by an unknown entrance. He backed out of the room and began calling for his men. No one would sleep until they found their culprit. This suited Zhogmi, as he knew he would find sleep impossible in any case.

The members of the DMC dwelt at the edge of the monastery grounds, in a row of small prefabricated houses. At first, Zhogmi intended to rouse them all, but he decided to strengthen his relationship with Jing Meng-Chen alone for now.

Jing Meng-Chen came out uncomplainingly, instantly cooperative, though he looked puzzled when Zhogmi explained the reason for the search.

“I don’t see how that could be. Painted, you say?”

“Clearly by one of the monks, and not one we had in our custody.”

“All the monks have been accounted for. They are all in your charge.”

“Then some other artist—a layman working with them.”

“Not to contradict you, but—”

“Speak your mind. I’m sure your thoughts run close to the truth.”

“There’s no one qualified to continue that work. We requested other artists from some of the larger monasteries to help with the painting, but never received permission. Gyatso Samphel was to do all the major work himself. Few in this area are sufficiently trained even to follow his instructions.”

“Some clever rascal must have managed to hide his skill from even you.”

“Can I see this restoration?”

“If you think it will give you some idea of its author, yes.”

As they hurried across the compound, shouts from the dormitories told them that the monks were being roused for questioning. Zhogmi asked Jing Meng-Chen whether there might be any overlooked entrances to the temple, and he admitted that there were a few small apertures through which even a child would have trouble squeezing. Then they reached the mural.

Jing Meng-Chen’s surprise was no greater than Zhogmi’s. In the brief interval since he’d last seen the wall, the restoration had continued still further!

The red body of the goddess now was dotted with dozens of colored specks, like an array of violet, green, and golden stars just coming into focus in a telescope. And she had eyes now… round black eyes gleaming wetly in that troubling, incomplete face. Jing Meng-Chen ran a finger over the wall, looked at it. “Dry,” he said.

“Someone’s inside the temple!” Zhogmi cried.

Jing Meng-Chen turned toward him with an amazed look. “I’m telling you: no one here could do this.”

“What skill does it take to wave a brush?”

“Sir, we weed out potential subversives early on—that means the intelligentsia, anyone with talent. Once, the best Tibetan minds might have studied in the monastic colleges, but today that would be an explosive situation. Talent is discouraged. This is how it must be.”

“You’re saying that all the monks are morons.”

“No, most are simply mediocre because uneducated. We want them that way. Thus, the tourists—if they ever come—will see what appears to be a functioning, vital monastery, and they will contribute generously to its operation; but meanwhile, the words the monks chant are meaningless to them. When the Tibetan tongue finally ceases to be spoken, then the texts will seem even more nonsensical… and the religion will naturally die out as planned.”

“All this happens slowly, Jing Meng-Chen. Many still remember the old ways, and will engage in subversion to restore them.”

“But this….” He raised his hands to the wall painting. “This goes far beyond subversion. This is the work of a skilled and knowledgeable artist. I tell you: I know each of the monks here; I know them intimately. None is capable of this. I was raised in that village out there, and there are no artists in it. Gyatso Samphel was the last!”

“Then what are you saying? That this image is painting itself?”

Jing Meng-Chen’s face grew pale. “Certainly not!”

Zhogmi regretted that he had even expressed this fanciful impossibility, for it made him appear as superstitious as the locals. He turned away from the wall. “There’s a rational explanation. Someone in our midst who comes and goes without attracting attention. Tell me….”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me about Jowo Tenzin.”

Jing Meng-Chen hesitated. “He is a good man, devoted to the Party, determined that the monastery function in accordance with official policy.”

“So it would appear. He is full-blooded Tibetan, is he not?”

“Yes.”

“And can we be certain where his loyalties lie?”

“I think so. He’s not a religious or superstitious man. Nor does he have any artistic skills I am aware of.”

“Nevertheless, I am convinced he is practiced at deception. His record books are a tangle of what I believe to be deliberate obscurations, disguised to look like mild incompetence.”

“Are you saying he steals from the monastery?”

“Not from the monastery, from the government! The monastery has no money of its own. If I prove this crime against him, it is likely that he will be suspected of others.”

Jing Meng-Chen looked pained.

“No one likes to hear such things about his superiors; but I have reason to think Tenzin soon may be leaving his post. Would it please you to lead the DMC yourself?”

“I’ll happily serve the Party in whatever office is entrusted to me.”

“But you can tell me nothing more of Jowo Tenzin?”

“No. I did not realize the accounts were in such disarray. I am sorry to hear that he is under suspicion.”

“Not only for theft.” Zhogmi gestured toward the red figure. “This is also a serious transgression.”

A member of Zhogmi’s work team appeared in the doorway. “Nothing,” he said.

Zhogmi felt an overwhelming futility and exhaustion. Dismissing the man, he turned back to Jing Meng-Chen.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted your rest,” he said. “It’s obvious we’ll learn nothing more tonight. But please… no word of my suspicions to Jowo Tenzin.”

“Of course not.”

Jing Meng-Chen bowed sharply, then hurried from the chamber.

Zhogmi listened to his footsteps receding, then faced the mural and marveled at the audacity of its creator. There was something seductive about the creature it depicted. Her curves were sinuous, openly erotic, as were in a way the eyes. He was well aware that the old gods of Tibet were often portrayed in a manner to arouse the lust of celibate monks—to keep them more firmly bound to their religion by infusing it with sensual snares. And all while they denied the importance of the body. Such hypocrites, these Buddhists!

He moved back to the far wall and sank down, retrieving the blanket he had dropped there earlier, drawing it around him. The red figure seemed to waver as he stared at it, but that was fatigue, making the whole room swim. He would guard the wall himself tonight; no further restoration would be allowed. It seemed strangely important that the renegade artist not be allowed to finish, as if to complete the painting were an act of revolution.

The painted jewels glimmered like actual stones. His eyes watered, but he forced them open. His mind wandered along the lithe lines of the figure, the suggestions of firm, small breasts, a dancer’s hips and thighs. If only the face and head were clearer—he could almost imagine a pretty woman’s face materializing around those eyes. She seemed to smile in greeting, though her mouth was oddly proportioned—too wide, too stiff…. And then he realized why the arms were held so strangely, and why they appeared blurred. They were not arms at all, but wings.

Outside, he heard a stirring of air. He fought to keep his eyes open, to stay on guard. But he felt drugged, betrayed. Ceasing to struggle, he slept.

IV

Jing Meng-Chen shivered with fear as he hurried back to his house. Restoring itself, Zhogmi Chhodak had blurted. Impossible—but no more so than his other explanations. There simply was no one in the area versed in such painting—and no one who knew the attributes of the Vulture Maiden as thoroughly as Gyatso Samphel.

As he approached his house, he received an additional shock. Someone hurried out of the shadows, seizing him sharply by an elbow and drawing him around the corner. He knew from the man’s huffing breath that it was Jowo Tenzin, even before he spoke.

“Jing! Where have you been? What’s the commotion?”

“Zhogmi Chhodak believes someone is continuing the restoration work on Gyatso’s mural.”

“Painting? But that’s impossible.”

“I told him as much, but still—the work speaks for itself.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Yes. Skillfully done, and quickly, too. It looks just like Gyatso’s work.”

Jowo placed a hand on his shoulder. “I know how close you were to him, Jing. You—you were practically his son.”

Jing did not feel comfortable confiding in Jowo Tenzin, especially after Zhogmi’s warnings. He merely nodded and said, “I must be alone now.” Jowo stood aside, and Jing went on into his tiny home.

He threw himself down in the dark, hoping to escape the mesh of anxious thoughts. Sleep, however, would not come. He kept hearing the morning’s gunfire and feeling the bullet graze his shoulder; he remembered the cry of the vultures and the way his knife had parted limbs and ligaments. He could not shake the sight of the Vulture Maiden. She seemed to brighten and solidify on the inside of his eyelids, as if Gyatso Samphel were alive within him, painting her there, imbuing the image with his own lost life.

It was further thoughts of this nature that sent him from his bed and across the monastery, stopping once near the temple entrance to answer the challenge of a work-team guard. He made his way over the gravelly hillside, into the warren of old cells that had once housed monks and supplies. The little structures were all crumbled and open to the elements, save for the one that Gyatso Samphel had restored, patching the roof and supplying a door that lay open tonight, creaking in the wind. Inside, he found and lit a candle stub. Gyatso’s few belongings were in disorder; no doubt the work team had considered this a likely hiding spot for their supposed rebel artist. Gyatso’s brushes and pencils lay on a small shelf, with vials of colored powders and various sorts of paper. Gyatso had collected scraps of all colors and sizes, using them as blank surfaces for sketching. Jing rummaged among them until he found what he sought on the back of a packing slip. His breath lodged in his throat when he smoothed the sheet against the wall.

It was the Vulture Maiden, beyond any doubt. She was lightly and rapidly sketched, but still exquisite, complete with all her ornaments and delicate gestures of arms and wings; her slyly cocked head and gaping, curved beak gave her the look of life. She matched almost exactly the goddess now taking shape on the temple wall. This was one of Gyatso’s preliminary sketches, a hasty packing-slip thangka.

Jing folded up the paper and slipped it into his jacket. If he got the chance, he would compare it to the mural, and prove to himself that it was precisely the design Gyatso had carried in his head. But more than that, he took it with the thought that it was the most precious thing Gyatso had possessed, and therefore the most meaningful token of his friendship.

Looking around the barren cell, he was overwhelmed by thoughts of all the hours he had spent with Gyatso here and in the village. After the cadre leader abandoned him, Gyatso had taken him in. Young Jing had loved the old man; it was the only emotion he had allowed himself. He gladly would have learned the painter’s craft had Gyatso not persuaded him that his own family’s trade was a necessary one, and must not be lost. Gyatso had insisted that he keep on in his family’s tradition, knowing the boy needed some means of clinging to them. He had arranged for Jing to spend part of each year in a neighboring village, apprenticed to a man who performed the sky burial. The Communists did not officially condone the practice, but they appreciated its utility in disposing of their victims. He learned to recognize the signs of abuse on many of the bodies—places where the flesh had been torn by dogs, or burned, or otherwise tormented; he saw the shattered skulls and crushed ribs and evidence of rape; bullet holes and knife thrusts and marks of strangulation. These encounters in his profession helped him hold an unaffected demeanor in the face of other horrors, which quickened his promotion into official positions. He came to be considered a man in whom confidence could be placed.

Gyatso Samphel had been the only one who understood Jing, who knew his troubles and his secrets, and that his aims were not the obvious ones. None of this was ever discussed, but the understanding went beyond words.

And now it was gone. His last connection with any person—severed.

He extinguished the candle stub and hurried out, once more crossing near the temple, once more enduring the questions of a guard who didn’t recognize him. This time when he reached his bed, he collapsed and slept until the reflected glare of Shining Hill woke him. There was no kangling call this morning. Shouted drill instructions echoed from the dormitory. He could not bear to face the work team, and besides, he had a grim errand to run in the village. He started down the road before the sun had cleared the mountains.

He spent the morning knocking on certain doors, returning the tokens he had collected from the dead. His appearance at any house was an occasion for grief, extinguishing the final, feeble hopes of those whose loved ones had not already returned from the monastery. For once, he felt their grudging respect. They knew he had conducted the sky burial according to tradition, preventing further desecration and dishonor. But this was little consolation to Jing Meng-Chen.

By noon he was on his way back to the monastery, making his way down a narrow street at the edge of the village, when a truck pulled up, and someone shouted for him to stand still. He looked up to see one of the work-team men holding a gun on him.

“Get in,” the man said. Another member of the ledhon rukhag leaped down and waved him into the covered bed of the truck.

“What’s wrong?” Jing said as he crawled up. The man jabbed his calf with the barrel of his gun; Jing gasped and sank down, rubbing the bruised muscle.

“Trying to get out of town?” the man said, grinning at him. “There’s no way out for you.” The gunman squatted across from him, aiming his gun at Jing’s groin, one finger playfully stroking the trigger. Jing doubted the man would harm him, not without express orders—but he didn’t know what orders might have been given.

When they reached the monastery, the truck halted directly in front of his house. The gunman bid him leap down, and Jing was glad to do so—until he saw Zhogmi Chhodak coming out of his house, followed by soldiers. When Jing saw his face, hope deserted him.

“I am very disappointed in you, Jing Meng-Chen.”

Jing was afraid to say a word. He knew how innocence, viewed from the proper perspective, could look exactly like guilt. He looked away from Zhogmi’s eyes, which offered no mercy in any case, seeking clues to his situation.

Zhogmi motioned for Jing to follow him around the back of the house, where a large rock had been rolled aside to reveal a hole freshly dug in the earth.

“There is no point in evasion,” Zhogmi Chhodak said.

“What was in it?” he allowed himself to ask.

The other man’s mouth grew sterner. “I had hoped you would cooperate. You’ll only make things harder on yourself.”

“Please….”

“This morning I removed from beneath that rock a small chest full of gold coins—purchased, no doubt, with temple funds.”

Jing said, “And how did you come to be looking under rocks?”

“That is none of your concern. Suffice it to say that there are progressive Tibetans who will undermine all subversive activities, even though they may not oppose you openly.”

“I know nothing of gold,” Jing said, knowing that it was a pointless admission.

“And I suppose you know nothing of this, either.”

Zhogmi reached into his jacket and took out a folded scrap of paper. It was Gyatso’s sketch of the Vulture Maiden. He had left it beside his bed.

“That’s mine, yes. I took it last night from the old man’s cell. I wanted to check it against the mural. Ask your own guards; they saw me.”

“You were seen crossing the compound late at night—no doubt using a secret entrance to the temple.”

“Why should I do such a thing?”

Zhogmi’s face grew dark. “To finish the mural, against my orders!”

Jing suddenly realized that the work-team leader was terrified. He scarcely managed to hide his fear behind a professional rage.

“It’s finished?” Jing whispered.

“You deny it?”

“You think I did it?”

“I was in that room myself,” Zhogmi said. “You drugged me, didn’t you? Then you must have painted all night—a superhuman effort that will gain you nothing and cost you more than you know.”

Jing could think of no response. He was absorbed in thoughts of the Vulture Maiden. He longed to see Gyatso’s work completed.

“Come,” Zhogmi said. “Before we work out the details of your confession, I have a task for you.”

With three soldiers behind, and Zhogmi striding before, Jing was taken to the temple. Shafts of afternoon light scarcely warmed the shadowy stone corridors or the desolate central hall. Jing felt as if the building itself were in mourning, its stillness a lament for absent voices, silenced bells.

Zhogmi thrust Jing Meng-Chen into the chamber of the mural.

Suddenly he understood Zhogmi Chhodak’s fear—he felt some of it himself, though his awe and admiration were far stronger.

The Vulture Maiden loomed large on the wall, her bright body red as polished ruby, her eyes like wet onyx, her beak diamond-sharp and poised to snap, her wings so powerful and brilliantly drawn that he could almost hear the air cracking as they cut it. She fulfilled all the promise of Gyatso’s sketch, but went far beyond it in execution. In the paper sketch, she hung alone on a blank background. Here she hovered and danced in the air above Shining Hill. The crag was done in what looked like liquid gold, intensifying what meager light was already in the room. The sky was green and blue, and of a translucence that entirely concealed the stone beneath it. Where the Vulture Maiden wore feathers, the wall seemed made of feathers; where she was flesh, the wall looked soft and alive. In the air behind the Maiden were a dozen of her consorts, the vulture nuns, each as lifelike as she, each poised to dive—or perhaps just rising. In their claws, some carried struggling bodies in dark blue and drab greenish brown. The blue was a traditional color symbolizing the ego, but the green reminded him of nothing so much as the soldiers’ khaki uniforms. Perhaps it bore a political message, after all—though the artistry was transcendent. On the crest of Shining Hill stood a lone human figure holding in one hand a knife curved like the new moon, and in the other a severed head. The figure was small, but, like all features of the painting, intricately detailed. Jing leaned forward to see its face, but Zhogmi roughly pulled him back.

“What you created with a brush, you shall destroy with a hammer,” he said. There was a pile of tools on the floor—hammers, picks, chisels. Zhogmi picked up a heavy sledgehammer and thrust it at him; Jing could only stare at it.

“But why?” he murmured.

“It’s intolerable! Your old friend the painter was poisoned with primitive beliefs. He worshiped vultures—birds of death! Such superstitions will destroy you!”

“The vultures eat only what is already dead,” Jing found himself saying. “We are the ones who kill.”

Zhogmi must have seen the hate unveiled at last in Jing Meng-Chen’s eyes. After so many years of hiding his emotions, keeping his thoughts always in reserve, he knew that this tactic had outlasted its purpose. Further concealment would gain him nothing now that he was suspect. Your old friend the painter, Zhogmi Chhodak had said. Which meant that someone had betrayed him to Zhogmi; the same person who had planted the gold behind his house, and convinced the work-team leader that Gyatso Samphel had taught Jing how to paint: Jowo Tenzin. Jowo had taken desperate steps to remove suspicion from himself. But Jing could not really blame him. To Jowo, he must have seemed a terrible traitor—to his people, his parents, to all Tibet. Who better to sacrifice than the collaborator? The resemblance to justice was almost irresistible.

“You can’t make me do it,” he said.

Zhogmi’s eyes poured scorn on him. “You’re a disgrace to the Republic! A traitor to your race!”

“Yes,” Jing admitted, “I have disgraced my people—but only by pretending for so long to be one of you. I am Tibetan, Zhogmi Chhodak. Tibetan!”

Zhogmi looked dismayed. “But—”

“What confused you? My name? I’m surprised you haven’t Sinicized your own by now. Wouldn’t your superiors permit it?”

Zhogmi shifted his grip on the hammer.

“If you won’t destroy the wall, then I’ll destroy you.”

“You’ll do that anyway.”

Zhogmi’s lips curled in a snarl. He thrust Jing into the hands of his aides and advanced on the mural with the hammer raised. “Weep for your precious wall, then. Superstitious fools—how easily you cry over stones.” He swung the hammer in a wide arc, bringing its weight crashing full on the crown of Shining Hill.

The whole earth shook beneath the hammer’s blow.

Zhogmi dropped the tool and staggered backward. It was as if a gong had been struck deep in the hillside and continued to vibrate. The walls and floor rippled like silk flags in a thick wind. The work team stumbed into the hallway, dropping their guns. A rain of dust hid them from sight. Throughout the temple, Jing could hear explosions of glass, the crash of falling masonry. He crouched in the doorway, which seemed a point of calm in the chaos. Zhogmi knelt in the center of the room, staring up at the Vulture Maiden.

The wall was shattering. Cracks spread from the peak of the painted hill, reaching through the glowing sky, quickening around the forms of the Vulture Maiden and her nuns, loosening them from the wall like separate pieces of a puzzle. As the wall crumbled, daylight came pouring into the chamber—but a richer, more golden and liquid light than Jing had ever seen. Its eerie intensity seemed to purify everything it touched. Shining Hill burned with the brightness of a thousand Tibetan dawns. The sky looked unreal, like the sky in a thangka. In that boundless heaven, thirteen fragments of the wall still floated.

The vultures of paint and stone hovered on a high, cold wind whose agonized keening embodied the suffering of Tibet. The twelve consort birds tipped their wings and began to descend, skating rapidly down the sky while the Maiden waited.

Figures in uniform fled across the hillside, running from the shaking buildings, seeking shelter. Rocks tumbled down the slopes, but the men ran heedless of earthly danger. Stretching shadows reached for them. Some turned and squinted at the sky, raising guns to fire—but the guns made no sound, and the vultures did not falter. They snatched up the men in golden talons, and Jing could hear no cries.

As the earth began finally to settle, Zhogmi Chhodak regained his feet, leaning on the hammer like a crutch. He raised it to aim another blow at the sky, as if he believed this entire scene were an image painted on stone; as if they had fallen into the wall and somehow, by brute force, he could smash free of it. Seeing such fanatical determination, Jing doubted his own vision of reality. He feared that his mind had shattered at the hammer’s first blow—that Zhogmi alone had pierced the illusion and broken through to the truth.

He couldn’t bear to see Zhogmi proven right and himself proven mad. A hammer might destroy the Vulture Maiden, but a bullet would certainly stop Zhogmi Chhodak. He could preserve this vision—at least for himself. If it were a dream, then it was one he could live with forever—it didn’t matter that no one else saw it. This was his truth.

The Vulture Maiden’s huge pinions flapped once, gently, as she began her spiraling descent. The monastery was in ruins; the room lay open to the sky, tumbled stones blocking every avenue. Zhogmi held the hammer poised for a killing blow. Jing reached for one of the fallen guns.

Down she swooped, passing through the ranks of her rising consorts as they pushed up toward the heights. Down she came, screaming—

Jing paused, remembering the last time he had fired a gun. This time he would kill an enemy. Would the death of a foe cancel out those of his family?

Then the Maiden cried again. She swooped over Jing Meng-Chen, opened her claws, and dropped something. Jing let go of the gun, threw up his hands—and caught it.

It was Gyatso Samphel’s living head.

As the Vulture Maiden soared up again, Jing stared in amazement at his old friend’s face. The eyes were bright, the mouth smiling.

“Dorje Wangdu,” said Gyatso, calling him by his true name, “this is not our fight alone. The gods are threatened, the faith, the land itself. Don’t despair—our defenders are beside us. Today the Maiden comes for Zhogmi Chhodak. You see? You need not kill him. His soul is already dead.”

Jing looked over at Zhogmi Chhodak, standing staunchly with the hammer cocked, waiting for the Maiden to descend. There was animation in his body, but no life. Jing felt as if he were seeing himself as a child—but far gone. It was death that held the hammer. Death held Zhogmi rigid, a robotic semblance of a man, soulless and obedient. Jing could smell the stench of a rotting soul. He felt a moment’s pity, and then only a professional calm.

The Vulture Maiden swooped again, avoiding Zhogmi Chhodak, and dropped a final gift to Dorje Wangdu.

It fit his hand like another finger. He felt the air humming around the curved blade as if the metal surface were one with his flesh.

The Vulture Maiden waited.

Dorje Wangdu walked up behind Zhogmi and placed a hand on his shoulder. At first, Zhogmi Chhodak didn’t move—his full attention was fixed on the Vulture Maiden. Then his shoulders slumped, all the sickness flooding out of him, deserting his body. When it departed, there was nothing left to animate the flesh. He surrendered at last to his culture.

The Vulture Maiden came only when invited, but she did not have long to wait. Dorje worked quickly. And when she was done, the sky swallowed her up as if she had never been.

Dorie Wangdu knelt on the hillside in the ruins of the monastery as the glow went out of Shining Hill, and the sky lost some ineffable part of its luster. Gyatso Samphel’s head had vanished, as had the sacred knife. Nor was there any evidence of Zhogmi Chhodak to incriminate him in all the long investigations that would surely follow.

After a time he heard voices calling, and a familiar head appeared over a mound of broken masonry. It was Gelek Thargey, the abbot. He let out a cry on finding someone alive in the rubble.

“The ledhonrukhag fled,” he gasped, helping Dorje climb up. “They left us alone in the dormitory. By a miracle, none of us was harmed—many of the soldiers have been crushed! But you survived.”

“Yes.” He came out unsteadily. Monks were combing the wreckage of the temple. He saw no uniforms.

“We will have to rebuild again,” Gelek Thargey said in a resigned tone of voice, limping along beside him. “At least it was a natural disaster—and not man-made. Do you think we’ll be able to find the money, Jing Meng-Chen?”

He put a hand on Gelek Thargey’s shoulder.

“I think the DMC will help you, yes. But you must call me by my true name. Dorje Wangdu.”

The abbot regarded him intently, searching his eyes; then he began cautiously to smile. “Sometimes the whole world must move to shake an evil loose,” he said.

There was a cry of dismay nearby, as another body was discovered in the rubble. Dorje felt an ambivalent pang when he recognized Jowo Tenzin. He sank down beside him, closed the staring eyes, hoping the Vulture Maiden had come in a sweet form—but fearing that with Jowo’s guilty conscience, it might have been otherwise.

“Do you still know the rites of the Bardo Thodol?” he asked Gelek Thargey.

“I keep them up here.” The abbot tapped his brow, then leaned over the corpse and began softly to chant.

Dorje Wangdu closed his own eyes and let the words wash over him—a river of sound, deep with meaning he scarcely fathomed. He let it take him, hardly sensing the shadows of birds that passed over his face.

For at the peak of Shining Hill, thirteen vultures circled in anticipation of more burials. Finally, as if weary of waiting, the flock dropped down on the ancient, eroded walls of the nunnery below their rock table. There they cawed and beat their wings and clattered their beaks merrily, like a group of old women telling tales of the distant days, marking time while they waited for the feast being laid out in their honor.

* * *

“The Vulture Maiden” copyright 1992 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1992.

GREAT BREAKTHROUGHS IN DARKNESS

(BEING, EARLY ENTRIES FROM THE SECRET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHOTOGRAPHY)

Authorized by

MARC LAIDLAW

Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Photographic Arcana, Correspondent of No Few Academies, Devoted Husband, &c.

“Alas! That this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a denouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!”

— William Henry Fox Talbot

-A-

AANSCHULTZ, CONREID

(c. 1820 – October 12, 1888)

Inventor of the praxiscope technology (which see), Professor Aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. Apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject’s thoughts. (Later researchers demonstrated that the device “functioned” by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) Aanschultz’s theories collapsed, and the Professor himself died in a Parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the Belgian countryside near Waterloo. Some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator’s brain. However, there is evidence that Aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster.

AANSCHULTZ LENS

The key lens used in Aanschultz’s notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject’s eye.

ABAT-JOUR

A skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. In the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, I found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society’s (and my own) madness and disease. It was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and Aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm.

I came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. My own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that I could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. At night I wore a woman’s long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (60 g.), carbolic acid (10 ccs), zinc oxide (30 g) and lanoline (480”), which I had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. I had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. I dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one’s face, I am told, there is a pleasant numbness)–but so far this nightmare had not developed. Still, I held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin Janssen photographic revolvers which I carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing “gun” which first captured the transit of Venus across the face of our local star.

The laboratory, I say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. Despite my admiration for the Professor’s efficiency, I found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. But Aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. He would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. I had suggested a more oblique light, but the Professor would not hear of it.

“That is for your prissy studios–for your fussy bourgeois sitters!” he would rage at my “aesthetic” suggestions. “I am a man of science. My subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight–I observe the whole man here.” To which I replied: “And yet you have not captured him. You have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. The fleeting things you see cannot be captured. Which is less than I can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial.” And here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that I knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope.

He needed lasting records of his studies–some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope’s pictures in place for all to see, for all time. It was this magical medium which he now sought. I thought it must be something of a “Deep” paper–a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. When he shared his own ideas, I quickly became lost, and if I made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. I could not follow Aanschultz’s arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. Only another genius could follow where Aanschultz went in his thoughts. With time I had even stopped looking in his eyes–with or without a psychopraxiscope.

“I am nearly there,” he told me today, as I reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand.

“You’ve found a way to fix the psychic images?”

“No–something new. My life’s work. This will live long after me.”

He said the same of every current preoccupation. His assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. Their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. In the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. There was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. I had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until I could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great Professor Conreid Aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. He courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. I finished it off and dropped it in a half-assembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. The Professor made use of all Things.

“This way,” he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. The proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning Bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and I was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. Here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. I sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to Aanschultz’s actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. I doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as Aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. I myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend’s urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit–a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. For poor Aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. His was a world of constant Discovery.

I bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally I found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. Blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. My skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. Things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light.

“Here we are,” he said. “This will make everything possible. This is my—

ABAT-NUIT

By this name Aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. I could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but I quickly saw my error. For it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness.

Darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which I now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. I even speculated that I saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children.

Unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when I tried to peer into it, Aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, “Useless for our purposes.”

“Our?” I repeated, as if I had anything to do with this. For even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices–something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation.

“This is my greatest work yet,” he confided, but I could see that his assistants thought otherwise. The shadows already darkening Europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. I felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. It was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind.

I comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. Given a mind as focused as Aanschultz’s, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. However, I already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which Aanschultz expected.

I watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. It was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. It had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. I only hoped Aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness’s distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. But I had little hope for this in my friend’s case. Have I mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me?

ABAXIAL

Away from the axis. A term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. Thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the Encyclopaedia itself, and this entry in particular. Would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. Some go so far as to state that the entirety of Creation is itself an

ABERRATION

A functional result of optical law. Yet I felt that this matter might be considered Aanschultz’s fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. In my professional capacity, I was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. They flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until Monsieur Artiste might be available. Sometimes Monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although I always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. I flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; I spoke to the gentlemen as if I had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. I was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. They meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (I thought then) expendable.

Yet there was only one Aanschultz. On the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), I knew I had never met his like. He looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. Yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and I wished–not for the first time–that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. None of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue. The fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. He did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty.

Perhaps “cruel” is the wrong word. It was a severity in his nature–an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor’s edge. I felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if I had at last found someone against whom I could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. In my youth I had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those I considered my superiors; for then I could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. With age and success, I had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of Society. Aanschultz’s laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote.

We two could not have been less alike. As I have said, I had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. Art was All, to me. It had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that I had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. Aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. For in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. In the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one’s own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a Name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? So you see, I was in danger already when I met Aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. With his aid I was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. Once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because I was indeed superior.

To all of Paris I might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in Aanschultz’s presence I felt like a young and stupid child. The scraps I scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. He hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. I would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when I heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told–his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy–he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. I fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as I came to him for his scientific rigor.

It was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty–though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. He would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the Mohs’ scale) at its core. This meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed “victims,” not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut. I sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them.

ABRASION MARKS

of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. Due to my own eczema, I felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, Aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. She looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when I mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur Hippolyte Bayard, but I saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. The girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that I knew they were mother and child. Leaving Aanschultz for the moment, I sank down beside them, stroking the girl’s frayed black hair gently as I asked if there were anything I could do for them.

“Who’s there?” the woman said hoarsely.

I gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. She didn’t need illustrious visitors now, I knew.

“He’s with the Professor,” the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. I could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left.

“You should bandage those arms,” I said. “I have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you’d like me to do it.”

“Bandages and ointment, he says,” said the woman. “As if there’s any healing it. Leave her alone now–she’s done what she could where I had to leave off. You’ll just get the doctor mad at both of us.”

“I’m sure he’d understand if I—”

“Leave us be!” the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a “tooth” for the penciller’s art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. I suspected this powder would do just as well, were I crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. She fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard Aanschultz’s sharp command.

I turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp.

“My God, Aanschultz,” I said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. “Don’t you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?”

He muttered from the side of his mouth: “It’s not a problem any longer. A short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion.”

“A print surface, perhaps, but these are people!”

“It works on me,” he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. “Now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her.”

I backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days Aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the occupational safety officials. He could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him.

ABSORPTION

This term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. In the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which Aanschultz hoped to strip aside. Optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of Aanschultz’s face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura–the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them–that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness.

My friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: “According to Draper’s law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. This dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. Give me my phantospectroscope.”

This last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master’s hands.

“The spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth,” he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. I could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. I took several quick steps back.

“I would show you,” he went on, “but it would mean nothing to you. This is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. Until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. But I have gone beyond that now. Ha! Yes!”

He thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. As the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror.

ACCELERATOR!

my friend shouted, and I sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. Common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited Aanschultz. He screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. An accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. As is written in the Encylopaedia of Photography (1911, exoteric edition), “Accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates.” I threw myself back, fearful that otherwise I would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. I heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and I leaned to help her up. But at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and I put my hands to a more instinctive use.

ACCOMMODATION OF THE EYE

The darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. With both eyes covered, I felt I was beyond harm. I could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion I heard around me, nor did I wish to. (See also, “Axial Accommodation.”)

ACCUMULATOR

Apparently (and this I worked out afterward in hospital beside Aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. All things threatened to split at their seams. Matter itself, the atmosphere, Aanschultz’s assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor–these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. My own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. Aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. My friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place–but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture.

I heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. Aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can I–nor would I–discredit him.

It was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. Or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. Other receptacles opened with more deliberation. Aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. The dripping and splashes and soft wet steps I heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. My own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for I felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. I forced myself to tear my hands away from my face–while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut–and leaned down to offer help. No sooner had I taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. Fearing that I was aggravating her wounds, I relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. It was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if I were her final anchor. As soon as I realized this, as soon as I tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. I heard her mother calling. The girl’s cries were smothered. Across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely.

My first impulse was to follow, but I could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open.

“A light!” I shouted, and Aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: “No!”

But too late. The need for fire was instinctive, beyond Aanschultz’s ability to quell by force or reason. A match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, Aanschultz’s most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax… although the denouement for the rest of Europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one.

ACETALDEHYDE

(See “Aldehyde.”)

ACETIC ACID

The oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. It is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place.

ACETIC ETHER

Synonym, ethyl acetate. A light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. It should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable.

ACETONE

A colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. As the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper.

ACETOUS ACID

The old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (which see). Highly inflammable.

ACETYLENE

A hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. It is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. It burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. Acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination.

ACETYLENE GENERATOR

An apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. Copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed.

ACETYLIDE EMULSION

Wratten and Mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. While this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in Professor Conreid Aanschultz’s laboratory were of no lasting significance. This misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. We are only now beginning to see what Aanschultz glimpsed in an instant.

“What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict.”

— Michael Faraday

* * *

“Great Breakthroughs in Darkness” copyright 1992 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in New Worlds #2 (1992), edited by David Garnett.

TERROR FAN

Runick shoved a rolled-up towel against the bottom of the door to keep the smell of pot out of his room; it filled the corridor with a sickly scent and made him ill at ease, a distraction where he was going. He drew the curtains to shut out the grey October light, cutting off his sight of the campus paths, students rushing everywhere in a light rain.

He would shut out that world for as long as he could. It took an additional effort to ignore the stack of textbooks teetering on his little built-in desk, especially since they were in the way of the stereo. He dropped a Holly Terror album on the turntable, then fit a pair of hugely padded headphones over his ears, shutting out all sounds but the soft crackling, like footsteps in pine needles, that always filled him with anticipation. He lay down on his bed, folded his hands over his chest, and shut his eyes.

The first notes, as always, summoned feelings of dread. The music made a choked path into darkness, little-travelled. Of him it made a shadow sweeping down into a black place.

His return was a moment of fear, despite his great joy.

He used to think he was entering the groove itself, that he was becoming microscopic, smaller than the needle’s head, descending into the track. But no vinyl groove could have been so overgrown with brambles, its steepening sides edged far above with tottering rocks like decayed molars. Thick pine branches crowded out the sky, clawed at the stars, blotted out their light—as all the while he swept down faster, borne by the music and his own black wings. He himself was dread now, pure terror. This valley was his hunting ground, a fissure between the hemispheres of his brain, the place he went when he had to get away.

Deeper, darker, faster, as the music built and fed his power, welcoming him home. The darkness was impregnable.

All around him, the black faces of his brethren stirred and squirmed invisibly, their open mouths waiting for any morsel he might drop to them.

And then, right on cue, the light appeared.

Far ahead of him, growing slowly, a spark of brightness, a flame drawing him, a star—

A voice.

He was unable to check his swooping flight, his headlong plunge, unable to hold back his all-smothering blackness from extinguishing that tiny spark. It grew in size and clarity as he swept toward it—brighter, louder, the words coming clear though his mind refused to admit them. He must quench the spark. The power to do so was his alone. Despite some reluctance, it was necessary to complete the darkness of his mind, to preserve the utter purity of the music, which shaped the silence of this valley.

He spread his wings and the spark trembled, expanding. Suddenly he saw the face of Holly Terror caught in a sourceless spotlight, her jet-black hair with one white streak flying around her alabaster face. He stretched to spill out all the passion he held back, and knew that it was his love that allowed him to murder her—for without her he was incomplete. Without her presence he had no reason to be here. What good is darkness without a light to quench?

Eagerly, he bent to snuff her.

Suddenly his wings were torn away, a light most drab and ordinary fouled his eyes, and Holly was gone, her voice snatched from his ears, her life from his black enveloping fingers.

“Runick! Guess what!”

He came awake clenched in fetal posture, uncurling as his roommate Nevis tore off the headphones that were Runick’s umbilicus to that dark womb of fear. Nevis, who should have been gone for the day, threw open the curtains and dropped down on the opposite bed with that taunting grin that was his usual expression, and not to be taken personally.

“You’re not gonna believe this. She’s back in town.”

“Who?” Runick whispered, far from acclimated to this bright and ugly place.

“Who? What do you mean, who? Is there any other ‘she’ in your vocabulary? Holly Terror, stupid. Unless you’ve got a girl nobody knows about.”

Runick sat up, got to his feet, turned to the door and then back to Nevis. “How do you know?”

“Miller’s girlfriend works at the airport rent-a-car. She just saw her there. You wanna bet she’s gonna do a concert? One for the old home town?”

Runick sank back onto the bed, in shock, unsure of what action he should take—if any. His grief was almost immeasurable. He should have been delirious, but there were so many others here who had a claim on Holly Terror. He was nothing to her, just a face in the crowd despite the power of his visions and the feeling he had when he was with her in that dark valley, swooping down to blow her out with the certain knowledge that he had total control of her life and death. But that was just a dream, a fantasy. What did it matter to Holly that he had seen every concert she’d heldin Portland since he was fifteen, that he’d played her records a thousand times? He was just one among many.

“What’s wrong, Runick? I thought you’d be stoked.”

He shrugged. “It is good news.”

“So come on, time for action. We’ll track her down. Spencer’s such a small town, she can’t hide for long. Her sister still lives on the outskirts—I’ll bet that’s the place to start. Come on, Runick, you’re up for it, aren’t you?”

He hauled himself unwillingly toward the window. Every step into that world took him farther from the black valley where his true power lay; farther from that brilliant spark that was his alone to fan or guench; farther from the ultimate darkness. Yet the world was irresistible, and despite himself he felt the birth of new hopes. He couldn’t just lie here listening to unchanging music, a dead voice, when the living one was near.

“All right,” he said, “I’m coming.”

“How could you resist, Runick? This is your time to shine!”

* * *

Holly was in England when the band broke up, each member spinning off in separate directions like the skirling notes of their final set. She was close to Wales, her mother’s home, so it seemed natural that she should seek a new start there now that the structure she’d spent the last ten years perfecting had cracked wide open. The Welsh hills reminded her of Oregon, in that they were green and damp, but there were constant reminders that this was not home, that she was an alien here. The landscape was sleeping, uneasy in its slumber, and she knew that it would never wake for her, nor wake the things inside her that she needed to discover. Sitting upstairs in an inn, watching the rain rush down on a gunmetal river and into the sea, she realized that nothing kept her here except her own indecision. She was used to coordinating her plans with five others. The time had come to chart her own path.

By nightfall she was in a jet above the dark Atlantic. She called her manager from Kennedy Airport to tell him she was heading back to Oregon for a rest before making any new plans. She expected him to pressure her at least obliquely to stop off in L.A. first; instead he read a week-old telegram from her sister Heather, three words: “Emergency. Come home.”

Circling Spencer Airport prior to landing, she wondered what kind of emergency Heather could have meant. Their mother’s death two years before had prompted no such message. It had taken three weeks for the news to reach Holly, and not because the band was touring in Europe at the time. Heather hadn’t considered it an emergency, after so many years of illness.

The Willamette River glinted below the plane, catching a glimpse of the sun. She and Heather had stood on a bridge above that river and opened the canister from the crematorium, scattering not ashes but heat-fused lumps more like porcelain. In her guavering voice, Heather had sung a few lines of a song Holly had never heard before or since, and that was the extent of the ceremony.

If Heather hadn’t considered that an emergency, then what could have alarmed her now? When Holly called from Portland to let her knew she was almost home, Heather had refused to elaborate on the telegram. She’d sounded anxious, worse than ever. Holly wondered how long she’d be able to stand her weird sister this time.

The town of Spencer had been swept by an orange brush, though the dark green of wet grass and pine still prevailed. The airport lay amid an ugly sprawl of agricultural industry, ranks of tractors and dairy trucks. The plane touched down hard.

Heather wasn’t waiting, but Holly hadn’t expected her. Her older sister had no sense of direction, and had often gotten lost on foot in her home town. Heather had spent her entire life within the span of a few square miles, and she was uncomfortable with most of those except the interior and immediate surroundings of the old house. Holly had travelled all over the world since she turned seventeen, yet she often thought that it was Heather’s mind that roamed the farthest; in her imagination she certainly ventured to stranger places than Holly ever dared.

She rented a car, and on the drive into town got a glimpse of the campus through the autumn oaks. For most people, spending a few years here as students, these were the strongest memories of Spencer that they would carry away. Holly hadn’t gone to college, here or anywhere. It was the broad, quiet avenues beyond the school that meant the most to her. Huge ivy-wrapped manors on manicured lawns, stone walls and empty parks where she had wandered and played as a child. These were memories not even Heather shared, housebound Heather with her books and poetry, who never went much farther than the woods behind their house.

Away from campus, the houses thinned out and the streets grew narrower; the hills were densely forested. An assault of housing tracts had failed when the lumber industry took heavy blows from environmentalists and Spencer’s economy had collapsed to its current poor condition. It was hard to see now where the land had ever been cleared for new housing. On the winding approach to her house, the woods seemed thicker than she remembered. She came suddenly around a curve and saw the place, shrunken and yellow as a plant raised in a cellar. Something even paler moved across a window. It was Heather.

Her sister stood inside the doorway watching Holly unload two heavy bags and come up the path through a chill rain. They brushed cheeks in the hallway. The house smelled like mold and crumbling rock; its dampness told her that the furnace hadn’t yet been used this year. No trace of her mother remained to haunt the house, no odors of cooking which might have draped her in sadness, as had happened on her last visit. She wasn’t sure what the mildew reminded her of.

Heather shut the door and faced her with a pinched expression, her shoulders hunched up, her white hair falling limp across her face.

“You want coffee, I suppose.” She pushed past Holly, toward the kitchen.

“Thanks. I’ll just take these upstairs.”

There was no welcome in her bedroom either. The bed was freshly made up, but the walls and shelves were bare. She remembered telling Heather to do what she wished with the room, but she hadn’t expected her simply to empty it. It was freezing upstairs, damper than below. She dug a sweater out of her luggage and tried the thermostat, without result.

Heather was pouring water into two mugs when Holly came back into the kitchen.

“Do you always keep it so cold?”

“I don’t notice. There’s oil in the burner if you want to turn it on.”

“Would you mind?”

“Why should I?”

In the basement, she discovered nearly a hundred gallons of fuel oil in the burner. As she lit the pilot, she realized with something like shock that she was relieved to be away from her sister. After less than five minutes together, she was more uneasy than ever. They were such strangers to each other. It was hard to believe they were relatives; hard to believe that all this time she had been singing Heather’s songs, expressing her sister’s emotions, when she didn’t even know her. The sister she knew from those songs was not someone she really wanted to know, for the lyrics were oppressively somber, morbid, steeped in darkness and decay.

Their relationship had only lasted this long, she supposed, because of the distance she kept between them. She had profited from Heather’s genius without troubling herself over the other, inexplicable parts of her character.

Maybe she’d be wise to keep the distance even in Spencer. Rents here were ridiculously cheap. She’d have to pick carefully, though, if she took a place of her own. It wasn’t easy to be inconspicuous when she was the one town daughter who had made it big—even if, by industry standards, she wasn’t really all that big. Spencer would never let her go back to being plain Holly Andrews, sister of that weird albino Heather.

By the time she climbed back upstairs she had all but made up her mind to find a motel. The problem was finding a way of breaking the news to Heather. Her sister sat at the table with her hands wrapped around her mug, looking up at Holly through the steam with frightened eyes.

“What is it, Heather? What’s the emergency?”

“It’s something I have to tell you. I had to do it in person.”

Holly sat down. “So tell me.”

“I… you won’t be seeing my songs anymore.”

“You mean you’ve stopped writing?”

“No. Yes.”

Holly scalded her mouth on the coffee, trying not to get too far ahead of Heather, trying not to read anything into the words—though everything she said was haunted with implications of other things she didn’t dare put into words. Conversations with Heather were like a game of riddles. Her plainest speech could be as cryptic and mysterious as her songs.

Go slow, she told herself. “Yes or no, Heather? Are you blocked? It happens, you know.”

“No, it goes deeper than that. I hear them all the time. They’ve been coming more than ever lately. But I won’t write them down, and I won’t have you putting them to music and blasting them all over the world. It’s bad enough that I can hear them.”

“You probably didn’t hear, dear, but the band broke up two weeks ago. There’s no one to blast your words or my music, even if you did keep writing.”

Heather looked unconvinced. “You’ll get another band. Everything comes easy to you. But you won’t have my words anymore.”

“Why make such a big issue out of your words, Heather? I mean, they’re wonderful, but they’re not state secrets. If you don’t want to write for me anymore, that’s fine, but tell me so straight out. Don’t cloak it in mysterious bullshit.”

“Who else knows about me?”

“What do you mean? Who knows we’re sisters?”

“No, who knows I write your lyrics?”

Holly met Heather’s eyes as steadily as she could. “You know I promised not to tell.”

“But have you?”

“Of course not!”

“No one wonders why you split your money with me?”

“That’s my business. They think you’re an invalid, and I’m supporting you. I mean, it’s sort of true, except that you’re earning your split. You really are an invalid, the way you live.”

“I wish I’d never gone out.” She gnawed her thin lip. “Did my telegram worry you?”

“I was coming home anyway. Of course it worried me!”

“I wanted you back here, but you shouldn’t worry.”

“Oh no? My source is cut off. Not that it matters, since my career will probably dry up like your inspiration.”

“I still have my inspiration. More than enough. You— you could have it yourself, though, if you could get away with it.”

“What are you talking about? I’m a miserable poet. Where am I going to find anyone who writes like you? You’re the ‘terror’ half of Holly Terror.”

“You can have the words if you want them. You already have the music.”

And Heather stared at her, smirking, with panic a slow surging tide behind her eyes, playing through the steadier current of irony.

This was the same old game of taunts and riddles. She was supposed to play along, dredging for meaning in her sister’s deliberately vague remarks, never sure of the truth of anything, never arriving at a final understanding. Heather’s way with words made for powerful poetry, but as conversation it was maddening.

Holly shoved back from the table. “I can’t take this shit right now, all right? I’ve been through too much in the last few weeks as it is, everything rearranging itself around me. I’ve lost everything I thought I could count on—and now this, my ace in the hole. You can’t just throw this news at me and expect me to play your fucking little guessing games.”

Heather gazed at her cup, looking slightly chastened. “Do you feel betrayed?”

“If I did, it wouldn’t be for the reason you think.”

“Because I—I did betray you, Holly. That’s part of what we have to talk about.”

“We have to talk sense if we talk at all. You’re free to do what you want with your songs, but I think I deserve some straight talk when it affects me this much. I don’t have much patience for bullshit right now.”

She rose from the table and saw Heather’s veneer of self-control slide away. Of course, it had only been thinly pulled over a bottomless pit of insecurity. “Where are you going?”

“To a motel.”

“Don’t! Stay here.”

“Until you’re ready to talk, things can only get worse. I’ll call you with a number.”

She walked out of the kitchen, simultaneously relieved and ashamed of herself. It had been so easy to get free of Heather, forcing an overreaction for the sake of winning some breathing room. It was all a pretext for escape. But Heather apparently believed she was as upset as she pretended.

When she came down with her bags, Heather stood in the doorway. “Don’t go.”

Holly allowed herself to soften. “I don’t need more confusion right now, that’s all. Maybe when my head’s clear I’ll be able to understand you better. We both need time to think about things, okay? I’ll call you.”

“But… but what if I need you here?”

“You don’t, Heather. You never did. I’ve been the one dependent on you, it was never the other way around.”

Heather had no answer to that, not even a mystification.

As she walked out to the car, she thought she heard voices above the hiss of rain. She looked back and saw the house being swallowed up in trees. The sound was soft and metallic, hardly human, the sort of noise the brain always reads into random patterns such as the white-noise sizzle of rain. Heather turned abruptly back into the hall, slamming the door behind her, and the sounds died instantly.

Holly stared at the house. The front windows were exactly as dark as the shadows under the trees. It looked as if the house were a facade with no rear wall, opening directly into the woods. She stared at it a long time, getting soaked, thinking she could still hear those silvery voices sliding away into distance. Then she remembered that she wasn’t waiting for anyone but herself. She was free to go.

* * *

She wasn’t surprised that once away from the house and her sister, she soon felt much better. The Spencer weather, as ever in tune with her mood, had itself begun to clear by late afternoon. On long-ago midwinter days during the Christmas holidays, she and a few friends would drop acid to roam the streets and haunt the cemeteries, to explore the banks of the river where rapists were said to hide; and as soon as the drugs dissolved on their tongues, after weeks of grey flannel skies and steady drizzle, the clouds would scatter, the sun would come out, and by early afternoon the grass was dry enough to lie on in a warm December wind.

She hadn’t touched acid in over five years, but the sharp blue sky edged with clouds brought back memories nearly as strong as the drugs. With her bags in a motel room and a car at her disposal, she felt exuberant, liberated, as if it might be possible to live here without immediately being reclaimed by old unwelcome parts of her past.

That thought came with a surge of guilt. She picked up the phone and let it ring for several minutes. She was about to hang up when Heather answered, out of breath.

“Holly!”

“Who else? Look, I’m sorry—”

“Please come out here, please. I didn’t mean to upset you. You… you have to stay with me.”

“Heather, I told you I need time alone right now. I just called to give you my number, so write this down.”

“But I thought you’d want the words. I want you to have them. “

“Don’t change your mind on my account.”

“I haven’t. I’m not. I mean, I want you to hear them the way I do. Write them down yourself.”

“Are you crazy? You can’t give them to me. That’s your talent, your inspiration. Mine is music.”

“But they both come from the same place.”

“Heather… do you want the number or not? I’ll hang up.”

Heather’s voice rose into a hysterical whine, and Holly couldn’t control herself. She hung up on the words, “I’ll take you there!”

Fuck her. She wasn’t going to let this madness ruin her life.

A bitter joke to think that she had built her success around Heather’s madness up until now. Many writers could fake the trappings of dread and a mood of gloomy posturing, but Heather had some sort of innate power of evoking dread with a few choice images. Something to do with her chemical imbalance. Their skills were suited to each other, that was certain? and that must be what Heather meant when she said they came from the same place. She had always found it easy to match Heather’s words with the perfect sounds to deepen the spell of fear. She could hardly imagine meshing so well with anyone else. But perhaps it was time to try something totally different. She couldn’t go on being what Rolling Stone had called “rock’s first Edgar Allan Poe” forever.

Even Poe had mastered a myriad of styles. The band had begun to complain that horror was stifling them, that their music was becoming progressively darker and drearier, and even the fans were starting to find it too oppressive. Almost everyone wanted her to lighten up. But she couldn’t control the lyrics that came from Heather; nor could she explain that there was no way of “lightening up” her sister.

So this disruption, along with all the others, might end up being a blessing. It was unfortunate that the band had broken up just when they had finally begun to reach an audience beyond the loyal cult that had kept them alive this long. But instead of devoting herself to more of the same, she could try something new now, unhampered by public expectation.

She had returned to her roots; it was time to see if new shoots could spring from them.

She went walking in a vibrant purple dusk. Because most of the motels in Spencer were naturally clustered around the University, she inevitably found herself on campus, treading oak-lined paths mosaiced with leafprints. The air grew brisk and dark and the stars came out like distant reflections in a sheet of obsidian. The ivied buildings and chilly scent of pine, the students hurrying and laughing and holding one another, carried her mind away from recent trouble, toward older longings. The streets at the far edge of campus were lined with taverns; she wanted a hot drink, but didn’t think she could handle the obnoxious crowds of frat boys that seemed to control every bar. She considered going back for her car and driving out to one of the taverns over in Laineville, Spencer’s sister city, where the music was sometimes good and the crowds weren’t guite so young. Or maybe she would save that trek for tomorrow night. She was starting to feel jet lagged.

In the act of turning back, she noticed a sign outside a bar.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered.

Inside, the music was just starting. She found a seat in a dark corner where she could watch the band without being seen. A man she didn’t think she knew, though his face was mostly covered by his hair, sat at a synthesizer that seemed to have been custom-built by a very eccentric and impoverished engineer. The sound was good, though, and made her long for her own instrument, which was waiting for her in L.A. Ron Deal, looking surprisingly middle-aged, played bass with that particular lack of enthusiasm he had made all his own. Another stranger, a pretty short-haired woman, played drums with enough energy to make up for Ron. And on acoustic guitar, his Strat on a stand in the shadows, was the man whose name had made her stop and damn herself in the street.

Kelly Conklin played lead and sang, though the keyboard player and drummer threw in a few near-miss harmonies whenever it seemed the song absolutely couldn’t do without.

Otherwise, as usual, Kelly was trying to carry the whole band himself, and staggering under the weight. But it was the Kelly Conklin Band, and it seemed only fair that he should bear the burden.

She wondered how many bands he’d formed since she had broken up with him, and how long this group would hold together in its current incarnation. She watched Kelly and thought idly about a lot of things, which was a bad sign considering that the music should have caught her up and carried her away from all that. The fact was, they weren’t very good. It was a long-cherished opinion of hers that Kelly had committed himself to mediocrity; which firmly held belief had made it easier not to regret certain choices she had made herself. She supposed it was unfair to keep a chokehold on her opinions. Kelly must have gone through plenty of changes by now. He still looked much the same, though—his coke-bottle lenses making his eyes bug out, his long sandy hair beginning to thin, giving him an inappropriately seedy look. What he was, was nerdy, but the nerd look had worn out now that he’d turned thirty. They were the same age, six months apart, born in opposite seasons. When they’d first gone together they’d used this to explain their complementary natures; and when everything was ending, it had provided a useful metaphor for their combativeness. She could look at him tonight without seeing that arch-enemy; she could even feel a little glad to see him. Gladder to see him than to hear him, in fact. The music was a real disappointment.

It seemed like a long time before they took a break. Kelly went out through a back door. She checked the urge to follow him, wondering if he still kept his old habits. Maybe he and the drummer were hooked up. No, the drummer was in a corner with her arm around another girl. Kelly reappeared, smiling shyly at the crowd, making the same old moves, sauntering past the bar to acquaint himself with any girl who might’ve engaged in eye-play during the set.

It was a matter of waiting to be noticed. Eye contact brought him drifting closer. The dark corner gave her a perhaps unfair advantage, so she leaned to bring her face into the glow of a candle in an amber ball. He was starting to speak, still smiling, when recognition made him mute.

His whole body stiffened, shook, and then he came at her with a yell, his delight pleasing her more than she would have expected or admitted.

“Holly! My God, I don’t believe it! What are you doing here? What the hell are you doing here?”

He wrapped his deceptively strong arms around her, but only briefly—disengaging before she had to struggle to free herself. That was new. He sat down across from her and shook his head, his eyes seeming to swim inside his lenses, grinning and laughing. “This is unbelievable!” Apparently for him, too, the old enmity had faded.

He ordered another Irish coffee for her and one for himself, and they launched into the kind of talk that always follows long periods of incommunication. The major events of their lives were treated first as trivialities, to be touched on in more depth later if there was to be a later. The break-up of her band amazed him, despite the fact that he’d been in and out of a dozen groups himself in half as many years.

“But that’s different,” he said. “With so much money and so many people hanging on everything you do—I mean, who cares what goes on in a small town like this? A few college students? Man, I couldn’t stand the pressure. A million people hearing about every little squabble.”

She waved this off. “We weren’t up to a million fans. Maybe next year we would have been.”

“Still.”

There was no way to explain some things to Kelly. If he’d wanted to learn them, he would have tried harder. When she left him here, he’d been putting more energy into digging himself a hole than he’d put into playing guitar. That hole ought to be pretty deep by now, with wall-to-wall carpet and a reinforced roof, cable TV and a sound system good enough to keep him happy through the long dead winters.

You’re so fucking judgmental, she told herself. Snap out of it.

The other musicians were starting to regroup. There was a quickening among them when they realized who she was. The keyboardist, Neil, and Raelene the drummer came over and introduced themselves. Ron gave her a brief nod, as if he saw her every day. Kelly apologized for not introducing her earlier, “Especially since Neil worships you.”

Neil blushed and looked at the candle.

“I hate to break up this tender reunion,” Ron said, “but it’s time we got back to work.”

Neil mumbled something in a choked voice, and Raelene jumped on it. “What a great idea!”

“Sure!” said Kelly, jumping up and taking her arm. “Come on, Holly, we know all your songs.”

She pulled back. “What? I can’t do that. You guys—I mean, Neil….”

“It was his idea,” Kelly said.

Neil smiled out from under his hair. “Honored, really.”

She hesitated. She had come out looking for something new, and this was too much like slipping backward into an old groove. Well, and so? Was that always bad? It was one thing when the past reclaimed you with a reek of mildew and a breath of damp earth, like a grave gaping to welcome you home. It was another thing when music was involved. Music wasn’t static; it constantly evolved and changed. Besides, she missed playing. It had been weeks.

“Whatever you want to play,” Kelly was saying as they pushed and pulled her along. “You sing lead. Come on, Holly, you’ll shake up this place.”

She found herself settling behind Neil’s keyboard, which lacked several familiar landmarks while featuring a few she didn’t recognize. She loved to experiment, though.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Kelly called, “we have a special guest tonight, straight from a performance for the crowned heads of Europe—and I do mean ‘heads.’ Some of you have already recognized her “

And indeed, as she came into the light she saw startled looks out in the crowd, heard gasps, and someone went rushing out onto the street calling her name just as Kelly was saying it:

“Spencer’s own, Holly Terror!”

She glanced at Raelene and whispered. “You know ‘The Woods Are Dark’?”

Before Raelene could even nod, Ron began pulsing out the first notes of the piece, which began with a deep choked bass like the beat of a heart buried under six feet of wet mulch. He looked over at her with a smirk that was somehow affectionate, and then it was her turn, the wavering notes seeping out like the last heat ebbing from a corpse. The drums kicked in, sounding weary, funereal. Kelly began to scrape his pick over his strings, eliciting a sound like long nails scratching at splintered boards. This was one of her first songs, one of the first Heather had given her, and she realized suddenly that it was the first song she and Kelly had played together, the first which had really come together and taken on a life of its own. An old song, but it hadn’t lost its power. She had forgotten this power until now, because it had so much to do with home, and with being buried here, her teenage fears that she might never claw her way free. They were Heather’s words and images, Heather’s emotions—but when Holly sang them she made them her own.

She belted out the words triumphantly at first, because she had escaped after all, her fears had been proven false; but by the second verse an edge of awful awareness crept into her voice and the words seemed to mock her, because she was back again, wasn’t she? It was escape that had proved illusory. The guitar seemed to laugh at her, tinnily, with Heather’s voice. Heather rarely laughed, but this was a rare, rich, cruel joke. She was back on her home ground where the woods were dark and the ground was rotten with shallowly-buried memories. She was playing in a band with her old lover in the same kind of bar she’d dreaded she would never outgrow, singing practically the first song she had ever sung. It was as if nothing at all had intervened, nothing had changed, and the music was only there to remind her of her ultimate failure. And she felt that Heather had known all this years ago, had planted the images in her repertoire as an emotional landmine she would stumble over years into the future, and finally be destroyed.

It was a relief when the song ended. She was wary of what might follow.

But first what followed was applause. The doors to the street were open wide, and the amps cranked up to spill their sounds out into the night. She could hear her name echoing out there in screams, as bodies pushed in to fill the bar beyond its legal limit. The little stage itself was getting so engulfed by bodies that Kelly had to move practically back to the drums. Several bar employees stationed themselves around the stage to shove people back.

It was with more than a touch of panic that she realized it was too late to stop. The night had shifted its course, and caught her up in something she couldn’t hold back. She could almost see what was coming, as if she had lived all this before. Something was crawling over the horizon, a smothering shadow she couldn’t avoid, something black and faceless and awful that pressed in like the crowd, that massed swarm of faces, to suck the life out of her.

But she wouldn’t let it have her. She could take control of a crowd; she was skilled at that. All she needed was control of herself, and something powerful to exorcise her fear.

There was one song that frightened her more than any other, one she rarely played though it was always requested. Maybe if she played it now, if she let herself go where that song always led, she would reach the end of all darkness, the bottom of the well, and afterwards everything would seem light by comparison, all roads would lead uphill, out of oppression.

She caught her breath. The audience waited, tense and expectant, getting edgy as they wondered what was coming.

She glanced at Kelly and his eyes reassured her that she wasn’t alone. Everything would be all right. This was just for tonight. Songs didn’t exorcise or invoke anything unnatural; they were only songs, spun from human hearts and dreams. A good song was an encounter, like jamais vu, a recognition of a place one had never seen before.

She winked at Kelly then, and brightly named the song she could play a thousand times and still find in it something to fear: “How Black Was My Valley.”

* * *

Runick heard Holly singing from the edge of campus. He knew instantly that this was no recording. He owned all her albums, every bootleg. When he saw the crowd up ahead of him, the excitement in the street, he broke into a run. The mob was packed tight around the entrance to a bar, but it couldn’t hold him back. Her voice drew him in; he slipped through the crowd as if invisible, right up to the edge of the stage, and nearly stumbled out in front of her.

His heart nearly stopped. He had never been this close. But suddenly he felt naked, vulnerable, afraid that she might see him—though she was still singing, with eyes closed, the last verse of “The Woods Are Dark.” He wondered how much he’d missed.

He’d attended all her Portland concerts with a bouquet of black roses. He was always among the first in line, the first to the edge of the stage, and there had always come a moment when he was able to reach up and hand the bouquet to her, imagining that something subtler passed between them when she met his eyes and nodded her thanks. He dreamed of all the things she had to say to him, dreamed she might decode all the secret messages locked up in her songs—as if they were all meant for him. But tonight, without his roses, thrust suddenly into this crowd, there was nothing to set him apart from all the others. He was close enough to see lines in her thin unsmiling face. She looked weary, and he wished he could comfort her. If only she knew him, knew his secret soul, he would give her such love. A single streak of pure white ran through her jet black hair, making her look ancient and youthful at the same time. He longed to press his face against that hair, to inhale the scent of her, to caress her tenderly and protect her from all trouble. Looking at her was exquisite agony, almost unbearable, as if she were simultaneously mother, sister and lover. Chills ran through

him like fever waves, spreading from his heart to his crotch and back again.

In the silence that ended “The Woods Are Dark,” Runick glanced furtively at those around him, and was shocked to see that their eyes held something like the same adoration and passion that he felt. Nothing the equal of his own, of course, but still—a puny striving to unite with her power, her purity, as if they alone could make her whole, as if her energy were a physical substance they consumed like addicts. He despised the way they drained the life away from her—no wonder she looked tired. He would never treat her so badly; he wanted to give something to her, not steal it away. No one here could possibly understand her songs as thoroughly as Runick did, for no one here had such a sympathetic darkness at their core, a blackness that harmonized so completely to her music. The dark valley inside him had known no other light than Holly’s voice. In that place especially, she sang for him alone, she created and celebrated his power.

Jealousy made him grit his teeth. His entire being clenched in fury and frustration. His eyes were fixed on her mouth, so he saw, rather than heard, her words: “How Black Was My Valley.” He stiffened in surprise, almost backing away. This was a kind of blasphemy!

But it was too late to flee. The first notes were already sweeping him away, carrying all his rage and jealous passion down into the dark.

Maybe if he’d had some warning, if he’d had time to steel himself against the song, he could have made himself invulnerable. But he was so used to hearing it in private, giving himself to the music completely, that now his descent into the valley was a conditioned reflex—a cue planted and reinforced by self-hypnosis, irresistible.

The pressure of the crowd merged with the pressure of darkness. Instead of cigarette smoke and spilled beer he smelled the night wind blowing through pines and moss. He was alone now, sweeping down into the valley, borne along by the cascading notes, unable to turn back or slow his descent.

He struggled against the current, dimly aware that there was danger here because his other body was in jeopardy. But resistance was useless. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, if he were dreaming or awake. All he knew was that the music was loud, all-enveloping, beating at his blood and bones, and its volume made the vision stronger than ever before. She had never played it in a concert he attended. The valley was deeper and darker, impossibly real. Tonight there were no prefatory stars or moon, not even a hint of blanketing clouds. Above was simple darkness, and the sense of sheer walls closing in as he plunged into the deep well of darkness.

The musical wind sucked him down toward the source of sound, so strong that he hardly needed his wings to soar.

Then suddenly there was light, a nova, and Holly’s face shone out at him as her luminous words spilled their radiance over everything. He panicked, beating backward, afraid of the flash—afraid that his true nature would be revealed, his sickness exposed, and everyone would see what he really was. He fanned his black wings, trying to blot her out before she could harm him. He felt his shadow spreading, saw the fear come into her eyes as she finally noticed him and recognized his power

“Runick!”

And again he was snatched back, his wings furling up painfully, the lights of the bar breaking in on the black purity of the vision, all his limitless power abruptly dwindling to nothing but the weak shell of a frantic, obsessed young man—only one among many.

It was Nevis again, his roommate, shouting. “I been looking for you, man! See you found her, though. Isn’t this great? I told you she’d play for us!”

Runick tried to pull away, struggling back to the valley where his destiny lay, but he was hopelessly off the track.

He stumbled away from the stage, unable to bear the disparity between the growing intensity of the song and his own loss of power. Nevis clutched his shoulder, shouting in his ear.

“After this we’ll stake out her sister’s place on the edge of town, okay? Heather Anderson’s her name. Holly’s probably staying there. We’ll get her autograph or maybe a good look through the shades.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Sure we can. Come on, you’re her biggest fan, you should be up for it. When are you gonna get another chance like this?”

“You can’t invade her privacy like that. You don’t understand.”

“It’s not like we’re breaking into her house, Runick, we just want to see her. But hey, if you don’t want to come along, that’s fine.”

He couldn’t imagine hiding with anyone else, tolerating their brutish comments. Their understanding of her songs was superficial; to them all rock music was just an excuse to jerk around and scream and do drugs. As if the Black Valley were only a valley, only words in a song, instead of a place more real to Runick than the inside of this bar. Nevis had never been to that place; he had no idea what made it so black.

Still… if he was clever, and went along with them only so far, he might profit from their enthusiasm—at least as far as it went. He didn’t have to sink to their level when he could stand on their shoulders.

“Maybe I’ll go,” he said. “Just to keep you in line.”

Nevis cheered and then he was gone, spotting another accomplice. Left alone in the crowd, Runick looked back at the stage, wishing things could be as they had been before. The image of the dark valley had frightened him, but at least it was better—more fulfilling—than this.

But he was grounded in reality now, mired in bodies.

The rest of the concert was almost disappointing, with never another moment when he felt close to Holly until she hustled past him with the guitarist’s arm over her shoulder, fighting for the door. For a brief moment he found himself inadvertently placed in her path. The panic in her eyes might not have been meant for him, but it looked like recognition.

* * *

After playing a set in that bar, it was ruined for the group as a place to relax. Ron took off without a word as soon as they got out the door. Kelly suggested a bar in Laineville, and Raelene immediately dropped out. When they got there, Holly could see why. It was full of cowboys, such as they were these days, and more kept coming in carrying bowling bags. She couldn’t help but feel anonymous here.

Neil asked endless technical guestions about the eguipment she used until Kelly started steering the conversation toward events from their past—things the synth player had no part in. Eventually Neil said something about having to get up early for work, and then they were alone. Later they walked down Main Street looking in dark storefront windows, wandering around a subject that didn’t fit comfortably into any conversation. The end of the evening seemed all too inevitable. Worse, despite herself Holly found that she was curious about exactly how much—and how little—Kelly had changed. It had been a long time since she’d been in this position with anyone who’d known her first as Holly Andrews rather than Holly Terror.

“Time I got back,” she said, and caught the expected flicker of anxiety in Kelly’s eyes.

“You staying with Heather?”

“Motel. I can’t take too much of her right now.”

“No doubt.”

“Have you seen her at all, Kelly? Is it just me, or is she weirder now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t run into her very often— you know how she is.”

“I feel bad not staying with her, but….”

“You two never did have much in common.” He squeezed her hand. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift. Maybe you want to come by my place for awhile?”

“Maybe for awhile,” she answered, wondering whether it was curiosity or entropy that made her go against her better judgment.

* * *

Sometime late, or very early, in blackness except for a candle’s last flickering, Kelly’s phone rang. Holly woke just enough to feel grateful that it couldn’t be for her.

But then Kelly shook her, whispering, “Holly, it’s for you. It’s Heather.”

“Heather?” She sat up and drew blankets around herself, unwilling to accept the phone. He had the mouthpiece covered. “What does she want?”

He shrugged bony shoulders. “I don’t know—she sounds hysterical. She asked if I’d seen you.”

“Fuck.” She took the phone. “Heather? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Heather could barely restrain herself. “They’ve come for you, Holly! They’re out there! They think I’m you— they—please come over, Holly, please!”

“What are you talking about? Who’s out where?”

“In the trees, they’ve been coming closer all the time, but this is the first time… around the house. They think you’re here and they’ll come after me if they can’t have you.”

“Jesus, do you know what you sound like? Call the police if you have peeping toms.”

“They’re not—they’d just melt away. I wanted to explain but it took too long and you ran out before—please, Holly, you have to come!”

She pulled the phone away from her ear and sighed, shaking her head at Kelly.

“You want me to come with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I’m going anywhere,” she said.

Heather must have heard her: “You have to!” she screamed.

“I think you better,” Kelly said. “Come on, I’ll drive you.”

“This better be good, Heather!” she yelled into the phone. She slammed it down.

Kelly was already dressed by the time she got out of bed. He shoved her clothes at her in a wad. “I’ll start the car. “

She dressed clumsily, anchored down by a cumulative exhaustion that wouldn’t let her come completely awake. She needed a good twelve to sixteen hours of sleep. It was like a dream, standing here swaying over Kelly’s bed, but that was a more reassuring dream than the thought of seeing Heather in this state.

Fifteen minutes later they rounded the curve before the old house, and the headlights of Kelly’s car picked out a glint of chrome, a flash of a windshield. For a snapshot instant Holly saw a new model pickup truck parked a few dozen yards down the road; in the cab, a young man was frozen on her eyes in the act of raising a bottle to his lips. As they passed the truck, the kid ducked out of sight. They turned into the driveway, the headlights flushed several figures from the trees near the house.

“Hey!” Kelly slammed on the brakes and jumped out to intercept them. They were boys, faces bright with liquor and laughter. Kelly didn’t even get close to them; they hooted derisively and fled down the road. A moment later the pickup sped into view, made a dramatic, tire-screeching one- eighty, and tore back toward town. The bed was crowded with passengers now, chanting into the night, their voices fading with distance: “Hol-ly! Ter-ror! Hol-ly! Ter-ror!”

“Fans of yours?” Kelly said.

She turned toward the house, wondering why all the lights were off. Suddenly Heather emerged from the gloom of the doorway and ran across the grass to meet her, sobbing.

She felt cold and damp as the lawn in Holly’s arms.

“Okay, okay, Heather, they were just kids.”

“I thought—I thought—”

“ But she was too shaken to speak.

Holly and Kelly led her back to the house, trying light switches as they went. None worked until they got into the kitchen. She sat Heather at the table while Kelly filled the kettle.

“You should’ve called the police,” he said.

“That’s what I told her,” Holly said.

“No… I’ve called them before. They don’t come out here anymore. Or if they do come, they just laugh at me.”

“You mean this happens all the time?” Kelly asked.

“Not… not exactly.”

“They’re only bothering you because of me,” Holly said. “Why should they be coming around all the time? They know I’m never here.”

Heather shook her head so minutely that Holly almost missed the gesture. She read her sister’s intent, though.

She wouldn’t speak further in front of Kelly.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem anxious to stay. When they heard the first birds singing, he allowed himself to be led to the door. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

“She’s my sister, Kel. I’ll be fine just as soon as I get her in bed.”

“Well, call me when you’re up again, I’ll pick you up and you can get your car. Maybe we can have dinner or something?”

“I’ll call.”

She watched him drive away. It was still pitch black outside. The birds didn’t make another sound.

Heather paced restlessly across the kitchen floor. “I couldn’t talk with him around.”

“I know. I know what you want to talk about.”

“How could you?”

“Because I know what’s on your mind. This whole ‘emergency’ of yours. You think somehow these kids know you write my songs, you believe I told somebody, and now they’re coming around to wreck your privacy. Isn’t that it? You think they’re your fans.”

“No—”

“I didn’t tell anybody about you, Heather. If you want to know why kids come around bothering you, it’s because you’ve made yourself into some kind of institution around here—the weird white lady. You know, in the sort of house kids dare each other to visit on Halloween.”

“It wasn’t kids before tonight. If you’ll listen, I’ll try to make you understand.”

Silence. Black night. The wall clock’s ticking was unnaturally loud.

“Well?” she finally said.

Heather went to the window. Holly saw nothing in the glass but her sister’s reflection, as in a black mirror.

“It’ll be light soon. Safe to go. We’re at the shallow end of night.”

“The shallow…. What are you talking about?”

Heather moved toward the back door, gesturing for Holly to follow her. “It’s easier to show you.”

“You want to go outside?”

“Yes. You can see for yourself. You can decide what you want to do.”

Holly couldn’t find the strength to resist. The sooner this ended, the sooner she could drag herself up to her barren room and sleep. She followed Heather onto the back

porch, which was dark and damp as the outdoors and suddenly she was outdoors. Pine needles brushed her face, leaving a trail of cold tears. She glanced back and saw the bright kitchen windows far behind them, though she had no memory of stepping over the threshold.

Exhaustion was making her delirious.

There was just enough light to see the trunks of trees around her. Her shadow fell dead ahead, pointing the way from the house. Heather was a pale shape weaving through the pines. She sensed that the sky was growing light, and she could just make out the scratchy glitter of wet needles and the curved gleam of resinous branches heavy with rain. Their footsteps were padded, muffled, and made a crumpling sound, as if they were wading through tissue paper.

She looked up and saw Heather staring at her with a forlorn expression. She started toward her, then saw it wasn’t Heather at all. Heather was far ahead, in another direction, moving guickly—though she stopped when she heard Holly’s gasp. The other face she’d seen was gone now; as if it had never been.

“What is it?” Heather asked, coming back to her.

“I thought I saw your face, but it wasn’t you.”

“No, it wasn’t. Take my hand. Don’t be afraid, it’ll soon be light.”

And if it weren’t? Holly wondered. What then? What if this were the deep end of night?

* * *

To Runick, the house was a dark shrine, and the coming of the headlights could not have pried him loose from his place of worship. The others scurried like bugs, taking their sacrilegious comments with them. It was a relief to have the darkness to himself. He crouched low among the pines, finally rewarded for his vigil by the sight of her walking through the headlights. When they darkened a moment later, he blinked furiously and tried to track her through the night, but it was impossible. Then he heard a door shut, and the waiting began again.

He hardly felt the chill, or the rain that came and went. He dozed. What woke him was the sound of another engine starting. He saw the car pulling out of the yard. A figure appeared at the bright kitchen window, not Holly but the pale one—her sister. He feared for a moment that she had seen him, but she backed away slowly, no alarm in her gestures. Moments later he heard voices in the trees behind the house, and a gentle crunching sound exactly like that which preceded his descent into the dark valley… the popping and clicking of the slightly scratched album. But this time the sound was actual footfall. He slipped through the trees, following, until he saw their shapes ahead of him. The darkness was easing a bit, sloping into morning, which added to his anxiety. He needed darkness to face Holly, needed the strength and security it brought. He tried to will it into being, and then remembered where he was.

He was the guardian of this place. The darkness was nothing less than his wings. All he needed to do was spread them, let the black pinions unfold, and then the music would begin and they would all be swept down into that place, that furrow in his dreaming brain.

Runick shut his eyes to evoke the feeling of darkness.

He imagined himself at the very mouth of the valley, about to start his descent. He was the needle sliding into the groove. He was darkness covering over all.

The trick was working, owing perhaps to all his practice, his discipline. It was a reflex shared by the night; a vision he had brought into the world. He could hear the music now, coming up from a deep cleft just ahead of him; and as the sisters descended into it, he swept along behind them on a black wind.

* * *

Heather moved quickly, surprisingly strong and surefooted in the dark woods; and with one arm she lent some strength to her sister, who kept stumbling. Holly just wanted to lie down.

“Where are you taking me? Please tell me something. I’m so tired.”

“Don’t you remember coming here?” Heather said.

“I almost never… I was afraid of the woods.”

“That was later. You weren’t when you were younger. The difference between us seemed much greater then. Now you’re practically the older one. So well-traveled, so worldly.”

“You’ll always be my older sister, Heather.”

“Believe me, there are times I wish I weren’t.”

“When my fans come around?”

“Baby sister, I have fans of my own.”

Heather edged them around a rhododendron black and huge as a shaggy beast, on a trail she could never have found on her own. On the far side of the huge bush, Heather

hesitated. Something made a sound inside Holly’s head, a single note that sounded stark and sinister against the general muzziness of her thoughts. It woke her slightly, though she hadn’t realized she was falling asleep.

“Heather, do you hear music?” she asked.

“Music? No, Holly. I hear words. You hear music.”

“What are you talking about?”

Heather raised a hand, indicating the land directly before them, and said, “Don’t you remember?”

Just ahead was a deepening of darkness, and also of the earth. The ground fell away before their feet, a black incision with the sound of water somewhere down inside it.

The sides were rock and mud and brambles, but already Heather was moving toward a trail of stepping stones that might have been placed for this purpose. With one hand she helped Holly down, step by step, below the roots of the trees, away from the promise of the sky. It was dark again here, dark as midnight, the dawn negated. Her eyes dilated but there was little to see except the untrimmed, frightening forms of wildness, enormous shapes looming overhead like the shifting shadows of vast birds of prey. She remembered, dimly, a childhood nightmare; and the memory was one with the sensation of that very old dream. In her fatigue, it seemed she had never stopped dreaming it. It had been a dream of strange sounds in darkness, an eerie music that seemed to come simultaneously from far away and from deep within. And Heather had been part of the dream, just as she was part of this waking dream; Heather calling out strange words that seemed like part of the music, words that drew faces out of blackness and shadows and nothing, faces that were not faces at all despite the mouths, despite the fact that they came to look at Holly, thrusting as blindly as the roots of the old pines; and in the dream she had screamed and screamed to get away from them, screamed and twisted and writhed about trying to wake, calling for allies, for friends, for anyone who might hear—but there was nothing, no one came to rescue her, and the dream just went on and on as the music grew, and the blackness grew, until finally, much later, it all receded and she was awake, possibly. Though it seemed that the dream had never really ended, the darkness had never ebbed, she had just grown used to it.

They stumbled along through weeds and vines, slipping on slick stones. Mud sucked at her shoes. She sensed the walls growing steeper, or else she was shrinking, falling into the ravine. She cried out and grabbed at her sister, who jumped and let out a faint gasp at her touch.

“Heather, what is this place?”

Heather silenced her, listening to the darkness. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Something following….”

Holly listened, but there was only the trickling gurgle of the cold stream. No morning birds. The sound of the water was faintly musical; it set off a corresponding harmony in her mind. She fought to silence it, but it seemed to spill out of her now, flooding the dark. She spoke to drown it out.

“I don’t hear anything!” she cried. “Where are we going?”

“It’s so dark,” Heather whispered. “It shouldn’t be this dark. I thought we would be safe.”

“Then go back. Let’s go back.”

For a moment Heather seemed to consider this, but then they both heard it—a grating sound, rocks rattling, somewhere behind them. Heather instantly turned and fled, abandoning Holly. Ahead lay a greater darkness; Holly felt certain the valley grew deeper and narrower here. But she was afraid to remain here alone—and even more afraid of what might be following them.

She hurried after Heather, and suddenly the ground dropped away beneath her. Her feet slipped on mossy stones; she landed hard on her back, and went sliding down a wet chute, a waterfall. Her screams and Heather’s were mingled, though she realized that she had shot far ahead of her sister, far deeper. When she landed, sprawled on a bank of what felt like rocks and moss and decayed wood, she heard Heather somewhere above her, calling down:

“Where are you, Holly?”

Holly moaned. “Down here.”

At first she thought Heather answered, “All’s well.”

Then she said it again, louder: “At the well?”

Well? Holly thought. What well?

Her legs were still in the water. Curiously, she kicked them, but couldn’t find the bottom. At the base of the falls was a deep pool. The water felt strangely warm and stagnant. Suddenly afraid, she jerked her limbs out of it and scrambled backward till she came up against a wet wall of stone.

“Heather?” she called. “You’ve been here before. How do I get back up?”

“Don’t worry about that. This must be where they wanted you.”

“Who, Heather?”

“Don’t you remember? This is where the songs come from. This is where the music began.”

Holly crouched down in a ball, hoping to shelter in the crannies of the rock. The pool made an evil lapping sound caused by the constant sloshing of the falls. By some trick of exhaustion, her faltering senses, it seemed to splash in time to the music in her head. There were little echoes of more complicated tunes implied in every trickle, melodies she might have worked out eventually, given time.

“Do you remember, Holly? I brought you here a long time ago. It was a special day for both of us. I knew we’d have to come here again someday. And they’ve been calling— wanting you. I had to get you to come back. I didn’t mean for it to happen now, this morning—but I guess they couldn’t wait. It’s been too long already.”

Holly suddenly felt that it was critical that she not answer. A single sound would betray her position. She tried to stifle even the sounds in her head, the dark music, fearing that there might be something nearby that could hear even that.

Had she been here before, as Heather swore? She had no conscious memory of the place, though there was something like it in her thoughts—a place she’d thought her own nightmarish invention. No… in fact it was Heather’s creation. Heather had planted the scene in her mind: this very place.

“How Black Was My Valley,” she whispered.

And suddenly the music in her head died out completely. Silence filled the darkness, blotting out even the sound of the falls.

Silence, until Heather began to sing.

The words came irregularly at first, as if wrenched from her. Then Heather broke off to query her sister:

“Do you hear them, Holly? Words and music this time? They ought to allow it. You’ve served them so well. We both have.”

She commenced singing again, her voice rough and quavering, picking out words. Holly realized with a chill what her sister was doing. She was not inventing the words, not making them up as she went along—she was transcribing them, seizing on the odd echoing patterns of sound that seemed to float through this place, rendering them in human speech though they were anything but human. They were emanations of rock and water, of the trees and the air; and it was not a healthy conjunction of elements that operated here. This pool lay at the bottom of some of process she did not grasp; it was a receptacle for certain evils that trickled down from the world above, things that could not nourish the roots of trees, things the earth could not absorb. Listening to Heather, she began to perceive the untranslated meanings of the sounds, deeper than words. No wonder the songs had filled her with fear—they were pulled from this well of darkness, this catch-all for the fallen and decayed. And no wonder that her music had suited the words so well, for it was woven of the same substance. She had heard it, long ago; it had never left her for a moment since the time Heather brought her here; this dark place had always been part of her, its sounds directly inspiring her music.

Yet she felt no sense of reunion, of coming home. There was no welcome, though she did sense a sort of recognition, a quickening in the dark around her.

“They could have taken us then, Holly,” Heather called from above. “They let us have a good long time, but I always knew they’d want us back. Well, you were too young to realize what the bargain was; you might not think it’s fair, but really, you got the most out of it. Music runs so much deeper than words.”

Holly shook herself, as if trying to throw off a thickening spell. “You’re insane!” she called. “You’re saying you… you sold your soul to write those songs?”

Heather laughed, and the last traces of warmth were sucked from Holly’s body. The darkness seemed to thrust its faces at her, and something rattled on the shore of the deep pool.

“No, little sister,” Heather called. “Not my soul.”

* * *

Runick knew the way by heart, but he had never had to travel it encumbered by a body as clumsy as his own. Where previously he had always glided down cleanly on a wind of music’s making, now he scrambled and stumbled, gouged by- thorns, and was soon coated in slippery mire, his fingers webbed with the scum and algae that grew between the rocks. The valley had reguired the sacrifice of his invulnerability, but it was worth it. Perhaps in the act of submitting to the place, it would raise him to those black heights he had long ago been promised. He had no doubt that he was crawling still among the lobes of his dreaming brain; that he had found some part of the world that expressed what was deepest and truest in himself, where for the first time he truly belonged and need no longer shut out the rest of creation.

He was coming home to the bottom of the world, and as he advanced a muted, maddening music began to play around him, stirred up by the rattle of stones underfoot, the swirling of water around his ankles.

A voice sounded just ahead, an intruder on the dark fantasy, and suddenly remembered that he was not indeed alone here. He had almost forgotten Holly Terror—that it was she who had brought him here in the first place, she who had introduced him to this portion of himself.

He advanced more cautiously now, forever suspicious of the tricks reality played. In his visions this moment had always been accompanied by a spark of light, but in the actual valley there was no light; he might as well have been born sightless for all the good his eyes did him now. He carefully gauged the location of the voice, decided that it lay just ahead of him, inevitably blocking his way.

Suddenly the voice broke into song, to match the music that curled around him, but it was an ill voice. If this were Holly, then the valley had robbed her of beauty; her voice was sick as death. It sounded as if she were dying, wasting her last bit of life on this awful moaning that hadn’t quite found a form in words.

The reflex of the dream came back to him then. There was no light to pollute the perfect dark sanctity of this place, but the song was even worse than light. The sound drew something terrible out of him; it brought forth the strength of the guardian who had been born to protect the perfect peace and silence of the valley.

Reaching for the horrible shrieking noise, determined to put an end to it, he stumbled forward with all the power of darkness rising in his heart. He could feel his nails growing longer, sharper, his wings spreading wide. He was almost himself again.

* * *

They were the words to “How Black Was My Valley.” Holly had sung them herself thousands of times, but never with such meaning, never to such a response. Her sister’s voice seemed to whirl and echo around her, stirring life in the still pool. The pebbles shifted under her, as if the shore were being scooped away from underneath. The grating rocks made a chuckling sound.

She drew herself to her feet, scrabbling at the stone wall, trying not to let her teeth chatter. Numb fingers grasped a small knob of rock, her foot found a narrow ledge, and she dragged herself up several inches as the scraping sound grew louder beneath her. Water sprayed in her face as she moved straight into the flood. It poured over her head, filled her ears, deafening her for a moment. She pulled herself up another foot.

From far away, in a distant echoing chamber, she heard a scream. She shook the water from her ears, and it was suddenly nearer. Heather’s voice became a harsh coughing, then nothing more than a rattle. She pressed close to the rock, waiting for the next sound, peering desperately upward through the spray.

Dimly, above her, she saw two shapes struggling. One was Heather; she knew the pale flag of hair that lashed the dark. But it seemed as if the other figure was the one that frantically whipped the flag. All she could see of it was its blackness, even darker than the rest of the valley; there was something bird- or batlike about it, a sense of huge wings spreading as the two figures coiled close together and sprang into flight above her.

They soared for only a moment, and then their plunge carried them past her. They hit the surface of the pool with a hollow sound, as if penetrating a drum. Water exploded over Holly, nearly sweeping her from the rock; in its aftermath she heard a rush of loose pebbles, as in an avalanche.

And then silence.

The music was gone from her head; her sister’s song, as well as the source, were gone.

From the top of the slope, she looked back once and found that morning light had finally begun to penetrate the place. Below her—not nearly as far as she had imagined— was a deep still pool, a sheltered well. Water ran out through a narrow cleft in the far wall, a tumble of broken stone where the current became subterranean. Nothing but water could have passed through the crack.

She tried to tear herself away, to hurry for help, but the surface of the pool captured her eye, like a lens into another world. The pool looked bottomless. The falls continued to patter down upon it, agitating the smoothness only slightly; it shook with a steady rippling, crystalline, pure.

And then a face appeared just beneath the surface—not her sister, but a young man’s face that might have been familiar if it hadn’t looked so distorted by the liguid. His eyes were enormous, staring straight up at her, and filled inexplicably with adoration, blazing with love, as if in death she had brought him unspeakable fulfillment. It was that which sent her running, back up the valley- through the brightening day.

* * *

Later, after the police had tied up the obvious loose ends, after the pool had been plumbed and found bottomless, dredged and scoured by divers and yielded up nothing, after Holly Terror had fled Spencer vowing never to return,

Runick’s family came to gather his things. Nevis stayed out of the room for the hour it took to pack a few sad boxes; avoiding their eyes, he didn’t speak of that night, or say anything more than he had told the police. He couldn’t help feeling guilty, somehow responsible. Runick’s parents didn’t say one word to him; dour folks, even when their son had been alive, and no wonder he had sought escape wherever he could find it, but mainly in music and the adoration of a beautiful rock musician. He hadn’t been the first.

When they were gone, Runick went back into the room and found that they had stuffed the trashcan full of tapes and records. Holly Terror, all of them.

Nevis liked her well enough, though not with Runick’s passion—thank God for that. He had other interests. Still, he couldn’t look at the covers without thinking of his roommate. Never quite a friend, but still—there had been something about him Nevis liked. He’d felt a strange affection. He couldn’t help but think that Runick should be remembered in a way he would appreciate.

So Nevis rescued Runick’s favorite album, the one he played several times a day and treated so reverently that there was scarcely a scratch upon it after a thousand playings. He didn’t bother with headphones, because there was no one he might disturb. He shut the door, closed the curtains, turned up the volume, and let the needle fall… And he was walking in darkness. In pine woods.

In a dark place, a deep place.

Before the first note finished, he bolted upright, screaming, searching for the light switch though he hadn’t turned it out, fighting his way back toward brightness and waking, though he hadn’t remembered falling asleep. He shoved the needle screeching over the platter, yanked the album off the turntable and sent it crashing against the wall.

He could never listen to that cut again; could hardly stand to hear another Holly Terror song, no matter how much her style changed with her next band. He couldn’t say exactly why, for he retained only a faint memory of what he’d seen in that moment when the music began. He had a faint, unwelcome memory of blazing eyes, a woman white and weeping, black sweeping wings, and Runick.

Runick had been there to turn him back, and he counted himself grateful for the warning.

* * *

She was Holly Terra now. She had a new band, she and Kelly. They sang of the earth and its mysteries, while avoiding outright horror; there was enough of that in her nightmares. She lost most of her original audience, who considered her too soft, and started to gather another which appreciated the subtler edge. She could look out from the stage and see the appreciation of a milder crowd, older, not so obsessive.

But sometimes, still, a younger face would surface there, eyes wide and drinking in every note, every word— thirsty for things she and Kelly had not put into these songs. Eyes like bottomless wells….

And then she would remember the black pool, and those other eyes. She would recoil and lose a beat, fearing to look into the crowd again for the rest of the concert.

Before such eyes she always felt like prey.

The eyes in the pool had been gorged and satiated, at peace, but what it had taken to satisfy them had been beyond price.

She couldn’t be sure of that, of course. Heather’s life might have been the price exactly. Only Heather would have known that, having driven the initial bargain.

But Heather was gone now. And she had taken Holly Terror with her.

* * *

“Terror Fan” copyright 1993 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared (as “Terror’s Biggest Fan”) in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1993.

THE DIANE ARBUS SUICIDE PORTFOLIO

“It’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”

—Diane Arbus

“You’ll like this,” said Schaeffer as he let Brovnik into the apartment. “She was a photographer.”

Brovnik chuckled unhappily till the smell hit him; it fit right in with the buzzing of flies. The other cops’ hard shoes clapped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall; their voices echoed in the cluttered flat. Brovnik walked slowly, as if in a sweltering museum. Dozens of unmounted photographs were thumbtacked to the walls, curled by the July humidity. Schaeffer went into the bathroom with everyone else. Brovnik wasn’t in any hurry to learn the cause of the splashing he heard. He bent close to a picture of a white girl standing against a canvas tent, her head thrown back, arms spread wide, the hilt of a sword and part of the blade poking out of her gullet. The other pictures were just as freakish. He liked them.

“Come on, Bravo!”

He walked into the small tiled bathroom. Too many cops in it, and a humid jungle reek, tainted with carrion. Water dripped from the mirror.

“Give him some room, guys.”

The body slumped in the tub, mostly submerged, short-cropped thick brown hair matted on the surface like seagrass exposed at low tide. She was fully dressed. One arm floated, propped on a knee, the hand looking swollen and peeled. The water was murky pink. Streamers of red, like those little crepe paper flowers you get in Chinatown; drop a clamshell in water so it slowly opens and a tissue flower unfurls. The room was too small and muggy. He clutched his camera gratefully to his face, confining vision to one small window on a distorted tunnel with suicide at the far end. Her other arm hung over one side of the tub, skin sucked in between the tendons. He nearly stepped in blood as he walked around to get a better angle. It was tacky, two days old, kept from hardening by humidity.

When he finished, the others came back in. He stood in the living room, smoking, agitated. Why? Because she was a photographer? He looked over more of the woman’s prints. Dwarfs, giants, freaks, a man covered with tattoos. Wonder what kind of mind she’d had, to take pictures like this.

A few photos lay spread out on the couch, as if she’d been looking them over while the water was running. He didn’t want to disturb them, but the one on top disturbed him. The last thing she’d seen? A picture of Death standing in a freshly mown field; Death as a woman in a Halloween skull, clutching a white sheet around her. Hell, she’d gone rattling around with a head full of death, hunting it with her camera. He couldn’t understand a mind like that. With his job, it was different. He was a cop first, a photographer second, though these days he didn’t do much of anything but photography and lab administration.

Schaeffer came up next to him, pointing at a picture of a shirtless Latin midget in a hat sitting on a bed with a bottle on the nightstand next to him. Schaeffer nudged him.

“What do you think, she slept with that dwarf to get his picture?”

“You’re sick,” Brovnik said.

“Me? She’s the one in the bath.”

“Bravo, hey,” came a call from the bathroom. “You drop something in here?”

He walked back toward the bathroom, trying to see no more of the interior than he had to. Morrissey came out with a crumpled yellow foil film packet. “Messy, messy,” he said.

“Fuck you, Morrissey. I’m shooting 35—that’s a 120 wrapper.”

“Where’d you pick that up from?” Schaeffer said.

Morrissey suddenly looked pale and stupid. “It was under the tub. I—I remember right where.”

“You fucking idiot.” Schaeffer raised a hand as if to strike him. “She was a photographer, too.”

Morrissey scurried backward into the bathroom, Schaeffer right behind him. Brovnik looked around the room at all the prints; most were square, two and a quarter format, would have been shot on 120 roll film. Nice big negatives, real sharp. He had this little Pentax, light and quick, good enough for police work though it always felt too small in his hands.

He looked around the room for her camera while Schaeffer bawled out Morrissey, and finally found it in an open case behind the couch. He shivered when he saw she had a Pentax too.

* * *

How did rumors get started? How did they leak? Brovnik could never figure those things out. On the strength of a foil wrapper, the tabloids were claiming that the lady had somehow managed to photograph her own suicide. The press had called all day asking if the police planned to release the photographs. Denying their existence didn’t help. If the department said it didn’t have the photographs, the reporters asked who did. Who’d been in her apartment to take the shots? Did they have any leads?

Leads on a suicide? He had to laugh.

Brovnik was surprised that there had been any interest at all in the woman’s death. He’d never thought of photography as “Art.” But apparently she was “known,” and all this was just making her knowner. He wondered if she’d ever have guessed that sliding into a warm bath and opening her wrists would prove to be such a canny career move. Whatever her reasons, she hadn’t wanted to flub the attempt; what was left of her blood had been rich in barbiturates.

Reading the papers, he learned a few things himself. Her name was—had been—Diane Arbus. She’d had a few shows, some critical success, though mainly she’d made her living as a fashion photographer. Hard to imagine how a mind like hers would portray glamorous models… wrap them in funeral shrouds, black veils?

In the lab, he looked over his own photographs with a more critical eye. The glaring flash had burned out the water in most of the shots, hiding the lines of her sunken body; hard to avoid that. He remembered how harsh the flash effects had been in her photographs. Deliberate? It must have been. She’d worked to get an effect like the one he came up with accidentally. That made him feel better about his pictures. She might’ve liked police work. Her interest in freaks and death and all that crap… reality. It would’ve been more than just a job to her.

And how happy he’d be photographing gorgeous models all day instead of bloodbaths, car crashes, double homicides. God, give him an opportunity like that and he wouldn’t waste it on dwarves.

Seeing things afresh, he felt inspired to go through some of his back files. Torso murders, decapitations, stabbings, mob killings. Not half bad, most of them. He kind of liked the grainy effects, the harsh lighting that sent deep shadows sprawling like duplicate corpses. Weegee had gotten famous with pictures like these. Not too surprising, really. People fed on this stuff. Consider the popularity of public executions.

A secretary opened the door and told him there was a call for him. No name. She put it through to the lab phone.

“Good evening, Inspector Brovnik, I understand you took some photographs of Diane Arbus in her bath.” A woman’s voice, small, raspy and hoarse. “I wonder if you’d be interested in a trade.”

“Who is this?”

“Just a friend.”

“Whose friend?”

“I took the other set.”

Brovnik didn’t speak for a moment.

“Are you still there, Inspector? Or getting this call traced?”

“That was your 120 wrapper?”

“I photographed Diane’s suicide. Twelve frames. The whole thing. Everything except the aftermath, really, and you took those. I’d like good copies if I can get them, to make my set complete.”

“And what about your set? Do I get a look at those?”

“As I said, we could arrange a trade.”

“You know, the investigation on a suicide is fairly straightforward. You telling me that someone else was involved, suddenly things start to look more complicated. You’re asking for trouble.”

“She killed herself, Inspector Brovnik. She didn’t have an accomplice.”

“What about you? You stood back and snapped off a dozen shots while your so-called friend bled to death?”

“Understand, she didn’t want her death to be for nothing. She wanted those pictures taken.”

“And what’d she think she would do with them?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Look, I can’t make this kind of deal, Miss—”

“You don’t need my name. And if you involve anyone else, then you won’t hear from me again. I got in touch with you because you’re a photographer. I thought there might be some understanding between us.”

“Understanding?”

“Consider that I’m Diane’s agent in this matter, Inspector. There has to be an element of trust. As an artist, you should be able to make the necessary intuitive leap.”

“Who said I was an artist?”

“You photographed Diane in death. Your eye has been changed… touched. I’m very interested in seeing your work.”

“This is crazy.”

“All right, so you need to think about it. I’ll get back to you soon. I don’t care who knows about the pictures once we’ve made our trade, but until then you must act alone or it’s all off. I’m eager for those pictures but I won’t risk exposure. Diane wouldn’t want that.”

“How can you be so sure what she’d want? I mean, look what she wanted for herself.”

“She was very hard on herself. Goodbye, Inspector.”

“Wait—”

But she didn’t wait. After that, he had to live with his impatience for another week.

He didn’t mention the call to anyone, contrary to his plans. He printed a duplicate set of the suicide photos, taking more care in the darkroom than ever before. He managed to burn some detail into the glare of flash on the bathwater, enough so that he could see one of her hands with the fingers gently splayed beneath the surface, as if bathed in mercury. He worked long past his regular hours. Her curled prints were always tacked up in his memory, examples of an ideal heid never known to strive for until now. He found himself working to extract subtle qualities of mood and tone from the negatives, fluttering his fingers beneath the enlarger lens, controlling contrast with split-bath developers—things he’d never bothered with before, except when making bad negatives into acceptable prints. Gradually he found the glossy bright snaps of death becoming utterly strange to him, unlike his other photographs which became more commonplace as he worked them over. These were beautiful, like paintings done in silver; morbid but alive in the way only photographs are alive. Finally he stood back from his handiwork and shook his head in disbelief, because he had made her poor drowned corpse immortal.

It was an awful responsibility. That night, late, the phone rang and he came awake to the reek of sulfur. It was on his hands and made his eyes sting when he wiped away tears. What had he been dreaming?

“It’s me,” said the raspy little voice, and that was when he realized why it sounded so odd. It was a midget voice; gruff with age and tribulation, not squeaky but still small. This was one of Arbus’s midget women.

“So it is,” he said. “But it’s the middle of the night.”

“I thought you’d be more likely to come alone that way.”

“What, now?”

“Have you got a pencil?”

He thought of telling her he didn’t have the prints with him, but he found himself grabbing a pen and pad instead. He wrote down an address and agreed to meet her in half an hour. He was backing his car out of the driveway when he came fully awake and wondered what the fuck he was doing. Was this police procedure? He decided this didn’t have anything to do with the department. This was for the sake of something else—call it moonlighting, like his work in the darkroom. He had to have something in his life besides a job, didn’t he? Like Arbus, who’d shot models for a living and in her spare time went looking for freaks. Maybe she needed that, after overdosing on glamour all day. Maybe in his case, after the brutal repetitive ugliness of his day-to-day—dead junkies and hold-up victims who were a bit too slow (or low) with the cash—he needed something a little fantastic, something beautiful, like that silver glow he’d glimpsed on the surface of Arbus’s bath, like the first rays of a silver sun about to rise, a hint of imminent revelation. He saw clues to that light hanging over the marble crypts of Brooklyn which spread away beneath him as he took the bridge; it was more explicit on the waters of the East River; increasingly lovely and plentiful as crushed jewels scattered over the black tombs of the Manhattan skyline. Then he drove down into the tunnel where the glare of fluorescents rubbed his eyes raw, dispelling all magic except for the sense of humid evil evoked by the sight of so much seeping greenish tile lining the tunnel walls. In his mind, water continued to drip from a mirror long after blood had ceased dripping from her dangling arm.

The address the midget gave him wasn’t really an address. There were buildings on either side of it, in an alley, but the number itself did not exist. All he saw was a low wall of old brick topped by a spiked wrought-iron fence; an iron gate opened in the midst of it. Might have been a vacant lot behind that wall, anything. Shattered windows looked down from three sides, as if the rendezvous were nothing but the bottom of an airshaft choked with trash, cast-offs. Not official business, no, but he was glad for his .38 and flashlight as he pushed through the gate into a cemetery.

He’d never seen the place before, not in years of patrolling the city on foot and in cars. He must have driven past—even down—this alley a hundred times and never noticed the wall and gate. As expected, it was full of trash; the old marble and granite headstones were shattered, chipped, vandalized, discolored. His shoes crunched through a fine covering of broken glass; it was like walking on the Coney Island shore, even down to the smell of urine. He flicked his flashlight over carved angels with brutalized faces and seared wings. Stubs of crosses with the arms snapped off appeared to give the finger to the living. Every beam he aimed into the tumble of graves sent off a hundred harsh new shadows. He couldn’t be sure where he’d looked and where he hadn’t.

He wiped off the lid of a relatively clean crypt and settled down to wait. With the flashlight off his eyes adjusted quickly to the dark. His cigarette made the only human movement. So where was she? A dwarf could sneak around in here easier than a full-grown woman—but it would be hard to come soundlessly in all this glass. He laid the envelope of prints on the stone beside him and smoked three cigarettes before a shadow came out of nowhere. He jumped down from his seat and instantly lost sight of her among the stones.

“Who’s there?” he said.

She came forward again. “No names, Inspector. Of course, I already know yours.”

As he’d guessed, she was small as a child, her face a grey blur of blended shadows. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate any light leaping on her.

Her hand darted out to the tombstone surface and stole away the envelope holding his prints. She slid them into her hand and made a frantic gesture for his flashlight. She turned away from him, crouched over and laid the prints on the ground. Shielding the light with her body, she switched it on.

He heard her gasp, then further sounds of pleasure. He tried to make out details he might use later to recognize her under other circumstances, but her silhouette was as empty as a doorway into a starless sky, with only little wisps of reflected light peeking through her spiky hair like bursts of solar flares. He grew impatient listening to her. She sounded like a starving animal wolfing down a huge meal.

“All right,” he said finally, “you’ve seen enough.” As he stepped toward her, she shut off the light and jumped back. The prints lay on the ground between them like a dozen stray windows into a glossier world. He had the feeling that if he stepped on one he might fall into it—fall into that bathtub full of radiant blood. He could almost see the glare of the flash shining from the time-frozen surface. Even in black and white, it had a reddish tint.

“Come on, you said a trade. Let’s have your dozen.”

She didn’t move. He could tell she was measuring him, reading his character in a way he’d never experienced before, eating him up with the dark sunken pits in her face. He made a grab for his flashlight, wanting superstitiously to shine a beam into those hollows and fill them in with eyes.

She backed away, being small enough that an edge of crypt shadow neatly swallowed half of her. Another stupid move and the rest would disappear. Without the light he felt more helpless than if she’d taken his gun. He held his ground, stooping to gather his prints.

“I showed you mine,” he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “You’re the one talked about trust.”

“Mine didn’t come out,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the roll was fogged, all twelve negs burned black, pure white prints. Nothing on them. I thought I could bring them with me, but it didn’t work.”

“Wait a minute. You telling me there’s no trade?” Now he was pissed, and ready to make a grab at her. She was little, she could elude him. He’d have to be fast. “Well fuck if I’m giving you my prints.”

“I saw them, that’s enough. They came out good. You’re a fine photographer. I can tell how much work you put into them. And I… appreciate that.”

That was it for Brovnik. Her whole story of being an accomplice, nothing but a lie to get a look at private records. This was suddenly more than personal; he would make it official, too.

He hurled the prints at her. They curled off in twelve different arcs, like a blossom opening around him as he leapt to cut her off.

She gasped, spinning away, and found herself trapped in a corner where a tall family mausoleum backed up against the brick of the surrounding buildings, below a high row of broken windows. Nowhere for her to go.

He stooped for the flashlight, which she’d dropped. “All right, lady,” he said, and switched it on.

The light caught her for a glancing instant, and that was all it took—all he got for his pains and for his memories. He saw that her skin was shimmery black, her short-cropped hair silvery grey, and the very centers of her eyes, brilliant white. Then she shrank to nothing and disappeared, like a little womanshaped balloon deflating instantaneously to the size of a speck of lichen on the marble tomb, then even smaller, gone. The beam hit nothing but the chipped brick wall and a slab of marble with some cryptic gang hieroglyphs streaking the side.

He backed up, swinging the beam to and fro, up and down, looking for the crack she’d slid away through, the secret door that had opened to swallow her up, the rabbit hole, anything. Nothing. None of those things would explain what he’d seen, anyway.

In the time he’d had to look at her, really look—and it was an almost subliminal impression—he’d seen that she wasn’t any dwarf. She had none of the characteristic squashed features, no stubby fingers or any of that. For her size, she was perfectly proportioned—like a normal grown woman who had shrunk in the wash. This remained true as she vanished: all proportions stayed constant as if she were zooming backward down a tunnel with her eyes fixed on his, until she blinked out. The last thing he remembered was her faintly wounded look, and her color… that shifting silvery black like nothing he’d ever seen in a person—though tantalizingly familiar.

Brovnik hunted through the cemetery till the sun came up, but he didn’t find anything except his twelve dented, scratched prints. He shoved them in a crypt to rot and hurried back to his car. In the strong morning sunlight it was just barely possible to not think of her consciously. But somewhere inside, his mind kept going over the details; the cop inside him wouldn’t quit.

It was his day off. After a few hours spent futilely trying to sleep, he went into the lab, fished out the negatives of the Arbus suicide, and studied them on the light board. The hair looked similar to what he’d seen in the flashlight beam—an odd shiny grey, cropped short. The skin was the same shade of silvery black that no negro’s skin had ever been. But that didn’t mean it was her. The face might have proved something, but he was spared the sight of her piercing white pupils staring out of his negatives because she’d slid face down in the tub. Still, when he looked at the spiky hair, he felt a chill he hoped wasn’t wholly based on recognition.

The next few days passed with excruciating slowness as he waited for the sense of shock to move through his system and into the past so he could get on with a life of ordinary things. He had time off coming to him, and he took it. He went to the Catskills with an instamatic camera and took color snaps of waterfalls and old bridges and empty inner-tubes bobbing down the Esopus River. He didn’t take any pictures of people. He met a woman in a restaurant bar who spent the night at his cabin; in the morning she was gone but he felt reassured because she had vanished in the usual way, while his eyes were closed. When he got back to the city after a week, he thought he’d put it all behind him, he thought he was refreshed.

His first night back on duty, a man shot his wife through the temples, cut the throats of his two, three and four year olds, strangled the family Doberman (not necessarily in that order), and sentenced himself to life as a vegetable by badly misjudging the trajectory of his final bullet. The photography posed a number of technical problems for Brovnik, due to the cramped conditions, but he was working them out in a cool professional way when he happened to look through the open window onto the dark fire escape, and saw the four of them standing there. Five, if you counted the dog. A tall silvery white woman, three little ones, and a four-legged mass of silver mist. Silvery white, with sharp white pupils, all looking at him as if he owed them something. It didn’t make sense to him at first (and this was how his mind worked, hooked on little bits of logic he hoped might help him understand the larger problem) that they should all be silvery white, when the shrinking woman in the cemetery had been so inky black.

“What the fuck are you doing, Bravo? There’s no pulse in that arm.”

He looked down in horror and saw that he had been posing a limp arm—adjusting the dead to make a better picture.

He backed off and drew the camera defensively to his eye, aiming it at the mother’s splattered skull. For the first time he noticed that she was black. The children were black as well. So was the Doberman. All black.

Lowering the camera, he saw five white negatives watching him.

What did she do to me? he wondered.

“Bravo? What is it?”

He didn’t answer the other cops. He knew he wouldn’t ever be able to answer their questions. He forced his way to the window and showed his camera to the watchers outside, let them witness him opening the back and exposing the film. He yanked out a yard of it, unspooling the celluloid, letting it go ribboning into the night with all the latent images burned out, never to be seen, sparing them his camera’s bite of immortality.

As the woman in the graves had done, they shrank away to nothing. Five new stars burned briefly in the night, a bit too low to top the horizon, then blinked out.

“Brovnik, what the fuck is wrong?” Heavy steps came toward him.

“I have to get out,” he said, stepping through the window. Questioning cries followed him all the way down the fire escape to the street, where he walked away quickly from the lights of the squad cars, his camera tugging like a bloodhound on the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.

* * *

“The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio” copyright 1993 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, May 1993.

THE BLACK BUS

Driver approached the main gates, hunched low against the cold clouds and the eerie onrush of music that crept out over the escarpments of the amphitheater, thin groping notes like the claws of wintry trees made of black sound. Colored lights, auroral, pulsed against the clouds in time to the music, reminding him of something older than memories of childhood Hell-dreams. He imagined his grandfather’s evangelical words driving down at him like a pelting brimstone hail, and thought how the old man would see the theater as a concession erected around the mouth of Hell, into which the damned were lured with music and screams which passage through the gates had transfigured into wild, seductive laughter. He pulled up his collar against the storm of invisible coals, and wished he could have stayed in the bus. But it had broken down completely, the prognosis was terrible, and he needed help.

He glanced back at the old bus, cold now in the mountain moonlight and the distant moth-battered glare of the stadium lights, far out at a corner of the lot among a dozen other buses not quite as full of memories, though equally lurid: paisleys, spirals, fractal swirls in luminous paints. An anachronism, a retrograde voyager, an affront to the new serious spirit of reform. Do drugs!—it seemed to tell all the little children who followed its progress on the back roads, delighting in its psychedelic colors. Run from home and join the circus! Following the Group was the same thing.

Turning back toward the gates, he saw another bus pulling in before the amphitheater, brakes squealing and then a gasping hiss of air as it stopped almost directly in his path. Gleaming black, with a long row of square windows all seemingly cut from warm yellow parchment. Its black surface was weirdly textured in diamond-shapes, oblique facets that turned light back on itself: like a stealth-bus, invisible to enemy detection. He walked around it cautiously, watching it over his shoulder, expecting the front door to open—anxious, in fact, to see the driver sitting up in the high seat at the top of the steps.

“Tickets,” said a voice, and he whirled to find himself in the shadow of the gate. A flashlight caught and held his hands in glare, making the hairs stand out like abrupt shards of spun glass, the blemishes suddenly malign. He jerked his hands out of the light and plunged them into his pocket as if to spare them such scrutiny, but actually searching for the plastic pass that had been his for longer than he could remember.

The torch, its bearer still unseen, waved him in, opening a path into the cement tunnel strewn with torn tickets, broken bottles, pools of piss with cigarette butts disintegrating in them. He hurried, but the beam deserted him. Laughter, and then a low growling that might have been nothing worse than some enormous old man clearing his throat. He walked around the sound of breathing, kicked a crushed can skittering, walked into a solid wall of stench and sound. He didn’t need to see the Group. Their music was everywhere. He brushed cobwebs from his face and stepped out into the amphitheater.

Bodies like an ocean, like a breaking wave of souls caught in mid-curl, rushed away beneath him to fill the vast pool of the theater, curving up and around, reaching to the sky on all sides, energized by the pulsing light. All of them dancing, swaying, caught in the trance of the music. From down here the clouds looked like a vaporous cover thrown over the theater. Looking up made him dizzy, his vision lined with a funnel of possessed faces staring down at him—past him, really, toward the stage. He shuddered and followed their eyes with his own, knowing that was where he could always find his charges.

The Group was so much smaller than its music. Tiny figures, although of jewel-like clarity even in the smoky distances of the theater, they bent above their instruments, hardly moving anything but arms and fingers. He had seen them often enough to know their eyes were closed, their mouths fixed in grave and urgent expressions. So they would remain until some shrieking inspiration bore its way through them, when their heads went back and their eyes bulged and words spirited from their throats in desperate harmonies.—But that was always later. This early on, the concert was a voyage in its infancy, almost plodding still. It was perhaps the only time he would be able to find his riders. Earlier, the place would have been a riot of people vying for position; later it would be a frenzy. Things were relatively subdued.

He found a stairway leading down into the sunken center of the arena; it was covered in bodies, worshipers who hardly acknowledged his presence, barely allowed him to pass. They resented his worming passage, thinking that he sought to put himself closer to the source of the music. If they had known how little he wished this, they would have laughed in disbelief. Often he was forced to halt and wait for a new path to open; and then he would feel himself trapped with the music, suffocating in it. People all around him, eyes rolled back, heads whipping from side to side, and himself deaf to it. Afraid they might recognize that he was not one of them.

Finally he pulled himself free of strangers, seeing faces he recognized just ahead, mere yards from the elevated heights of the stage. They were together there, packed close as if for protection, the eternal pilgrims. No doubt there were other such clusters scattered through the theater, but these were his own. Driver had grown fond of them, if not their music. The object of their devotions—the Group—meant nothing more to him than a steady job, travel, food, companionship. He could as easily have been driving a limousine or a schoolbus, or delivering parcels door to door—in which case, he would never have experienced the strangeness of such nights. The awareness of how close he had come to missing this particular life lessened his dread of the crowd. He felt almost at home here, through familiarity.

As he pushed his way toward Sonora—her blond hair streaming back, metal rivets threaded through the strands, long strips of gleaming tattooed scalp showing above the wildly colored scarves she wore—a fearful face thrust toward him. A skinny young man, bearded and pale, his hair tom into tatters, his eyes wide with horror. Screaming not with the music, which might have been appropriate later in the night, but in time to some sinister rhythm of his own making.

He collided with Driver, who would have fallen if not for the congestion of bodies holding him upright. “It’s happening again!” he howled, staring desperately into Driver’s eyes. “I can’t stop it—make it stop! I always forget!”

Driver flinched away from the apparition, anxious to avoid contact. The kid reached toward him, then drew back himself, his eyes already wandering. “No,” he muttered, and Driver knew he was in the depths of some drug-inspired nightmare. There were people in these crowds whose minds had cracked and would never heal. People who appeared only in this context, screaming prophesy, gripped by visions, having no relation to the outside world, the world of day. This one sank to his knees, forcing the heels of his hands up into his eye sockets, wrenching them violently as if pushing something in or jarring something loose. “No, this is the first time,” he said. Then he staggered upright again and stumbled on, chewed up in the mill of flesh. To Driver he was vaguely familiar; he had probably glimpsed him rushing through the crowds on his stoned jeremiad on other nights, during other shows.

By now Sonora had noticed Driver, and she pointed him out to the others, who drew him into their midst in a sheltered spot they had made of their bodies, a haven woven of flesh and bone. It was difficult to hear them in the din, for the music was building now, cresting toward some peak he did not wish to witness. But they made him welcome with looks and gestures and squeezes on his arms and shoulders. No doubt they thought he was becoming one of them, that the music had finally done its trick and lured him in. In a spirit of companionship, Sonora put her mouth to his ear and said, “Try this.”

She opened her palm under his eyes, and in it was a little foil pack. She opened that, and in among the silver creases he saw a thing like a stylized teardrop the color of blood, a three-dimensional paisley, gelatinous, specks of light sculling through it. She lifted it by the curled tail, like a tadpole, and laid it on his palm. He could sense what was in it, and instantly panicked, gripping the droplet as if to crush it.

“We all did it,” she reassured him. “It’s just coming on, we won’t be too far ahead of you.”

“No,” he said. And then, because it didn’t register, he screamed it.

She drew back slightly to show her amusement. “It’s not what you think,” she shouted. “This is new.”

He shook his head firmly. “The bus is dead. We need a decent mechanic—we need parts, and a ride to find them. We need help. Help!”

While he was shouting, Sonora peeled back the fingers of his hand one by one; he ignored her silly game until he had finished shouting, and then, because she was staring at his palm, he too looked down and saw the small reddish stain where the teardrop had been. Even as he looked, it squirmed away into his skin, drunk in as if the flesh were dry earth touched by rain.

At the sight, he began to forget his errand. He forgot where he was, who he was. “Why” became the real concern, but when he asked it of Sonora and the others—Chad and Parky, Selene and Yvette and Dietch—they stilled him with their hands and buffeted him into the dance, until he no longer questioned anything. He gave up his will, if he had ever had it.

It was merciful, for a time, to escape his dread and innate skepticism, his constant sense of something going wrong. But his anxiety did not end, exactly—only changed, uncurling like the tail-end of that paisley, and left him weaving through the gates again, this time one of a hushed line, holding hands in long chains like human molecules, everyone deserting the theater silently, the entire crowd speaking in whispers or not at all. Something vast slept behind them, and they departed quietly so as not to wake it.

The matter of the bus had already been discussed, he discovered, as with gestures Sonora indicated they were to board not their own defunct vehicle but the black bus that had pulled up by the amphitheater gate. Apparently there was room for them in it, and he went along, though he would not be the driver of this bus. And that was something of a relief, too. It had been so long since he’d been able to sit back and simply watch the changing roadside. He had always felt so responsible for everything….

Inside was pleasant contrast to the inky, angular black exterior. Here it was all warmth and glow, soft pillows and cushions spread everywhere, low bunks overhead for sleeping, plenty of blankets for the cold nights of traveling. He slipped off his shoes and went on hands and knees onto the padded platform, crawling toward the back of the bus, the warm rumbling cave above the engine. In his own dilapidated vehicle, the engine had growled under the hood, always up in front of him. It was less efficient, but he missed it for a moment. Curled against a pillow, eyes shut, he dreamed a clear picture of the other bus as it had been, new and freshly painted, when he’d first hired on as its driver. Years ago, and thousands of miles behind him, that had been. He realized—had known all along, tonight, without admitting it till now—that it would never be fixed. The old bus was dead.

Now the passengers of the black bus, those who had invited them aboard some unknown time during the show (as if their plight had communicated itself osmotically), pulled down black shades, as though no spark of light could be permitted out. Sonora and Chad joined in the effort, but Driver was content not to move.

I wonder, he thought, since I’m apparently not the driver of this bus, I wonder if I get to keep my name.

* * *

They were all passengers now, Sonora thought, watching Driver, halfway convinced (but never quite) that she was sharing his thoughts. His fear was obvious enough, betrayed by his stiff posture, as he lay among the cushions like a wooden martyr marionette dropped down from a cross to which it was still attached by strings. His mind barked out loud warnings; he felt threatened, but it was easing.

She smiled and put her hand on his breast. “It’s strange for you, not driving, isn’t it?”

“We’re not moving yet,” he said with a wry smile, as if he had seen into her intentions.

“Yes we are,” said Sonora.

Sonora could still remember her name, which was more than she could say of the others on the bus. She wasn’t sure about all of them; and they didn’t seem exactly sure of themselves. Chad she remembered; Yvette, yes—and the one who called himself Neuron. Or did she know Neuron? Hadn’t for long, actually. He’d come up to them during the concert, right after Driver had said he needed help.

“Join us on the bus out front,” he’d whispered in her ear. “We’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

He wore a cowboy hat, which, for a guy who called himself Neuron, was an odd thing. But the crown of the hat was transparent, clipped away and replaced with a transparent dome which crisply replicated the crease down the center of a Stetson. And down in that dome you could see lights moving and pulsing inside a plastic model of a human brain. At least she hoped it was plastic.

“It’s not plastic, you know,” he’d said right away, as if she’d asked audibly. “It’s laminated so you can look right in. Just as tough as my old skull.”

“You go around like that?” she said.

“Sometimes I wear a regular hat, like when I’m working in bright lights. But on nights like this I like to keep the top down and… ‘just let the lights shine!’”

The last of his words were a line from a song the Group was singing right at that exact same instant.

“So how do I know which bus is yours?” she leaned and asked him.

“Can’t miss it. She’s black and weirdly angled, as you’d say.”

“I’d say? You said it.”

Now he was putting himself down beside her, his cowboy hat tossed off, and wrapping a black bandanna kerchief around his head. The neural lights had dimmed anyway. She vaguely remembered seeing his brain bobbing along way up ahead in the dark tunnel as they were seeping out of the amphitheater, the last chords of music hanging behind them like a bubble about to burst. She had followed him dreaming of nightlights. “I don’t suppose you have any wisdom pills, do you?” he asked.

She pulled a vaporizer out of her pocket. “Will this do?”

“Hafta.”

When he could speak again, he did so raspingly. “Who’s your friend there? The comfortable one.”

“That’s Driver,” Sonora said. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or just pretending. The motion of the bus lulled him. She realized it was probably the first time he had ever allowed himself to sleep on a moving bus. My God, she thought. The most basic pleasure of the journey and he’s never experienced it until now, no wonder he seemed so uncomfortable all the time.

Driver opened his eyes and looked at them.

“What kind of bus is this?” he said.

“You’ll be sorry you asked that question,” Neuron said.

Sonora had ominous intimations of an unspeakable horror about to be revealed. No sooner had Neuron spoken his warning than an old man near the front of the bus began to talk, twisting his leathery neck around so the cords twined together.

“This is the only kind of bus there is,” the old man said.

“That there’s Crouch,” said Neuron. “And you just started him on his favorite subject.”

“It’s not my favorite—not by a long shot,” Crouch said, knee-walking toward them. “But it’s one on which I have many opinions.”

“That’s what I meant,” Neuron said.

“They’re not the same thing, what you said and what you meant.”

“Crouch, you make my brain tired.”

“And it makes my soul weary looking at you, Cerebrus.”

“What was that again?” Sonora asked, looking on amazed at this stream of bickering, which suggested old well-worn rots in the relationship between these men, so that she doubted they could ever talk to one another in any other way—had they even wanted to.

“Cerebrus. The Spectacular Transparent Head. The Mind-Body split made manifest.”

“I have many opinions about buses, too,” Driver said. “I’ve thought about them a lot, while I was driving. But this isn’t like riding on any bus I can imagine. This is like moving on waves, just soft little swells over the sea… or a big lake.”

“Or a river,” said the old man. “A river’s more like it.”

Then “Look!” said Yvette at one of the windows, peering out through a tiny spyslot she’d lifted beneath the shades. “It’s our bus!”

Sonora turned around and made herself one of the eyeholes. They were coming down from the mountains, narrow curving roads winding around and switching back, wriggling down the slopes. They were out of the cool dark trees, the pines and rivers and rocks. This was the arid desolate place above the foothills, the place where nothing grew but weeds and aluminum guardrails. She had always hated this part of the road—of any mountain road. This was where the dust beat itself senseless, blowing in from the plains; or where the salt fell, whisked in off the sea. Nothing moved here but headlights.

On the switchback below—moving past, under them, and then in the opposite direction—she finally saw their bus. Unmistakable. And there were people in it.

“Hey,” she said. “Driver, I thought you said the bus was broken.”

His face darkened in a scowl. “I know that bus,” he said. “And it died tonight.”

“Maybe it hasn’t, yet.”

Sonora looked over at Neuron, but only briefly. His smile, like his words, puzzled her. She went back to watching the bus below. Headlights vanished around a curve, came out again, continued to weave. The air was full of dust or smoke, so she could see the beams swinging back and forth.

Driver pushed up next to her. “What are you looking at?”

“Just what Yvette said. It looks like

“It can’t be our bus.”

“That’s what it looks like, I’m sorry.”

“It can’t be our bus.”

He looked anyway.

Someone up front switched on a radio and music came out of the scattered speakers. It was the Group, predictably, broadcast from the microsatellite they owned, which all the pilgrim buses picked up with a special antenna. Sonora hardly heard it, it had been background music for so long. But she noticed when the broadcast cut off suddenly.

Suddenly was hardly the word for it.

The tune died with a scream, then a hysterical wailing and clamoring. Voices in panic and terror. “No!” someone shouted. “No, my God!”

“No—no!”

Screams. Then a clearer voice, only slightly stronger than the others, high and nasal, a man: “This is a report—hello, are you there? Anyone? I’m reporting live from the airfield where the Group was just now departing. It’s hard to be sure, but we just saw—everyone waiting out here is afraid of it—”

For a moment the sane voice was drowned out by shrieking that completely overwhelmed everything else. He moved away or somehow regained control—at least of himself, at least for the moment. “Oh my god, yes, it’s apparently true. We saw a fireball—well, heard a horrible sound, first, hard to describe—impossible to describe, I’d have to say—sort of a metal scraping and then a crumpling crash—and then that fireball, an explosion that is now pouring up into the sky.

“Brothers and sisters, I do not want to be the one to tell you this, but I saw them with my own eyes and I have the microphone now, so my voice is going to have to be the one to say it. I saw them board that plane a few minutes before it took off. I would like to tell you that they were not on it, but I saw all of them go in, and then the door closed and the ladder pulled away and the plane started to taxi off down the runway into the darkness, so I could only see its running lights moving across the field. It was very dark out there, everyone. I don’t know if another plane came in out of nowhere or if the Group’s plane just didn’t get off the ground in time… or if something else went wrong. But I can see a giant wing or a tail sticking up out of the flames; that’s all I can see through the smoke. That’s all I can tell you now, my friends… my poor friends. My God… I’m so sorry for all of us.”

Silence in the black bus, indecipherable. Sonora knew that she and Yvette and Chad and Driver were all looking out their windows at their own bus on the road below, but somehow none of this seemed real. What they were hearing, what they were seeing—none of it.

Their crazy, colorful bus’s headlights drove in and around, wove sharply once, twice, and again. In an instant—it happened that fast—Sonora saw the bus speed up and go out of control. The turn ahead was sharp and lit too late, and whoever drove was not thinking of the road.

“You idiot!” Driver said, yelling down at the bus as if he could save it with a word.

But he couldn’t. None of them could have done anything to stop it going over the edge. The disaster had begun when the Group got onto the plane; now it was only spreading, a shockwave, carrying all of them with it.

“Shut those shades now,” Crouch said firmly.

“But—but—”

“I said shut those shades!” the old man insisted.

“Come on.” Neuron was up next to her now, gently taking the shade out of her fingers, sealing it down again. “Crouch knows.”

“What’s happening here?” Driver yelled at them.

It had to be asked, eventually. Sonora was not so sure it would ever be answered.

The speakers shut off and the lights dimmed drastically. Only a few little bulbs remained to show a way through the heaped pillows. For the first time Sonora noticed figures sleeping, wrapped in sheets, on the overhead bunks which lined the interior. There was not much room up there, under the curved ceiling; they were crammed in like luggage, and among luggage. The bus whirred on, and it was as Driver had said: it felt as though they were rocking, but not so gently now. Crazily. With growing violence. She lay down flat on her back, afraid she might be thrown or at least rolled; with arms spread wide, she grabbed onto the mattress, convinced that they too were now going off the road.

A wave of sound roared through the bus, beginning in the pings and creaks and groans and rattles of the engine, the shocks, the brakes and the tires—growing louder and louder, until it sounded like jabbering voices. It built into a storm of howls and crashing as if they’d been caught in an avalanche of souls on the steep road. The sides of the bus felt too thin to protect them. Hail or hammerblows struck the ceilings, the walls, even pummeled them from underneath. She felt a repetitive, dull slamming just under one of her shoulders, a steady beat that seemed to be aiming up deliberately at her, driving toward her heart.

Her mind had room for nothing else. The lights flickered and went out, and she would have screamed except that Neuron was right up next to her, whispering comfort in her ear, and she could see his brain glowing faintly, comfortingly, through his bandanna. She grabbed onto him, wondering for a moment how Driver was taking this—sorry that he had always been so aloof from them. She supposed he would be all right.

Then, some long time before she accepted the fact, the sounds died out and the hammering stopped and even the sickening motion was done. They seemed to be at rest, the motor purring—idling—underneath them; and all around them, otherwise, perfect silence.

A few lights came on again. Neuron sat up and pulled his hat from a hook between the windows, settled it over his head. He looked down at her. “You might want to wait here.”

“For what?” she asked, words that barely escaped her dry throat.

But he was moving on his knees toward the front of the bus, along with some of the others, including old Crouch, who was coughing with a wet, bubbling sound as if the shaking had jarred something loose in his chest. The others from their old bus were sitting against the walls, the masked windows, some curled into fetal positions among the pillows, eyes squeezed shut. Yvette sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching Crouch.

Sonora looked over at Driver. His eyes were open but he was staring at the ceiling, looking contemplative, resigned. When he saw her looking, he smiled briefly, a darting flicker.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I don’t suppose so,” he said. “On the other hand, does it matter?”

Crouch whistled sharply, and she turned to look down the aisle at him. But he wasn’t calling her, or any of them. He was looking up at the sleeping racks. One of them, up there, was stirring.

Just then, there was a loud pneumatic wheeze. A rash of warm air tore at her scarves, as if the bus had gasped out its last breath. A bitter metallic cold replaced the warmth she hadn’t noticed until it was gone. The driver—whose face she had not seen, who was no more than a scarcely registered shape in her memory—stepped from his seat and descended the steps at the front of the bus. Everyone watched him depart through the accordioned doors, his shoulders sharp in a dark, stiffly pressed uniform, disappearing outside. When he was gone, Crouch moved irritably toward the sleeper in the closest bunk.

“Come on,” he snapped, shoving the figure there. “It’s your time.”

There was a crackling sound, something like a canvas sail being unfurled in the confined space, and a creaking groan. What Sonora had thought were sheets slowly unfolded into wings. Pale leathery wings, bald as a rat’s tail, with clawed hinges. The sleeper, at Crouch’s prodding, rolled from the bunk and dropped to the floor, moving awkwardly on thin legs, its long nails catching and tearing in the mattress covers. She had only a glimpse of its face—but that was enough. Sleepy slitted eyes, long white snout, thin ranged mouth. Then Crouch was harrying it ahead of him through the aisle, down the steps and out the door. Only when it was gone could Sonora look away, and then her eyes went immediately to the others still slumbering overhead. They did not all appear to be of the same sort; but there were more like that one up there.

Suddenly the black bus seemed less of a haven than she had imagined. She went on her knees after Neuron, who was sitting at the edge of the platform pulling on tall boots. Her own sandals were below in a pile of shoes.

“Be sure you get the right ones,” he said as she rooted for her pair. “This isn’t the place to go walking off in someone else’s shoes.”

“You and your identity,” Crouch called back sourly from the doorway. Then he stepped off into the night, and Sonora distinctly heard his footsteps crunching down hard into gravel or sand. The sound reassured her. At least they were somewhere.

There was a pile of loose shawls and blankets near the shoes. She dragged a poncho with a mandala pattern over her head and went down the aisle, down the steps, looking over once at the driver’s seat and the dashboard as she went. She didn’t drive, herself; but it looked like any other bus.

Stepping out, she learned instantly where the heat had gone. Sucked up, sunk into the reddish sand, which instantly snatched the last trace of warmth from her body. She stood hugging the blanket around her, cold as alabaster yet not quite feeling the chill. That numb.

Footprints led away from the bus, toward the horizon. At the end of that lengthening trail was the dark uniform of the driver, plodding steadily along. But Crouch, who stood outside, and Neuron, who now jumped down beside her and stamped his feet as if to force nonexistent heat into them, were not looking that way. They gazed straight out ahead of the bus, in the direction it was headed. Neuron pushed back his cowboy hat for a better view of the winged silhouette that was lofting higher by the second against a dark sky with faint stars in it. It was the violet hour, wolf-glow, but lacking qualities she associated with dawn or dusk. Then she realized what it was. At the zenith was a molten orange glow, like a sun without definition; while spreading away from that in rippled waves was steadily deeper darkness, purpling till it coalesced into perfect blackness against the land. It was the exact opposite of sunrise or sunset; here, darkness massed at the horizon, and light retreated toward the center of the sky. Stars burned and flickered close to the ground, like the lights of a desert city. The flying shape, as it gained distance, gradually merged with the darkness that ringed them entirely. Behind them, she noticed, was no sign of the mountains they had traversed; nor of any river, for that matter.

Sonora was grateful to have at least the thick blob of molten light above, though it cast no warmth that she could feel. Even as she thought this, she saw that it was dwindling—that the darkness was not a static thing, a mere wall around them, but continued to grow and seep up across the sky. Blue and violet invaded the orange flare, weakening it while she watched. It was like a foreign cell under attack, dissolving. Stars marked the territory taken by night.

Well, she thought. At least there are stars. For the moment. I won’t take them for granted.

As the orange light faded, Crouch and Neuron grew visibly nervous. They peered hard at the horizon, squinting into the dark, until the old man began to curse.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Another one.”

“Maybe he’ll be back,” Neuron said. “Anyway, there’s more.”

“Not many!”

This, too, had the feel of an old—an endless—argument.

“Okay,” Neuron said, turning toward Sonora. “That’s about it for us, now. You better get back up inside there.”

“What about the driver?” Sonora said, for at the end of that long trail of footprints there was nothing now but more darkness.

“Looks like that’s taken care of,” he said, nodding up the stairwell. Driver himself had taken the seat, settling in with an eager look as he examined the dashboard, tested the steering wheel, and finally tried the lever that worked the door. It sighed shut casually, squeezing the inner light to a narrow slit between its rubber flaps—until even that went out.

“Hey!” Neuron shouted.

“Shit!” Crouch yelled. “Don’t move!”

The black bus was gone. There was nothing now but darkness sweeping in over the empty plain of sand, with the three of them standing there alone while wind erased the tire tracks.

Sonora spun to look around, to see where it had gone; but Neuron grabbed onto her, harder than she had ever been grabbed. “Don’t… move!” he cried. She could hardly see his face, it was so much darker now. A membrane seemed to have been pulled even across the stars. There was only a tiny sullen dot of orange being extinguished in the vault overhead. Once it snuffed out, there would be nothing left to see by.

Everything was quickening. Night came on like the wind, which roared out of nowhere as if bent on tearing them from their place. She planted her feet in the sand and knelt, dragging Neuron down beside her. Voices buzzed in the sand, which scoured her flesh, tore at her eyelids. She screamed and the sand rushed into her mouth, caking her tongue, drinking every ounce of moisture—stealing it from her, sucking the life away. Neuron and Crouch had her by either arm, holding her between them, and they were doing something she couldn’t quite see. Waving their arms, pounding the air with a hollow sound.

Suddenly something blocked the wind. As if a wall had been erected behind them and they stood now in a quiet, sheltered spot. Sonora brushed sand from her eyes, tried to look behind her, but something else caught her stinging gaze. The light again, a thin slice of yellow, opened up before them. The steps of the bus were revealed.

“Go!” Neuron yelled, and shoved her in. She stumbled on the steps, clinging to his arm, pulling him with her. Crouch, his face scraped raw and caked with bloody sand, swept the air with open hands, feeling for the door but missing it. Beyond him, something enormous moved toward them at inconceivable speed—like a part of the landscape curling and reaching for the bus. Sonora screamed and grabbed for his hand, and Neuron turned and saw it too, and also grabbed. They caught him by one wrist, but their screams -or the view—had startled Driver, and he closed the door with only that one hand yet inside the bus.

“Wait!” she said. “Open it—open!”

Driver was slow, as if stunned by what he had seen through the door. She couldn’t grab the lever herself, not without letting go of Crouch—and that wouldn’t have been wise. As hard as she and Neuron pulled, she could feel the old man’s arm slipping out of their grasp.

“Driver!” she screamed.

“Go!” Neuron yelled.

“The door!” Sonora cried.

“Just go!”

Driver stamped on the gas and the engine roared. His face was white, stricken. He started to haul on the stick shift, and Sonora could hear gears grinding, could feel the wheels catching in something, jerking them forward.

Yvette rushed up then, grabbed the lever and hauled it back. The door wheezed open again. At first all she could see was Crouch’s hand and forearm. It seemed to end in midair, just below the elbow; but that couldn’t be true. Driver threw the shift the rest of the way into gear. With a liberated growl that quickly became a whining purr, the black bus lurched forward, throwing its passengers back. Crouch flew into the stairwell and the door clapped shut, rubber flaps somehow sealing out the night.

Neuron moved quickly, gathering the old man up in a limp heap from the stairs, carrying him back to the padded platform where he laid him down gingerly. Sonora peered over his shoulder, expecting to see Crouch in rags, shredded and bloody, worse than he had been a moment before.

But he lay breathing quietly, sand covering his clothes, lining the wrinkles of his face, otherwise apparently untouched. He opened his eyes and breathed up at Neuron:

“Got me.”

“No, old man,” Neuron said. “You’re fine. You’re gonna be okay this time.”

Crouch shook his head. “I was out there—for ages. I just barely remember you….”

Driver, at the wheel, still accelerating—though Sonora couldn’t imagine into what, with the windshield showing nothing ahead of them—twisted around to say, “What happened? I only shut the doors for a second—a fraction of a second.”

“To you it was a fraction of a second,” Neuron said, then turned back quickly to Crouch. “But you remember now, don’t you? You’re here again.”

“I’m changed, though—changing. I want… I need to lie down.”

“You are lying down.”

“No, I mean—up there.”

Neuron glanced at the overhead racks. Sonora thought she saw his lips move in prayer. Then he put a hand on Crouch’s breast.

“No, old man, you’re not—”

“Damn it, I know what I need. Help me up. I wasn’t asking, I was telling you.”

A few of the passengers moved to his aid, but Neuron was not one of them. Sonora put her arms around him; as much for her own comfort as for his. Crouch hobbled a few feet down the center aisle to the newly empty bunk, and allowed himself to be boosted up into the rack. They put a pillow under his gray head, swept the sand out from under him. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face away. In moments he was as quiet as the rest of the sleepers up there.

Neuron sank down onto the mattress. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “This is bad. I thought Crouch was—if anyone, Crouch was here for the long haul.”

Sonora kept her arms around him. She glanced up at the front of the bus, saw Driver’s face in the black glass of the windshield. What did he see out there, she wondered. How did he keep control?

* * *

Driver stared down into the headlights, which scarcely showed anything except flat sand unrolling ahead of him, just enough to drive straight into. He drove by instinct, or by trust, suspecting that there were no obstacles in their path—would be none for quite some distance. Thinking, grimly, that even if he ran into a wall—so what?

It was something he reflected, to be up here again, in the driver’s seat, doing the only thing he had ever done for as long as he could recall. He felt relief at being essentially alone. Too many passengers back there—from the old bus and from this new one—brought on that unfocused, troubling pressure he always felt in crowds, as if he were in danger of coming apart or losing himself in their midst. They would know him as Driver now, and he wouldn’t have to know much about them. They would be grateful to leave the driving to him.

It was a challenge. He had never seen a road like this; or imagined one existed. Well… maybe he had. On certain nights after days of driving, after weeks of journeying on the endless pilgrimage, following the Group, he would sometimes lie in bed in some motel, or in a sleeping bag on the ground outside the bus, and imagine that he was still driving—but in perfect darkness, with his eyes closed. He would dream the act of driving distilled to its essence—no real mad beneath the tires, only the voyage itself, always leading into sleep.

Sleep, he supposed, if you could stay conscious through it, might be like this. Lucid dreaming, that’s what this was. Or dreaming wakefulness. A drugged kind of—

Squirming memories surfaced; the palm of his hand tingled. Something about a drug, a droplet, a burrowing thing.

He was on the verge of remembering when a white shape flew into the headlights and slammed against the windshield. He hit the brakes, screaming into the face of the thing that had crumpled against the glass—crushed snout, red slit eyes, torn wings as wide as the windshield. When the bus finally ground to a stop, the flattened thing slid backward and fell into the dust.

Sonora and Neuron stood next to him, peering down. In the headlights it was fairly well-lit, and apparently dead. Its wings unfolded the rest of the way, its claws twitched galvanically then stilled. From one of the withered wing-fingers, a bit of colored ribbon dangled, talon-pierced. It was a rainbow paisley pattern, part of a scarf or a pennant. Driver had seen the colors before, flapping over the stage at a concert.

“Damn,” Neuron said. “I guess we are headed the right way.”

“You’re not going out there again,” Sonora said.

“No. You can keep on going, Driver-man.”

Driver sank back into his seat. The engine had stalled, but it started up easily enough. He pulled forward slowly, watching the ruined thing pass under the front bumper. He was careful to drive as straight as possible, but even so, he thought he heard the wide wings crackle as the tires passed over them.

Neuron clapped him hard on the shoulder. “It’s a good sign,” he said, nodding. “A real good sign.”

Not long after that, the stars reappeared. Dead ahead, clustered low on the horizon, spreading slowly apart as the bus sped forward.

He was squinting for a better look when he saw something moving. He wasn’t ready for a repeat of the last collision. He started to brake, hoping to avoid a mess; but then he saw the pale thing waving. A person.

“What’s going on?”

Without answering, he brought the bus to a stop. The person outside—a skinny, ratty-looking kid—came running toward them down the bright twin tunnel of headlights, waving his arms desperately. When he reached the bus he started banging on the door.

Driver looked back at Neuron, as if for permission. “Go ahead,” the cowboy said, and Driver opened the doors.

The kid hurled himself up the stairs, breathless and laughing. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying. “You—you found me out here. I mean, there’s others here? Wow! I thought I could hear them up ahead, you know, I been following just the little sounds in the dark, just those few notes you can barely hear. But I should have known I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t be the only one. I mean, of the followers who’d do this, who’d come here.”

His eyes were everywhere all at once, pupils enormous, as if he’d been staring into darkness forever. Finally his gaze settled on Driver, and his wide smile froze inside his pale ragged beard.

“I remember you,” he said. “I met you! And you’re really here now. Man!”

Driver started to look away, leaving him to the others. The kid was crazy or high. Then, abruptly, he remembered their meeting in the amphitheater earlier; the kid had come rushing up to him just like this, exactly as crazed, and then staggered off.

“Man, this is great,” he was saying. “We’ll catch up with them now, yeah. You got a bus and everything. How’d you manage that? I mean, on foot it’s tough. I didn’t have much to go by. But—but maybe it’s what you have when you go, right? I mean, were you all in a bus? All of you?”

He looked around the interior of the black bus, but no one answered. The other passengers seemed almost embarrassed by his manic energy.

“I mean, all I had was my own two feet, right? Only way I could think to follow was to, you know… walk. I found an edge, like, a real high place, top of a building. A real tall building. It was so tall the lights on the ground looked like tiny faraway stars, you know? Like stars, yeah. And I just went walking toward them, right out into the sky, stars above and below, stars everywhere… and I walked through that for a while, till the stars went away and it got dark. But I could hear the Group again, finally. Like they were up ahead just a little ways— they didn’t have much of a head start on me. That was such a relief, right? I mean—I was trying to imagine the world without them. What’s left? Hey… you got a radio, why aren’t you tuned in? You gotta tune ‘em in. How else you gonna follow?”

The kid went to the dashboard and punched on the radio. It hadn’t been on since they’d seen their old colorful bus plunge into darkness. It crackled to life now, as if the satellite were still out there orbiting in the dark, bouncing signals to anyone who cared to receive them….

Music.

Driver straightened when he recognized it. The Group was coming in clear, as if they were outside the bus, surrounding it.

“Yeah,” the kid said, ecstatic. He sank down on the steps.

Some of the others began to whisper, in the back of the bus. Yvette and Chad sounded excited. They knew all the tapes, all the recordings going around, being traded; they knew not only all the songs, but all the individual concerts, had heard most of them in person. But this was something new. This was…

“It’s happening right now,” Chad was saying. “Can’t you feel it?”

And Yvette: “It’s live!”

“Yeah!” the kid on the steps agreed. “That’s them! We’re catching up! What’re we doing sitting here, Driver? Let’s get moving!”

Driver had already been in the act of pushing the great bus forward. He bent once again to the task of driving, while music filled the black bus and the stars spread out on the horizon, drifting higher now. Not stars at all, he saw, but fires. Scattered fires burning all over the slopes of some dark shape. He sensed that something held them up, but could gain no impression of it. Spires, or simply a wall? The sky was too black to allow a silhouette, and the fires lit nothing but themselves.

The excitement in the bus grew as they approached the lights. The music was getting louder, the signal stronger. It was strange to know that the Group was up ahead playing—but to what audience?

And then, from the passengers, came a cry of disappointment and frustration—even of despair. For the tunes had blurred into a final lullabye… the Group’s signature piece, after which they always left in utter silence.

“Hurry!” they were yelling at him, as if he could squeeze any more speed from the bus—as if they didn’t mind crashing headlong into whatever black enormity held the specks of flame aloft. He couldn’t bring himself to drive blindly, though. The closer he got to the lights, the slower he went—he had no sense of depth here. How far had he come? How far had he to go?

The tune crested, tumbled over an inevitable edge into silence.

“Noooooo,” they wailed inside the black bus.

At that moment, the bus passed through a gate, an entrance or exit of some sort, into a tunnel. It was luminous with a deep violet light. They were descending, so he took his foot off the accelerator for an instant—and just then, they burst out abruptly into a huge arena, a stadium or coliseum whose dimensions were almost inconceivable.

They had emerged somewhere in the middle of the field. Ramparts or bleachers rose on all sides; they were like distant mountains, their true size impossible to judge. He had no sense of scale.

The ground was littered with rubbish: chunks and splinters of whitish rock that looked like the shards a mason leaves behind when he chisels a tombstone. Gnawed, discarded bones; soiled take-out containers. Worms and flies crawled and buzzed through the heaps of filth. Glass crunched and burst under the tires. Wide piles of embers smoked and glowed here and there like the remains of bonfires. He drove carefully through the waste, not wanting to be stranded here. Static poured from the speakers; all directions looked equally undesirable, all destinations futile. To head for any one of the surrounding walls would have been equally vain; they were all impassable.

“We missed ’em,” the kid on the steps said, dejected. “We just missed them.” He put his head on his knees and began to sob. “All that… and… and…”

Sonora moved over to him. Her eyes were on the desolate scene beyond the window, but she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll catch them next time, okay? They’re still out there.”

“But where?”

Sonora fiddled with the radio dial, but all bands seemed equally dead now.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Not here, though,” said Neuron.

“What do you mean?” Sonora turned to look at him. Driver kept the bus moving slowly, weaving around heaps of smoldering coals, because that was what he knew how to do.

“We have to keep moving. We have to get out now. If we get stranded, stuck here, they’ll pull so far ahead we’ll never catch up.”

“How… how do you know all this?” she asked.

“We’ve been following them a lot longer than you,” he said. “You learn these things.”

“But—but all this, it only happened tonight—I mean, if this is still tonight.”

Neuron shook his head. “You don’t see. It didn’t happen tonight, whatever that means. And it hasn’t happened yet, neither. It happened a long time ago—and it’s still happening, even now. It keeps deepening; it keeps moving through all the levels, and that’s where some of us come from… from the world before, or another one before that. Just like you, now, hooking up with us. It’ll change you eventually, like it changed me.” He put a finger to his skull. “You’ll become what you are, along the way; but what you are will change.”

Sonora stared at him, irritated. “Just tell us what to do,” she said.

“If I knew that…” Neuron started.

“Let me,” came a rasping voice from above them. In the rear-view mirror, Driver could see someone stepping down from the bunks. It was Crouch, the old man. He hadn’t been there long, but apparently it was long enough. He almost wasn’t Crouch anymore.

He knelt before them, extended his pale, long-fingered hand, and slowly opened his fingers. Driver gasped. From the popping blue veins in the old man’s palm, red slugs were crawling. They wriggled up, dried, curled to a wisp at one end, a rounded blob at the other. “Corpsules,” Crouch said. “I can make my own now.”

It was the first thing Driver had seen here that truly frightened him.

Then he remembered when he had seen them before.

When and where….

The amphitheater. Like this place, only smaller, enclosed, packed with people. Could this be the same place, much later that same night, with all the people gone from it? Had they been driving in a circle all night, and now everyone was home and sleeping except them? But it was so immense… had they shrunk somehow?

“Disgusting,” Chad said, his face pressed to a window. “Look at all them fukkin diapers, my god. And the cans, the garbage bags.” Which there were, bursting at the seams, stuffed with rancid meaty stuff, ground worms maybe, that wouldn’t quite ever decay, it was so rubbery and plastic.

“Yea, verily,” said Crouch now, raising two fingers in a peace sign, then making a sign of power over the handful of red drops. “Behold me, that am yet angel.”

And then his wings unfolded.

It wasn’t a good idea, there in the bus. He battered them against the racks and jumped back, hunching smaller. “Jesus!”

“Looks like this isn’t your day, old man,” Neuron said, putting arms around him, helping him pack the wings back in again. In almost the same gesture, he swiped the handful of drops from the white-furred palm. Apparently it was expected. Crouch sucked in his cheeks and, still stooping, hobbled painfully toward the front of the bus.

“Open the doors,” he said commandingly as he passed Driver.

“But—”

Crouch hit the lever himself. The smell that swept in was unbearable. He faced into it, descended with his nose held high, turned and faced the bus and all its company. Seeing him out there, surviving in the emberlight, some of the passengers let up the windowshades on that side. Crouch clicked his heels together, put his hand to his brow in a crisp salute, and bowed stiffly at the waist. Then he sprang into the air and was gone.

“Now we take these,” Neuron said. Waving a corpsule under Driver’s nose.

Sonora also remembered the droplets. She rushed over to Neuron and grabbed it out of his hand.

“This!” she cried. “This is why we’re here!”

“Well, in a sense,” Neuron said with a shy smile. “Or hadn’t you figured that out yet?”

“I don’t mean what you think I mean,” she said. But she wasn’t sure how to put it. Wherever they were—death, a dream, some other kind of place whose name came not quite so readily to the tongue—they wouldn’t have been here except for the drag. They would have been somewhere else completely; perhaps they might have passed through here briefly, on their way to that other place. But instead they had gotten off the road—driven off it almost deliberately—and were now trapped in this… she wanted to call it a borderland, but she wasn’t sure it was either a bordering region or a zone between borders. It was more like another planet, that extensive.

“He’s wigging out,” said one of the original passengers, whose name she had never known. She thought he was talking about Neuron, but he saw she thought that and shook his head, nodding toward the ceiling.

Wild laughter from overhead.

They went out, all of them, to see Crouch turning somersaults in the sky above. He was just luminous enough to be visible.

“Come on, old man!” Neuron yelled, clenching his fists. He had dropped the red tears into a vial he wore around his neck.

“I’m not following him,” someone else said.

Crouch hooted at them.

“Where are they?” the bearded kid cried. He sounded mad.

“Right here,” Crouch called down to them. “But not right now.”

“We know that much,” Neuron said. “Should we drop now?”

“Not yet. They’re farther ahead. Just follow me.”

“Good job, old man.” Neuron looked ecstatic, and when the kid saw him, he relaxed, too. “You heard him, Driver! Everyone back on board!”

Sonora went up just before Neuron, who came last. She realized she had smelled nothing outside—not since the moment she stepped out of the bus. As if the decay were only an image of decay, a projection affecting only the eyes. But as she boarded the bus again, she gagged on the stench that followed her in. Driver had his face covered with a monogrammed handkerchief he pulled from the label of his charcoal black uniform. It was a relief when the door shut behind Neuron.

She let him past, smiling broadly when he looked at her, then turned and whispered urgently to Driver: “Don’t take those drops!”

Neuron was looking back at her. She straightened up and walked toward him, feigning easiness. She swayed as the bus moved forward, and Neuron put his arms out to catch her. They went right around her, tighter this time than before. “Whoa, there. Gotcha,” he said.

“You sure did.” Sonora smiled, hands on his forearms, twisting away. She went down to the mattress, scooting back in between Chad and Yvette. Neuron took a lazy swipe at her, let his arm dangle, and smiled sideways sort of regretfully, as if: oh well.

Sonora looked up and saw Driver watching her in the mirror. Concern showed in his face, but she nodded slightly and he looked back at the road, such as it was. Crouch flew on ahead of them, she supposed.

“What is it, Sonora?” Yvette asked, and Chad, hearing the question, looked over.

Chad had bowl-cut hair and a baggy sweater, a long face with the cheeks scooped out of it. One eye wandered. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“The drug,” she muttered, low, her hands on either one’s knee, so they leaned closer to her. “Those drops. Do you remember taking them?”

“Sure,” Chad said. “Just after the Group came on.”

“It was just before,” Yvette said, with equal certainty.

“But you both took them, right?”

“Yeah. But so what?”

“Something happened to us—and I don’t mean the drugs.”

“I’m not stupid,” Chad said. “I know where we are, Sonora. You’re not the only one who can pick up on these things, and it isn’t exactly all that subtle.”

“I don’t think we’re exactly where you think we are,” Sonora said.

“All right, so is somebody going to say it?”

“We’re dead, you mean?” Chad blurted out, laughing a moment after he had said it.

“If we aren’t, I’d like to know where we are,” said Yvette.

“I think we’re sort of dead, yes—”

“Sort of?” Chad howled louder.

“— but there’s more than that going on. When we died, we were on that stuff, that drug. When you die, you’re supposed to, like, let go of things, come all apart, dissolve back into the universe—at least for a while. But we’re not getting there. We’re stuck somehow, stuck following the Group, just like we did in life. Death is supposed to be experienced with clear, concise consciousness—but we were, are, addled. So we’re seeing all this instead of the Clear Light.”

“Are you saying that even in death, there’s drugs?” Chad asked. “Whoaw!”

“So we… we just let it wear off?” Yvette said.

“I hope that works. That’s why I’m saying, don’t take any more of the stuff. What would it be like, here, to do more of it? What is it? What does it do to you when you’re…”

“Dead,” said Chad, still laughing.

“There’s a peyote paradise,” Yvette said. “Maybe this is like that.”

“This is no fukkin paradise,” Chad said.

“I mean—a drug land. But we’re stuck here in our bodies, or our astral bodies, because we’re dead… so we’re free from anything that would pull us back to the Earth plane, like happens when you come down from peyote.”

“Right, baby, I follow that,” Chad said. “But what about this, Sonora? What if we don’t want to come down off this stuff? I mean, what’s up ahead if we do? What are we waking up to, comprende? I mean, the rest of the trip might not be even this pleasant.”

“But Chad, this is unnatural! We’re not supposed to be here this long.”

“Then what the hell are they doing here?”

Sonora looked around the bus at the other passengers, most of them unknown to her, yet with stories and lives as full as her own, hard as it was to imagine.

“No, not them,” Chad said. “The Group!”

“Maybe they were doing the same stuff as us,” Sonora answered. “Or maybe they’re not here at all. The crash could have been like a lure, to get us here. To make our bus go out of control.”

“Jesus,” Chad said. “That’s creepy.”

“Or maybe they died but they weren’t drugged, so that’s why they’re getting ahead of us, going forward while we’re stuck here. So they were on that plane but they weren’t drugged at the time—”

“Yeah, right,” Chad said. “The Group not drugged. Now you’re really stretching things….”

As if to punctuate his sarcasm, there was a blare of music up ahead, a wild chord sweeping through the bus. It electrified them; everyone crowded to the windows except Yvette and Chad, whom Sonora held back.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What do you think about Neuron?”

“We should ask you that,” Yvette said.

“I don’t know,” Chad said. “Why? What do you think?”

“I think—he’s here for a different reason than we are. He’s chosen to stay here. I remember him giving us the drugs, in the theater tonight; but we weren’t dead yet.”

“How do you know we don’t have the order of things confused in our memories?” Yvette said. “What if our minds and personalities are breaking up even now?”

“I believe they are, yes, but somehow we got that original drug. Those red drops. What if somehow, someway, Neuron was able to come out to us—out of death, I mean, into the living world.”

“What if he’s meant to,” Yvette said.

“I see what you’re saying Sonora,” said Chad, dismissing the other. “The guy came out and snatched us, sort of.”

“In a way we can’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand it. He saw you, fell in lust, and went for you the best way he knew how. Only to get you, he had to take all of us, since we’re sort of, you know… attached.”

Sonora swallowed. “So I’m to blame?”

“He’s to blame!” Yvette said.

“Then… what if we’re not really dead? I mean, what if this really isn’t death, but some other kind of world, like you say? What if the Group, playing up there, really is playing?”

“He’s coming,” whispered Yvette.

Neuron ducked out of the crowd at the front of the bus. “They’re playing. You want to come see?”

He put a hand out to Sonora.

“I can hear, thanks.”

“Yeah,” Chad said loudly. “We’re kind of comfortable now.”

Neuron glowered at Chad. He turned away, but took another look at Sonora over his shoulder.

Then the bus stopped, she wasn’t sure why. The music had been brewing, early notes of a concert, the warm-up stage, arrival. She looked out a window, raising the shade above her head, and saw light. It was artificial, drifting down from incredibly tall spindly lampposts that arched overhead and dropped blots of light across a concrete wasteland.

They were in a parking lot. All the garbage they’d passed through was peripheral to this. They had come to another stadium inside the larger one, a relatively tiny arena in the middle of the plain which was itself surrounded by ring-walls.

The black bus was the only vehicle in the lot. Except… yes, far off, around a curve of the stadium, she could see a black airplane, sleek and inky, angled something like the bus with a shimmering exterior, half-diamonds and other geometric planes that made the craft look at once velvety and scaly.

Driver had parked within walking distance of the gates. She could see clots of people moving through the dark arches, down the tunnels that led toward the central stage. Not many, though. She had the impression these were stragglers, hurrying in late.

“It’s started already,” Neuron said quickly to all of them, like a teacher explaining to a class. He uncapped his vial. “Okay, Crouch will back me up on this, it’s time to drop. Who’s first?”

Most of the other passengers moved forward. Sonora wanted to stop them, but she didn’t dare. It would have to be enough, for now, to save her friends—and herself. They opened their hands and she said nothing. Neuron laid the red corpsules in their palms as they walked past him, down the steps and onto the cement, heading toward the music. Some licked their hands, slurped up the droplets; but she remembered from a sudden tickling in her palm how easily the things were administered.

She whispered, “Drop yours—I mean, get rid of them—as soon as you can. Don’t leave them on your skin.”

“Why not just refuse?” Yvette said. “I mean, he can’t make us take them.”

“I can’t believe you two,” Chad said. “Dead, and afraid to take drugs. What could happen to you now?”

“What if we’re not dead?” Yvette said.

“Yvette, you are one confused girl. Do what you want. I’m going for it.”

He pushed up from the platform and swaggered past Neuron, who dropped the corpsule in his hand and winked at him. Chad slapped Neuron’s shoulder and popped the drop in his mouth, giving a thumbs-up to Sonora and Yvette on his way out.

“Ladies,” Neuron said. “You coming?”

“I don’t know,” Yvette said.

“The show must go on, right? You’ve got to get off and experience—”

“She doesn’t feel up to it,” Sonora said.

“Really?” Neuron pressed toward them. “Don’t feel well? Now how can that be?”

“I’ve got sort of a psychic headache,” Yvette said.

“They don’t have to go if they don’t want to,” Driver said quietly.

Neuron stopped where he was and turned back toward him. “What’s that?”

“I said, there’s no reason for them to get off the bus if they’d rather not.”

“But, hey, out here in the parking lot… it gets a little scary during a show.”

“I’ll be more than happy to stay with them. I’ve done it many times.”

“Done it many times, huh? Look, Driver-man, you’re just a suit, all right? A uniform, you get me? Nobody’s talking to you. You don’t play a part in this.”

“Do you want to drive?” Driver said.

Neuron paled, while up inside his hat, his brain blackened, emitting a dark bruised light, purple as an injury. “Look here,” he said.

Driver rose as Neuron stalked toward him.

“Hey,” said a voice from outside. “What’s going on in there?”

It was Crouch.

“Good, you’re here,” Neuron said. “The driver is giving us trouble this time.”

“What? Impossible!”

“Get in and help me.”

“I—jeez—can’t. These fukkin wings!”

Crouch tried the doorway but got stuck in it. Driver pulled on the door lever and the partitions began to shudder and flap, first crushing Crouch’s fingers and pinching his wings so he yelled, then expelling him backward onto the parking lot. Soundlessly, but not before Sonora let out a warning cry, Neuron leapt at Driver. Driver caught him, twisted, and simply shoved. Neuron tumbled down the steps, landing directly atop the howling Crouch.

Driver then, before they could regain their feet, shut the door.

The two staggered upright, clinging to each other for support, livid and furious now. They came toward the door, not seeing it, searching the air with desperate hands. Before they made contact, Driver had already thrown the gears into reverse. They stumbled past the windshield, dismayed to find the bus already gone.

Standing next to Driver, Sonora and Yvette looked down at Neuron and Crouch. The men searched an ever expanding spiral, Driver backing up a few yards whenever they approached. Finally they turned and faced each other. Neuron tore off his hat and stomped it flat; Crouch’s wings shot out stiffly to both sides.

“This is unbelievable!” Neuron cried. “I can’t believe it!”

“You?” said Crouch. “I got these outta the deal!” He jabbed a thumb at his wings. “I knew that driver was trouble from the start.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why should I have to? Oh, I know. Because you’re an idiot!

“How was I supposed to know?”

“He was different than the other drivers.”

“No he wasn’t, he was the same. It’s been the same guy as long as I can remember, and it was him again. You’d notice any little change in that face. It never changes!”

“He was different tonight!”

Sonora put a hand on Driver’s shoulder. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

Driver shook his head.

“Because, I mean, if you’re something more than what we think, I just want you to know… we appreciate it.”

“Really, I don’t have the slightest idea. They’re insane. Look at them now.”

They were tearing at each other, roiling around on the cement. The old man cried out each time Neuron grabbed his wings, and Neuron winced and growled whenever Crouch hammered him on the crown.

“Give them plenty of room,” Sonora said.

Driver pulled away from them completely, starting on a circuit of the stadium’s outer walls. As he drove, he slowly turned his course outward, moving away across the empty parking lot and gaining speed as if they were trying to break away from a planet’s gravitational field, attaining escape velocity so they could fly off into the night.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Sonora asked.

“Getting some distance.”

“What about them, back there?” asked Yvette.

Sonora thought of their friends, the bearded boy, who had taken the drug and wandered into the theater. She hadn’t said goodbye to any of them—hadn’t the chance. “I guess it’ll wear off eventually… and then they’ll have to go on. Unless Crouch keeps giving them drugs, and then maybe they’ll be here a long time.”

“No,” Yvette said. “I meant them. In the bunks.”

Sonora had forgotten that the bus was not empty.

“I can stop,” Driver said. “Before we go any farther. We can unload them.”

“What if we need them up ahead?” Sonora said. “What if they really are guides?”

She could imagine them waking in their own time, electing to fly out and scout the way, instead of being rousted irritably and sent half-asleep into the dark on a trivial mission.

“We’ll let them sleep then, for now?” Yvette said.

“I guess. We’re not going back then, are we?”

“I think the bus could make it through, if you wanted to,” said Driver.

“It would have to, wouldn’t it?” said Yvette. “I mean, Neuron got out, didn’t he? He rode this bus in and out between the worlds?”

“But he never stayed out,” Sonora said. “And I think—we only saw him when we’d taken the drugs.”

“I thought he gave them to us, though.”

“Yeah….”

But that was before she remembered first seeing him. Events were out of order; time did not quite dovetail here. That’s how he did it, she realized—that’s how he gave us what we needed to meet him… before we met him. He wasn’t in ordinary time. So he never really reached our world, where each thing follows another, one event gives rise to the next. And we couldn’t really get all the way back there, probably; not even in the black bus, miraculous as it is. We might pull up alongside our old bus and find it crashed on the mountainside, everyone dead—including ourselves. Who’d want to see that?

We can only go forward, she thought. Besides, maybe we weren’t even alive then, in the time before; maybe we were lost in some kind of other place, wandering and vulnerable in a drug-land like the peyote paradise, and that’s how he reached us. We were so used to the sensation of dreaming, with all the drugs we took, and everything seeming so unreal all the time anyway—how would we have known if we’d been dead already?

But we’ve broken that cycle, whatever it was. We’re going on now.

Driver’s foot was on the floor and the bus kept going faster and faster, picking up speed. Ahead of them, against a sky that was slightly lighter than she remembered, she saw not stadium walls but actual mountains.

“You don’t mind driving, do you?” she said, her hand on Driver’s shoulder.

He shrugged. “It’s what I do.” His pained, martyred expression had softened; he looked genuinely content. She realized that she was seeing someone new—not a stranger, but an old acquaintance never seen so clearly until now, and strange because of that. He glanced up into the rearview mirror, meeting her eyes.

“Why don’t you two go in back and try to rest?” he said. “I’m fine up here, alone. I’m not sleepy, myself, and there’s a long drive ahead.”

“All right,” she said. “Come on, Yvette.”

She slipped out of her sandals and crawled back among the pillows with Yvette. They lay down and wrapped themselves in blankets, and she thought of her old companions, forgetting their faces as she had earlier forgotten their names. Soft breathing filled the bus, soothing and hypnotic as the engine sound, but coming from the bunks. Her eyes closed. At the last moment before sleep, she recalled that they had not drawn the shades—and wondered if it mattered. Her eyes flickered open, going to the windows across the way. There were stars now, and suggestions of clouds, high and faintly luminous, or reflecting some distant glow. The sight reassured her; she let go of fear. Then she was a child again, lulled, rocking, asleep.

* * *

At the wheel, watching a highway slowly appear out of the receding darkness, Driver could feet the insignificant details of his personality sloughing away with every mile, leaving only the essentials, paring him down to a bare-bone surface solid as the hard, flat road on which the tires hummed. He was, had always been, Driver.

Glancing into the mirror at his sleeping passengers, he was pleased they felt safe enough to sleep. The bus was almost empty, but he knew that eventually it would fill again. Somewhere on the road ahead were numberless hitchhikers and wanderers on foot, pilgrims who might be ready for some company, all headed toward something none of them could name.

Driver kept an eye out for them.

* * *

“The Black Bus” copyright 1994 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1994.

MAD WIND

-1-

Among his nightmares was a bulldozer driven by the so-called Doctor Dodo. Its growling worried his sleep; he muttered that it should go away, leave him to rot in peace in the Fombeh settlement, but his griping made no difference. He could hear it all the way from the paved edge of San Désirée, tearing up the ragged gardens, crushing cardboard roofs and walls to pulp, pushing the screams of the destitute ahead of it like so many cattle. There were not enough cattle left in all of Bamal, however, to make such a din. It almost woke him.

Joseph Gidukyu railed in his sleep, grinding the golden teeth that were all he had left of his success. The American cash was in Dodo’s lab-frock pocket now; President Buique purred under his fellow tribesman’s jaundiced thumb, submitted gladly to having his pulse and blood pressure taken, his hemorrhoids probed, his armpits scraped with tongue depressors by the new head of the Institute. Where Dodo ambled, roses bloomed, depraved crowds followed with noses lifted, sniffing out their allegiance through streets that stank like exhumed communal graves. But it had not always been this way, Gidukyu reminded the sardonic chorus that laughed from the edges of his dreams? It was once my clinic, my regime, and Emperor Mome was mine. Where are you now, Emperor? Flown off in your jet of silver-plated plastic, surrounded by your soldiers and syphilitic wives, leaving me here with your rusting limousines? Leaving me here to do single combat against Dodo and his maniacal tractors?

The dream altered, thinned slightly, like mist from dry ice caught in the blades a fan. He found that he was speaking aloud, though he could no longer hear himself over the roar of the earth-movers. Give me a fulcrum and I’ll move the earth. “Give me a crowbar!” He leapt up screaming, the imaginary weapon clenched in an empty hand, blinded by the splayed glare of headlights breaking through the paper walls of his hovel. In the last moment before the dream collapsed, he thought the engines growled his name: Gidukyu, we have come for you.

“Go back to hell!” he cried. “I want to sleep!”

In those shifting beams he watched the writing on the walls of his shanty leap from obscurity, a jumble of brand names and shipping labels, “This Side Up” arrows aimed at the African dust that carpeted the enclosure. The ground shook like a fevered beast. How close was the monster? He had slept too deeply, been far too chummy with his nightmares, and the shouts of his neighbors, awake and fled minutes ago, had hardly scratched his slumber. They must have thought he was out stealing a midnight repast; more likely they had not thought of him at all. Fombeh or not, tribal honor and blood-trust meant little out here in the suburbs. And now there was no time to fold up his home and tuck it under his arm; if he intended to live another day, he must run and run well. Run, he thought, staring into the dazzle of headlights, looking for something in the crazy shadows which he must not leave behind. Something (sleep befuddled him), but what?

“Notebooks,” said his own voice, though he hardly recognized its desperation; starvation had sharpened it, although not without imbuing a certain commanding quality to the harsh syllables. He obeyed himself, knelt as though praying to the juggernaut for a moment’s respite, and reached through the rags of his bedding until he touched the small stack of books—buckram, plastic, a cold metal spiral. As his fingers closed on paper, the flimsy walls split open and a tide of dirt buried his hand. The tractor was upon him.

Joseph wrenched his forearm free and rose to confront the wall of earth and trapped cardboard that writhed, silhouetted, in the glaring lights. He shaded his eyes with the single sheet of filthy paper he had rescued from the heap, blocking out the lamps, and caught sight of the bulldozer’s driver beyond a frail shield of spattered glass. In the other hand, a miracle, he held the pistol that these days never left his side. He could live without money, without his precious attars and pheromone distillations, but without a gun he never would have survived.

He knew he had the man’s attention when the engine whined. This brave driver was an Ife, one of Buique’s and Dodo’s tribe. Joseph leveled his weapon on the torn cardboard’s edge and picked out one of the Ife’s yellowed eyes. The tractor’s engine died. Only a moment too late to kill it, he fired. A spiderweb appeared on the glass and the driver hit the broken ground with a thud, already running.

Joseph clambered over the mound, grabbed hold of the bulldozer’ snout, and surveyed the night whence it had come. Far out at the edge of the new-laid waste were the lights of San Désirée, the scabrous city where his dreams had been pulled from his head like still-healthy teeth, too soon and with much pain. No fires burned— even ass dung was precious—but an electric miasma hung above the streets of the foreign estates, and in the ill-named business district the walls of skyscrapers were scarred by lit windows, like a pox of fluorescence. It was not business going on at this hour: those offices were rented out to pimps and ambassadors. The few secretaries who trudged to work in the baking dawn found their desks stained with charas, spilled wine and semen, and quite often blood. Murders were not conducted only in public squares.

There were other lights, but not in the city. These came jostling towards him across the hastily-scraped plain that at nightfall had been a sister city to San Désirée, her inescapable shadow. Bulldozers, headlamps new and gleaming, jounced all over the treasures that the squatters had not had time or hands to grab before they fled. Shadows of tardy suburbanites flitted among the beams, struggling to pull down their houses before the tractors reached them. In the morning this barren land would be cluttered again, the paper houses reconstructed, the same Fombeh and Nmimi and Kaak fortune-seekers once more lazing in their shacks, only slightly ruffled by the wreckers. But among the same old cabins would be something new: half a dozen, maybe a score of bright yellow tractors, abandoned by their drivers when they ran out of gas or cracked a cylinder or burned out a bulb, never to be touched again except by the fortunate few who tied their canopies to the gear-shift levers and took up residence beside the mighty, failed treads. Even now he could see their lights dimming, though many pressed on, too many for him to face with a pistol and a mere pocketful of bullets. At least, he sighed, his resistance had not been a total failure.

Sitting down beside a headlight, perched on the sharp edge of the dozer’s shovel, he unfolded the grimy sheet of paper that now represented the whole of his library. He had thought it a sheet from his notebooks, but it was unlined paper of high quality. His spirits sagged when he realized that this lone survivor was no more than a page from one of his medical journals, the subscription to which had long since lapsed. He started to crumple it, to toss it away, but a look at the immense burial mound that now, coupled with the weight of the bulldozer, cut him off forever from his cherished papers, convinced him that he had better preserve it. The library had once been a great part of his identity. It had covered wall upon wall in his manor. All the nights he had spent poring over the French, German, and English journals were the part of his past he remembered with a fondness that had nothing to do with the luxuries of those days—the Emperor’s gifts, the brimming bank account, the expensive scientific equipment and more expensive women.

Smoothing the paper against his ragged thigh, he read the title with regret that he had saved no more than a portion of the title page and the abstract. “Autotomomania in Olfactory Esthesioneuroepithelioma Patients,” it was called. He read as much as he could of those unfortunate and deluded patients who wished to operate upon their own paranasal sinus tumors rather than permit surgeons to put qualified fingers up their nostrils. It was a syndrome with which he had some experience. The fragments of terminology made him heartsick for his own laboratory, and he was granted a sudden, unwelcome vision of Dodo himself puttering about, breaking glassware, playing with centrifuges as though they were tops, spilling vials of his most prized essences, redesigning the clockwork Coulter discrete analyzer to sew sheer lace lab-frocks for his Ife concubines.

It was no good having these visions when there was nothing he could do about them. Everything opposed him. President Buique, the laughing doctor, the League of Nations. If only there were some way to escape these scenes of disillusion, where every fall of light reminded him of his own plunge into shadow. San Désirée, all of Bamal, mocked him.

“Old Mome,” he muttered. “Where did you go? Did America take you in? Would they have me? I wouldn’t want to go where you have gone. Anywhere else, anywhere, would be fine. I want to get away!”

He looked up. Once more he had let a bulldozer come too close. Narrowing his eyes against the lights, he saw two men aboard it; one must have been the unseated driver of the vehicle he now occupied. He heard a shout from that direction, and several angry words in the Ife dialect.

No time now, they were rushing him away again. But by the first light he would lay his plans for escape. It occurred to him that he had friends beyond Bamal, that there were those who would understand him perfectly: the scientific community was a global fellowship, was it not? On the slip of paper in his hand were the names of other scientists and the addresses of the institutes that supported them. They would take him in, surely.

Satisfied that at last he had a new purpose for his life, an organizing principle, he got himself out of the bulldozer’s way and hurried to be with the other refugees, now squawking like birds in the east while they waited for the tractors to depart and for the sun to rise.

-2-

In all Bamal there were but a few who knew that Joseph Gidukyu had survived the coup. Of these, only two knew that he lived in San Désirée proper.

It had at first been widely supposed that the Emperor Mome had taken his physician with him when fleeing the coup. But Buique, no doubt goaded on by his own pet Doctor, swiftly saw fit to announce over Bamal Free Radio that the famous pioneer of olfactuality, osteognosis, and other scientific avenues previously unperturbed had been captured while hiding shamefully in the wine-cellar of his extravagant estate. Joseph, huddled in a basket belonging to a loyalist friend of his cousin Miguel, had not been in the least surprised by the news; he had been rather more dismayed to hear the manner in which he was characterized by the spokesman for the new regimes.

“Rest easy, citizens of Free Bamal, the foulest poison has been sucked from your wounds and shall soon be spit into the purifying flames of annihilation. This charlatan called Gidukyu, who enslaved you with lethal perfumes, now begs for mercy in a cold jail cell that is warmer and cleaner than he deserves. His eyes roll, he quakes in terror, for he knows that the people will not rest until the stench of his blood is drowned in the dust. Justice will be done in democracy’s name, on earth as it is in heaven, Amen!”

The Gidukyu imposter, whoever he was, had been executed at noon in the Pavilion du Monde, and Joseph had witnessed the spectacle while wrapped in the rags of an old woman. It was the largest gathering that had met in the square, not excepting the mandatory assemblies that had been drawn to Mome’s eight-hour addresses. He believed people must have poured into San Désirée from all over the country to watch the bloodletting, though there was little enough to see. Clerks hanging from office buildings dropped a confetti of paper and rinds on the people below; scuffles broke out between Nmimi and Fombeh, Fombeh and Kaak, while the Ife stood around hardly realizing yet that their position was unwontedly secure, that their stock had gone up, as it were. Standing in the midst of the commotion, up on a platform with ten soldiers and the President himself, was a thin black man with a leather sack over his head. Joseph did not know him; he looked too old to be a good imposter. He sucked at a fruit core he had rescued from the gutter and waited for the hubbub to die down. When this did not happen, he tried to work himself closer to the stage, and in the attempt nearly missed his own murder. It happened in less than an instant. President Buique stepped up to the prisoner, leaned his head close as though whispering confidences, and then put his gun to the leather sack and fired. Joseph stared at the ruin of red skull and dripping brains as the dead man fell. It was an awkward moment. They did not even look like his brains.

These thoughts were in his mind as he bicycled up the ramp onto the treacherous Presidential (once Imperial) Freeway, the cries of “Thief!” finally lost in traffic behind him. The way was made dangerous by the ragged and corroding hulks of cars that filled all eight lanes and both shoulders of the avenue. Commuters were still waking; those in cars with working batteries leaned on their horns, but there were few of these. Others buttoned their stained shirts, belted their trousers with neckties, and took up empty lunchboxes before starting the trek downtown. Dust and the glass of broken windshields littered the fuming asphalt; he prayed that the bicycle’s tires were tough, that its chain would not snarl, and that he would not be recognized. Unlikely. Few had seen him in the old days, outside of blurry photographs in the Imperial (now Presidential) Gazette.

Fragmentary scenes appeared beyond the window frames of Volkswagens and Datsuns as he cycled past: a bloat-faced woman holding her child to urinate through the wind-wing, a couple copulating stiffly in a back seat, an eczematous mongrel searching the eternal traffic jam with both paws on the steering wheel. Disgust overcame him; disgust not with these people, but with Mome who had deserted them at the first stirring of crisis. All Joseph’s preparations could not save the government when its leader was a coward.

“Mome,” he said, and hawked the word into the dust.

It had been months since he last came into the city, and now he remembered why. The memories were clustered here like flies on a corpse. He had once healed this fragile land, filled its streets with sweet incense, united the four tribes under one man. How unworthy that man had proved. If Joseph had only known how sensitive the Emperor was to the slightest whiff of evil rumor, he would have synthesized its essence long before and used it to keep Mome on the throne. He should have known, that was what troubled him; he should have known. To Mome, popular opinion meant that he must be popular, and all the tools of propaganda had gone to assure that, in his own eyes at least, he was. He had wrapped himself in the purple prose of the Gazette, as though in insulation; but all the time Joseph had thought him basking sleepily in the praise of editorials, he must have kept one eye ajar and one ear constantly cocked for the sound of gunfire in the streets.

And had Joseph suspected? He should have, yes, but those days had become increasingly dreamlike to him; and what were suspicions in a dream? Easily quelled, until they grew beyond all expectation, became monstrous, and one found oneself wide awake, battling nightmares like that bulldozer. That had been no way to live, sleep-walking. Not when the waking was so rude, so dangerous.

He would never repeat those mistakes. If he somehow managed to escape Bamal and make his way to hospitable climes, he would not allow himself to lapse into idylls of safety, security, trust. In this world there were no such things, not for such as he. He had proved that, hadn’t he? Faith was a cellular process. The human organism longed, at its most basic levels, to lay down the tooth and claw of survival, to grow soft and fat and hairless, to transcend all imperatives, whether of nutrition or defense. Surrender to peace, to entropy. Simply to exist was enough for most people. And because of these deep-rooted tendencies, they were at core quite weak and willing to suspend disbelief. How vulnerable. All anyone needed to succumb to these urges was the merest hint that to do so would bring down fulfillment, that the struggle was over and they could relax, putting trust in one sweet-smelling Emperor.

For Joseph had bottled the essence of trust, among many others. That had been his triumph, and it had earned him a place at the Emperor’s side even as it earned the Emperor his throne. His attars of loyalty, love, and personal charm had sprayed out from the lecterns where Mome stood and spewed his philosophy of world domination, and with every breath the populace fell more in love with him. Imperial soldiers came to homes at night, knocked politely, and asked for the lives of those accused of resistance or traitorous attitudes; and because they wore Joseph Gidukyu’s deodorants, which absolved them of complicity and banished the odor of fear, mothers opened the doors and set them upon their children; women still gleaming with the sweat of love brought them in by the hand and showed them where their husbands slept; young men guided them to grandfathers; cousin betrayed cousin; brother and sister confessed unlikely conspiracy; and the smell of roses was all about them, cloaking every death in an aura of fantastic beauty, fatal as innocence.

An old man opened a door in Joseph’s path, blinding him with the glare of a side-view mirror, almost ending his swift plunge toward the center of the city. He averted disaster by swerving perilously close to a guardrail tangled with barbed wire, and sped on. If only it had been so easy to save his aromatic reign from like catastrophe. He would still be a court physician now, the dream of safety uninterrupted. But who knew? There might have been another Buique, another soldier of Saharan wars whose nasal passages had been fused in chemical infernos, another man immune to the pheromone-distillations who would have stumbled onto Mome’s secret and begun to train an army of men to fight in gas masks, breathing filtered air.

One never knew.

His route took him on an increasingly steep descent into the shadows of the business district, where the only business at this hour was one of grievance. By the thousands, the folk of San Désirée languished in the streets, coughing up blood, gambling with bits of broken glass; a girl scarcely in her teens pushed away a dog that fought her infant twins for suck at her teats, until the young man beside her rose and clobbered the dog with a pipe, calling for a knife that they could drink its blood.

Joseph marveled. These were the Ife, the privileged few. It was worse in the barrens outside the city, where the other tribes dwelt in constant small-scale civil war. The inner city had its share of Fombeh, Kaak, and Nmimi, but they were not much in evidence. Many, after Buique’s so-called election, had fled to their homelands, such as they were. Unlike the reign under Mome, there had been no attempt to unite the tribes. Joseph was sure this neglect, a regression into the chaos of the African past, would be Buique’s undoing. The four must merge; influenced by Gidukyu essences they had begun to merge. In any case, he did not intend to witness the country’s collapse.

It had already begun. To his left, the Russian Embassy rolled past, gutted by arsonists, barricades lying in the streets, beggars sifting ashes in the doorways. The site of an unfinished bank, doomed to be “Under Construction” until every piece of it had been hauled away for scrap and fuel, had once been the location of the San Désirée Medical College and Hospital, where he had studied under his Franco-Portuguese mentor, Dr. Rene Lopez.

A disgrace, what this city had become. The vast Green Cross supermarket, the International Mall, the Bibliotheque Désirée were all empty, miles of shelves converted to luxury highways for rats, thoroughfares for termites and paper-engorged silverfish. These insects were the only citizens of Bamal that could be called sleek and healthy.

The parking lot of the immense and ruinous Dik-Dik Plaza appeared between the towering San Désirée Utility Building and Mome’s half-erected Needle, a chrome-plated phallus that eventually would have had at its tip a revolving restaurant that overlooked all of Bamal. Now Bamal was to be overlooked by its President, who had discontinued such public works. Buique’s fervent broadcasts upholding human rights in Africa were aimed at the ears of potential investors, while to the cries of his own folk he was deaf or uninterested. But had Mome been any better? A sticky issue. Joseph concentrated on finding a shortcut through the parking lot, which was crowded with citizens asleep in the lanes, their heads gently cradled on the concrete curb-pieces. These unlikely pillows were much in demand. Men with long knives moved between sleepers, demanding payment for use of the lot at steep hourly rates. He wondered how anyone could pay, or if the whole thing were a farce concocted to alleviate the boredom of slow extinction; but no sooner had he crossed into the thick of the sleepers—steering carefully lest he nip an outflung hand beneath the bicycle’s tires—than one of the toll-takers, spotting him, gave out a cry and began to give chase with his knife out. He would slash the tires to strings and then start on Joseph. “Private property!” the man was screaming. A mongrel yelped, its tail crushed by a tire, but Joseph only pedaled faster till he reached the far sidewalk and found himself at his destination.

Here the street was almost empty, sidewalks swept, potholes filled. Freshly minted street signs proclaimed the avenue to be “Dodo Boulevard.” Bitterly he stamped on the brake and cursed the name of his replacement. Dodo was a common enough name, for an Ife. How easy to hate four letters, given a reason. Mome had never named a street for him.

Dodo Boulevard was perfectly straight, and the date palms down its center gathered dust in the shadows of the office buildings. It led, as he well knew, directly from the estates on the north edge of San Désirée to the cubical building near where Joseph stood clenching the handlebars in disappointment. The Boulevard bypassed the hardened arteries of freeway traffic so that each day a one-man parade might pass undisturbed to and from the heart of the city. At every corner a soldier sat astride a grunting Harley-Davidson, watching the street for activity. If a bird chanced to land on the pavement it was shooed away or run over, depending on the bird; some were too groggy with parasites to avoid the rubber treads. There was constant traffic along the sidewalk, a continual crowd hugging the buildings in single file; all the people pursuing their countless unnecessary errands eyed the bright black asphalt greedily, seeing in it a comfortable bed, a homestead large enough for untold villages. Those who finally abandoned San Désirée and returned to their tribal homes would undoubtedly tell stories of that road that went unused by any but a long black limousine.

That limousine was now parked in the turnaround that faced the marbled grey cube at the end of Dodo Boulevard. A margin of impossibly green grass (impossible because plastic) fringed this ponderous structure; a desert gull pecked in vain at the vinyl turf. The front doors were elegant, carved of black oak, polished and gleaming in the shade of a garish red awning. Above the entrance was a dingy marquee that completed the impression that this was an expensive but disreputable theater.

HER MAJESTY’s

The L’Institute Dodo

Of

PsychoMicroBiologiE ExpErimEntalE

The first line of letters had been painted out years ago, each character individually traced with black pigment, which served to make the words stand out quite clearly. The second line of letters was more recent, and typical of Bamal’s grammar: French, Portuguese, and English colonies had left it a hash at independence. The final line of print was composed entirely of cinema-marquee letters, all in different faces, the E’s enormous. It was an atrocious display, and one he had always intended to clean up when he had been director. Dodo had done no more than substitute his name for Gidukyu, as though he approved of the sloppy titles. At least Joseph had known how bad it looked.

But there was not time enough in the day for dwelling on Dodo’s poor taste. Now reassured that his disgrace was complete, it was time to put his plans into effect.

“Out of the street, old man!” barked a traffic cop, revving his motorcycle’s engine. Joseph dragged the cycle sideways onto the path an instant before the Ife could run him over. He did his best to feign infirmity, but it was all he could do to cough wretchedly and hobble like an old man. He looked the part; starvation had added years to his visage even as the inches slid from his waist. But today, for good reason, he did not feel old. New desires had tapped old reserves, plumbed the genetic energies stored in his cells, pressed each withering microsome once more into service. He felt as though, given a mission, his metabolism had suddenly shifted into more efficient gear.

It was his great delight to see the motorcycle stall, spouting thick black exhaust, not half a block away. By the time he cycled slowly past, the driver had abandoned it in the street and was drawing his pistol in anger, as though to put it out of its misery. Joseph was careful not to smirk as he passed, for he knew that would have made him an irresistible moving target.

The human traffic thickened as he went on, until at last he was forced to dismount and walk the bicycle along the roadside. The congestion was temporary, however, for as he approached the estates the rabble thinned; few had reason to go there, where handouts were discouraged with generous helpings of bullets. He pondered his own wisdom in attempting to enter his old neighborhood at such a time. No one would expect to see him there, save perhaps for Angelica, but if he were to be recognized anywhere in San Désirée it would be there. How did he suppose to pass unnoticed on those beautiful avenues, where the lawns were sprinkled continuously with the contents of several dwindling Bamalan lakes while thirst wracked the populace? In this garb, and mounted as he was, there was little chance of penetrating the estates, let alone of walking up to Angelica’s door and asking if she might be in. He could hardly count the times that his own servants had beaten interloping solicitors and beggars with their own tracts and prayer bowls; now he was eating from such a bowl. Somewhere, some god was dishing out this portion with a chuckle.

But there were two people who knew of his continued existence in San Désirée, and Angelica was only one of them. The other, Miguel, was even nearer, and he would have no trouble entering his cousin’s place of employment. There were any number of ways to get into San Désirée’s jail.

The police station, he soon discovered, had abandoned its old offices to take up residence in the luxury hotel across the street. No one questioned him as he parked the bicycle at the base of a wide stairway stained with blood and urine, leaning it against a tall cement urn full of litter. As he picked his way between the mendicants asprawl on the steps, he turned down offers of narcotics and prostitutes. He glanced back once to see a boy wheeling away on the bike that had already been stolen once that day—or perhaps more than once, who knew?

At the threshold, where no doorman stood to open the shattered glass door, he felt in his robes for the reassurance of his gun, but his hand came away empty. The sensation provoked a mood of dread—not, he hoped, a premonition. He was not expecting trouble, but he knew how aggressive misfortune could be. There was nothing for it. He could not retrace his path looking for the lost weapon. Its absence made his throwing of himself on Miguel’s mercy less of a symbolic gesture; it smacked of foolhardiness. Could he count on his cousin, or anyone?

Inside it was dark and sweltering; air conditioners pumped heat into the grim lobby. The walls were papered with posters of President Buique, his mutilated face presiding over this hall of justice; the smoke of cigarettes and confiscated opiates rose everywhere like incense offered to placate the villain. Officers slumbered like children on eviscerated couches. He regarded one sleeper tenderly for a moment, a bony man with a broken yet determined jaw; in his dreams he must be leading armies to glory, such was the beatific expression on his face. Joseph leaned over and nudged him in the ribs, no harder than was necessary to rouse him.

“I wish to report a stolen bicycle,” he said.

The man waved vaguely, as if shooing a fly. “You’ll have to wait.”

“I shall not wait. I want this thief caught and executed.” And in an undertone, “It is I, Miguel. Don’t keep me standing here.”

The officer’s eyes snapped open. He jumped up quickly and grabbed Joseph by the arm, then they were walking down a wide corridor so full of metal desks and office furniture that it was impossible to pass two abreast. Upon the larger of these desks, policemen lay curled and dreaming. Joseph noted the abundance of typewriters in the corridor; he might need one soon to write a formal address to the scientific saviors of the free world. Miguel drew him into an office, pitch-black once he closed the door; a light came on and the room was revealed to be a large utility closet.

“Why have you come back? You should never—”

“I know it would mean your death if we were caught plotting, Miguel, but I do not think that likely.” He realized that his cousin was furious, and he was anxious to cool him down. “Soon enough, if all goes well, I will have removed myself from your care entirely. I intend to leave Bamal.”

“Good! You should have left months ago. I thought you had.”

“Gone where? And how? I’ve spent the last six months learning how the people live, trying not to slip beneath the dust and die with the rest of them, distinguishing myself in this regard. It has taken me time to reacquaint myself with some of the world’s harsher aspects; as you might imagine, I had forgotten what it could be like to live—”

“Like the rest of us?” Miguel shook his head, holding the door of the closet shut, his hand white-knuckled on the knob. “It was plain to see how much you forgot when the Emperor put you at the foot of his throne.”

“You’re glad to see him gone, I take it.”

“Glad?” Miguel’s laughter was dry and unappealing, not meant to be shared. “If you were not Fombeh, if there were no blood-trust between us, I would have shot you myself. It was foolish to risk my life hiding you, making the arrangements I did.”

Miguel took a breath and Joseph said, “So you think you live the common life now, do you? Do you think that out on the plain, the people sleep on soft couches and wait for the cool of night so they can retire with whores in your empty cells?”

Miguel’s jaw creaked as it moved from side to side.

“Buique has done nothing for these people,” he went on. “They flocked to San Désirée to find their fortune by casting a vote, but what have they found? A wealth of fleas, twisted guts, the blood-rot that has begun to eat up the tribes from within. They have come here to die, that is all. And I am different. Why should you oppose me when I say that at last I have decided to live—to more than live?”

“I know how you live.”

“Of course you do, Miguel.” He touched the rags that clothed him. “Forgive me for lording it over you here in my moment of luxury. I was always kind to you when I had power and position.”

“And I returned the favor. I saved your life, which was worth—”

“Exactly nothing as I live it now. I will not ask any great favors; I do not wish to be in your debt. All I require is a change of clothes, access to your typewriter, perhaps a desk to sleep upon tonight.”

“Fresh clothes? And where would I find those?”

Joseph spoke cautiously, foreseeing Miguel’s reaction: “A uniform. Common enough. Like the one you wear.”

Miguel was on the edge of exploding; he would be pushed no further. “A uniform!”

“For the moment I must be able to pass freely in places where these garments would only have me arrested. Get me a uniform and I promise you’ll see no more of me. Even if I sleep in the station I’ll do so in secret.”

“Ridiculous. You, passing as an officer?”

“And Buique passing as President, yes, it is ridiculous the way things turn around, is it not? Yesterday I stood at the top, holding the Emperor on my shoulders. Look at me now, Miguel; oh, not with such a sour face. I reflect sadly on the pride of our tribe but, alas, embody the state of the world.”

“You’re mad if you think—”

“Thinking is not what maddens me. It is only when the thoughts stop in the face of circumstance, and I hear the cries of the people out there in the desert, their voices building in a single cry, an insane wind; it is only then that the madness truly leaks in.”

Miguel shook his head, put a finger over Joseph’s heart. “I should have shot you myself.”

“Please, cousin, no regrets. Grant my final request and you may consider all obligations, even those of blood, forever cancelled. When I put on this uniform, I shall put off the Fombeh tatters.”

“Good. You are not of my tribe.”

“Nor any.”

The door slammed behind Miguel and Joseph heard his footsteps dying in the hall. He stared up at the bare light bulb until it seared his eyes. He had expected a strained reception from his cousin, but nothing so bleak as this; the world had truly turned in the last six months—from one season to its opposite.

-3-

It was not uncommon to see San Désirée’s police officers traveling moderate distances on foot; their vehicles were notoriously unreliable, a fault of the climate and not of the mechanics. (There were no mechanics.) It was a good hour’s walk from the police station to the edge of the estates, and by the time Joseph arrived the dust of the road and his fetid perspiration had reduced him to a condition like that of the wretches who were turned away from the gates of the wealthy without exception. He was not the only officer in such a state, however; the sentries at the gates looked no better. There were Fombeh among them, soldiers like his cousin, who had been quick to take Buique’s side and assist the coup in every particular. Turncoats, he thought, but he returned their salutes and dry smiles.

The estates formed a world apart from, and yet contained within, the expanse of Bamal. In the months of his absence they had changed not at all; too many of the residents possessed the resources to shield themselves from change. Joseph strolled along a perfect reproduction of a Parisian avenue, replete with cafes where the fashionable wives and artistes loitered. The morning edition of the Times lay in the window of the first shoppe he passed, an expensive satellite-sent facsimile which had sold out to the penultimate copy. Mulattos—the fifth tribe of Bamal—were everywhere, running errands, polishing cars that would never leave the precinct, sweeping the pavement, nodding to him as he passed. Here he was careful to keep his hat brim pulled low over his face, for many of these were people he knew. He did not fear that any would cry out for his arrest, but whispers carried farther than one might think, and within the day Buique himself might have heard rumors. That would never do. He needed time, probably a great deal, to arrange his departure, and he had not yet settled on an approach.

Would it be best to send a brief letter announcing his impending arrival, detailing his hoped-for escape from persecution in his homeland? Surely that would touch the hearts not only of the scientific community abroad, but also of the common people, lovers of human interest. On the other hand, his reputation might have gone ahead of him. Who would dare import a doctor known chiefly for having brought a tyrant (well, Emperor) to power? The red carpets that news would unroll at his feet were not necessarily ones he wished to tread. No, he needed a subtler plan.

Angelica’s house lay around the corner, but he was slowed by a sudden desire to see his former residence. She had waited six months to see him, after all. He knew it might be unwise to haunt his old home, but the impulse was as irresistible as it was irresponsible. Perhaps if he threw an egg at the place he would remove any suspicion from his presence.

Well, he would have a quick look. He doubted they would have made a monument of it, but it was such an elegant building that he couldn’t imagine them razing it on account of its most recent inhabitant. It must have housed worse men since the year of its completion. Buique had probably handed it to one of his lackeys as a gift.

Joseph had to change his course only slightly to reach the old house; in bygone days he had slipped between his house and Angelica’s in secret, taking the servants’ walk that joined the rears of each place. Thus their relationship had remained a private matter; not even Mome, who mooned for her constantly, had known. She had always insisted on that, and it was fortunate for her that she had; else where would she be now, with the world turned on its head? She had kept herself poised in the worst of the upheaval. And he had always considered it a statement of her high regard that she had not attended his execution.

Now he slowed as his colonial manor came into view. It had been painted recently, he was pleased to see, and the lawn kept in excellent condition. He knew instantly that he dared not draw close, for hunched among the hedges at the side of the house was Kulchong, the gardener who had raked the lawn clippings and fed the flowers for all the various occupants of the last forty years. A pleasant old man, Kulchong, and good company, appreciative of fine liqueurs and candid with his opinions of Joseph’s latest scents; but this was not the time to strike up old acquaintances. Careful, now. Curtains drawn, Kulchong preoccupied, no one else on the street. He glanced at the post-box with its gilded letters, expecting to see the name of some innocuous public servant, and instead he almost betrayed his anonymity.

He turned swiftly on his heel, a brisk military movement in keeping with his outfit. It was necessary to keep his composure. Self control was essential now. The days ahead would surely be full of many such rude little shocks. Little? He was stupefied actually. That was not the house of a public servant: the name of his nemesis was emblazoned the mail-box!

Doctor Dodo had gone too far.

Shame burned him, hotter than the sun over Bamal. Why must fate be so intent on rubbing his nose in misfortune? Let Dodo dwell in his former home, let him commit obscenities on the same mattress where Joseph had slept; why did Joseph have to learn of these things? Couldn’t they simply go on without his knowledge? It was as though his own apprehensions created a vacuum that nature rushed to fill with dreadful oddities. If this were so, he must resolve to be fearless, to give nature no advantage, to follow his course without deviation.

The weight of the morning’s events sat on his shoulders as he ambled toward the last person in San Désirée capable of disappointing him. It seemed inevitable that she would be waiting to spring some trap, however innocent. Very well. He wouldn’t be discouraged; to bow before circumstance would get him nowhere, least of all to freedom.

He straightened his back, tried to look at ease although the sky was like a vast lens focusing the sun’s rays on his head; he led himself by the nose to the house of his last hope.

There was no one in sight, not on the wide lawn nor in any of the French windows. He hoped she was awake. The gate crashed behind him when he went through, and the Dobermans she kept began to howl; they were not let loose until nightfall, but the sound of their baying struck a chill through him. The beasts had never learned to recognize or trust him, though with her they were like puppies. He chuckled. Angelica treated them all like puppies. The more vicious and violent a man threatened to become with her, the more she babied him, the less serious became her attention. That was why Mome had never gotten close to her; his cruelty repelled her, but she’d always convinced him that the distance between them was something he’d created. She made it seem like chivalry, a game.

He reached the door without mishap or mauling, only to find it already open and Angelica’s valet waiting. Leon could be a startling chap, appearing the moment before you called him, vanishing with your request half-uttered only to return with more than you had asked for—exactly as much as you needed. Leon must have recognized him immediately, but he was implacable. Bowing slightly, he asked Joseph in, then started away into the depths of the house.

“A moment, please,” Joseph called. “Who will you say is calling?”

Leon smiled very faintly. “An officer, sir, of the police. Of course, if you wish to give a name….”

“That won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

“I’m sure Madame will be with you shortly.”

“I’m glad to hear you say it. I’ll wait in the study, shall I?”

“As you wish.” Leon did not offer to show him the way.

Joseph went into the richly furnished library whose tall windows overlooked the lawn and the blazing street. The noonday sun ruled the rest of the city, but here Angelica was queen and she kept a cool house. Nothing had changed here since his last visit. Her gilded lorgnette rested on the corner of her writing desk, beside an unfinished letter written in lavender ink. He knew nothing of antiques, but every piece of furniture was a collector’s piece according to Angelica. She had once offered to redecorate his house, imparting her knowledge of fine objects to the task, as well as her European connections. Hers was an old family with its roots extending far beyond Bamal.

As he stood staring up at the shelves of dark wood, gilded leather volumes standing arow, a voice like polished Florentine marble spoke out of the air behind him.

“Promoted to Sergeant? You’ve come up in the world since I last saw you.”

He turned slowly. “It would have been impossible to sink any lower without going under. Angelica.”

If he had expected her to rush into his arms, to smother him with kisses and the scent of her perfume, he would have been disappointed. But it had never been that way with them, and he was ready for the worst. She stood in the doorway, a jade fan slightly spread in one hand, the other outstretched. Her eyes told him nothing, not even when he straightened from kissing her soft brown fingers and risked clasping her hand firmly for a moment. He was the first to draw away.

“I apologize for my appearance,” he began.

“Not at all, you look rather dashing. It’s a change from your white frock, I’ll admit, but I’ve always loved the soldiers, you know.”

“I remember. Angelica—”

She waved away her name. “Don’t be rushed, Joseph. You’re not being followed, I trust?”

“I wouldn’t have come here if I were.”

“Then you’ll join me for lunch?”

Somehow he had not thought of food until that moment; he had gotten out of the habit. A memory of Angelica’s table, like a sumptuous dream, momentarily weakened him. He managed a smile but his reply was a rude gasp: “Lunch!”

“Come then.” She slipped her arm through his and led him down the hall toward the sound of silverware. He watched her in profile, her coffee and cream complexion blurred and illumined by the sunlight falling through the windows they passed, filtered by white curtains; deep Tibetan carpets muffled their footsteps. Her green-eyed Persian cats watched them pass, inscrutable; he had never trusted the animals, with their serpent eyes, but Angelica had them everywhere, all alike.

“You look well,” he said. “More beautiful than ever.”

“And to a man dying of thirst, hydrochloric acid must look inviting.”

Her tone, and the image, sobered him. He realized that he had been softening toward her, bending in a ridiculous direction, slipping into the role he had played in overturned times; the man she loved had died six months ago at the President’s hand. Stupid, stupid of him! Thank God Angelica did not lend herself readily for his support; he must stand on his own feet,now more than ever. He wanted to thank her, but there were no words to express his

feelings. He seated her at the long white table; her eyes when she thanked him for the courtesy were sharp and unsentimental. She understood his situation better than he himself. In that moment he no longer feared her; she was the last true friend he had on the planet.

He took the chair opposite her, and for several long minutes—while cold soup was served, wine poured—he was unable to meet her eyes. Any contact now would have been highly charged. What was said at this table would determine many things, among them his fate. He had never realized before what a focus of power she had become in San Désirée. He saw how inevitable it had been that he would come to her; it had taken six months, but in all that time he had felt the tugging.

“You expected me,” he said finally, and took a first sip of wine which dried his mouth and set his brain spinning above the conversation. He groped for a soup spoon, hardly remembering that he had just spoken.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I hoped I would see you again. It’s good to know that you’ve managed to live out there. You have been on the outskirts, haven’t you?”

He nodded, his throat so soothed by the cream soup that he was reluctant to speak.

“I’ve thought of you often, wondered how you managed to survive. I see you’ve managed, barely.”

He felt ashamed, sitting there in the oversized uniform, stinking up her dining room, but there was no hiding the strain of the recent past. He felt his stomach turn over and come to life like an ancient engine. Nausea welled up, along with the taste of soup, and he realized too late the effect of the wine and rich food on his metabolism. She must have known what was happening.

“Excuse me,” he blurted, staggering to his feet.

“Nonsense, stay where you are. Leon!”

He waved at the air by his face. “The wine, I’m not used to this life…”

But there was no need for further explanation, and in fact he would have been unable to elaborate. He collapsed across the table, suddenly shivering and dizzy, and the last thing he felt was a cold smacking kiss that nearly covered his face. He had fainted into his soup.

-4-

“I’m sorry I must turn you out so soon,” she said to him an hour later, when he was quite revived and the soup had been scrubbed from his uniform. “You might have been seen coming in, and if you do not leave presently I’m sure there will be some pointed questions asked. But don’t fear, Joseph, this time I’m not throwing you to the dogs.”

He swallowed the last of a cup of weak tea, ate one more soda cracker, and stood up, brushing the crumbs from his lap.

“I have much to tell you, Angelica.”

“Listen to me, Joseph, and don’t get yourself in a fit. All you need do is walk several blocks to the Regency Hotel, wait in the alley behind it, and I will send a car to pick you up immediately. You’ll be brought back here invisibly this time. Now all you have to tell me must wait. I can probably guess most of it.”

“I would not be surprised.”

“By the time you return, I’ll be properly prepared. I have some of your belongings, you know.”

“You have—”

“Calm, calm, and do as I say.” She brushed him away. “Leon will show you the door.”

“I can’t believe… you have… Angelica, you really…?”

“Go, you baby, or I’ll have you thrown.”

Disbelief silenced him. He turned numbly away from her, remembered his manners, returned to give a formal farewell, and found that she had already gone away. Leon waited at his elbow, and Leon closed the door on him once he was outside. Joseph walked slowly, seeing nothing of his surroundings, surfacing from his thoughts occasionally to check his whereabouts. There had been some changes in the neighborhood, but not many; the houses were an amalgamation of colonial originals and modern townhouses. The greatest change in the estate community must have been its residents. There would be more developers waiting out the heat behind the drawn shades, and fewer of the old-money aristocrats and colonial hangers-on who had for reasons unknown chosen San Désirée as their home. It had always been possible to live like royalty here if your currency was printed elsewhere. But San Désirée meant nothing to him now, and he resented the intrusive musings that the city provoked. He wanted to know what Angelica had meant with her talk of his belongings. What could she have of his? What would have been worth saving, except for the attars?

How could she have acquired them? He tried to imagine her in the first hours of the coup, hurrying along their secret path to his house, risking everything she had to rescue the things that were most precious to him. What an amazing woman!

He stayed where she had sent him, skulking in an alley, until her silver limousine glided past and he could duck in.

The chauffeur made no comment on seeing him, and Joseph was thankful for the discretion. In minutes they had slipped into the garage adjoining Angelica’s house, and he was taken through the kitchen, then upstairs into the dark reaches of the manor, finally to a small bedroom where fresh clothes smelling of sachets were laid out on a luxurious bed. It was the bed that held his attention, more than the clothes. Six months since he had last felt a mattress beneath him. This thought was accompanied, inevitably, by the thought of Angelica. Another thing he had been without for half a year. Another thing? It was not things he missed, not possessions, but companionship.

There was a door on the far side of the room, slightly ajar, and beyond it the sound of rushing water. He went to the threshold and saw a bathtub, almost full. The water was cool to the touch; without delay he stripped and immersed himself.

Adrift, dreaming, he began to forget his perfumes, his plight, while the waters did their work. He felt himself dissolving.

A knock woke him. It was Leon with a bathrobe.

“Sir, Madame is ready for you. She asks me to inform you that there is some urgency.”

He dressed quickly. Leon was waiting for him in the hall, and he led Joseph to Angelica’s private salon.

“I hope you are ready for me, Joseph,” said Angelica. She sat in a high-backed chair; the window behind her faced the rear of his former home. He could almost see into his old room.

Sitting opposite her, he said, “I have no intention of wasting time, Angelica. I only came to tell you that I plan to leave Bamal as soon as possible, with or without your help. I think it would be difficult without it, but—”

She laughed merrily. “With my help it will be difficult; without it, impossible.” She covered her mouth lightly with several fingers, seeming apologetic. “I shouldn’t say that. You’ve surprised us many times, Joseph. Still, if you would accept my assistance—if, as you say, you came seeking it—I am prepared to offer what I can. This may not be much, but surely it is more than you have at the moment. You know I have friends outside Bamal.”

“It is the enemies within Bamal who worry me. How can I get on a plane without a passport?”

“Passports can be acquired. Plane tickets, and custom agents, can be bought. Of course, flights are unreliable; we can’t have you waiting in line two weeks, under the noses of the military. On the other hand, the only private jet in Bamal belongs to the President, and I can’t see you riding with him.”

“Buique,” he said. “I’d as soon ride with Dodo.”

Her eyes looked half-open, sleepy, as she said, “We’ll get you out of here somehow, never fear. But I’m concerned with where you will go after that. You say you have friends. Who can these be?”

From an inner pocket of the clothes she’d found him, he removed the soiled sheet of text that he had rescued from the bulldozer in the night. “Colleagues,” he said, extending it for her perusal. “The greater scientific community. Scientists are always defecting from one place or another where they can continue their research with liberty.”

She looked up from the sheet. “These are Americans.”

“Well?” He didn’t see the point; her expression was problematic. “Then I’ll go to America.”

She shook her head. “You’re out of touch, Joseph. America takes in no one these days; the new President Burdock’s policy is strict. Buique has been flattering the United States with every conceivable manner of fawning since his election, but without avail. You know he counted on American support because he instituted what at first glance is a democracy in Bamal, but none has been forthcoming.”

“Then where did Mome go? I thought they would have begged to add the old tyrant to their collection.”

“I doubt your reason, Joseph. There was never much to Mome except what you distilled. He couldn’t have fled Bamal with more than a few vials of charisma, and that would hardly have impressed them over any distance. There’s been no method of transmitting odors until quite recently.”

“What do you mean, until recently?”

She would not meet his eyes now. “You must promise not to get upset, Joseph.”

“Upset? With you?”

“Oh no, that’s secondary; I’m not afraid of you. But don’t you dare damage what I’m about to show you.”

He remembered his attars, was about to ask after them, but she got up and went to a cabinet, unlocked it with a tiny key, then opened the doors to reveal a radio. A radio? Were they to listen to music?

“I thought you said this was urgent,” he said.

“Patience.”

She brought the radio over and set it on a tall round table at the side of her chair. He noticed that it was not like other radios; attached to it was a small glass container with a rubber stopper in one end. Pale yellow liquid sloshed in the little bottle.

“I’ll find the afternoon broadcast,” she said, twiddling the dial through a symphony of static until, out of the fuzz, a stuffy voice emerged. The station was loud and blaring, because so near. Bamal Free Radio filled the room with the President’s easily imitable voice; Joseph had heard children in the streets pinching their noses and mocking his accent.

“By beaudiful, beaudiful beoble. Thag you so buch for tudig id agaid to Babal Free Radio. I would like to thag each ad every ode of you for electig be your Bresidet. This job bead so buch to be—”

Joseph’s head jerked up from the monologue. He sniffed the air. What was that smell? His heart began to pound to a military beat, his blood sang an anthem in his ears. The Emperor was near.

Mome had come, he had come again to lead Bamal to freedom, to world dominance. Joseph cried out his loyalty, thrusting back the chair as he rose to his feet, immersed in the scent of roses.

“Emperor, where are you?” he cried. “I can’t see you, but I smell you. I know you are here. Here…”

And the moment passed, leaving him standing awkwardly at attention, saluting no one but Angelica. She smiled, shook her head, and he could read her disappointment easily.

“You really did believe in him, didn’t you, Joseph? How could you believe in anything, especially a scent that you devised?”

“But that wasn’t him!” he shouted, still caught in the splendor of the vision, the aroma of roses not yet completely gone. “That was Buique’s voice. What was I doing? I’ve gone mad, utterly mad.”

“Buique’s voice, yes, but Mome’s smell as you well know. It’s here.” She turned the radio until the vial of yellow liquid was exposed. “It’s driven into the air while he speaks, broadcast along with the sound.”

He advanced on the radio cautiously, as though approaching a venomous insect.

“Remember, you must not harm this radio. I promised to keep it safe and you know I keep my word.”

“Who?” he whispered, frightened. “Who made you promise this?”

“Joseph, who else could have built such a thing? Kmei Dodo.”

Kmei Dodo.

Dodo.

The name hung in his mind, conjoined with the picture of the evil radio and the last fading smell of empire.

“Oh, Angelica,” he said when he could. “How could you? He lends you his toys? And do you two play?” He had not known how quickly the bitterness could come to his voice, had never dreamed he could speak this way to her. “The secret path… do you use it to meet with him now? Do you signal with window shades, as we used to do?”

“Joseph.”

“I only wish you’d told me when you saw me in your study, Angelica. I only wish you had thrown me in the street. I don’t relish knowing these things. I hate being shown what he’s done to my life.”

“Your life?” she said, matching his anger. “This is my life, Joseph. Your life is no longer in Bamal. You will go where you have to, you will start again; perhaps—who knows—you’ll even join your old partner in madness. But I have never had a thing outside San Désirée. This is where I live, have always lived, and will remain until I die. I must be careful here, more careful than you dream, although I’ve tried to make you feel safe and at ease today. You are not very safe now, Joseph, oh no. I hope you have caught your breath because now you will need it. The peace you may have felt has been illusory. Your life could end at any moment, and bring mine down with it.”

She had risen from her chair; he could not speak, nor move.

“Do you think I wasn’t happy to see you? You’re wrong. I remember what you meant to me, perhaps better than you do. There were no obligations, if you will recall. There were no favors done, no bargains made, no debts. If you have come here to collect on some imagined debt then you had better go back to the barrens now, or try to board a plane at the airport. It makes no difference to me where you’re shot down. Do you think my servants don’t talk?”

He had turned away from the barrage of words. Again he felt weak, humiliated. All she said was true. She had once again shattered any dream of security he might be nurturing, to impress upon him as rudely and cruelly as was necessary the fact that as long as he remained in Bamal he could never be safe.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right, of course.”

“I know I’m right.”

“I don’t know what to say, Angelica.”

“Then say nothing. Or better, speak of something else. Tell me your plans.”

“They seem ridiculous, they would take too long. Last night I still believed I could stay here for the rest of my life, however long that might be. I suppose I could have, if I had buried my dreams, my identity, and become unknown even to myself; but my past was bulldozed, and suddenly I found myself wishing for freedom, a new beginning. By coming here I have accelerated the process. You are a catalyst, Angelica. I come and I go, but you remain unchanged.”

“Is that so?”

“I don’t know, I don’t…. You must have an idea how I can escape, a practical plan. I’ve been thinking like a madman. I imagined writing to my fellow scientists, asking for asylum. That’s a stupid plan, stupid.”

“Now, Joseph. Give me time to consider this.”

His eyes flickered to the radio; he was still unwilling to face her, even though her temper had changed. “A neat piece of work, but completely technical. He hasn’t unravelled the secrets of my attars, has he?”

“I don’t think he’s close to that. He uses only a few of the essences you left behind, and he’s running out of those. But he does have a large staff devoted to the analysis, and they are attempting to synthesize your products. Naturally he can’t use Mome’s stink of roses when Buique is speaking; that would be asking for rebellion. I merely showed you this experimental radio. He gave it to me that I might listen to music while flower scents percolate through the room. He’s developing a scent harmonizer, something like a pipe organ, capable of orchestrating complicated combinations of smells to match the moods of music—or that’s what he says. I know better. It will be the same thing all over again with Buique, except that he will be immune to his own perfume, unlike Mome. It may take Kmei time to isolate Buique in a bottle, but I don’t think it will take forever. You didn’t have sufficient warning to cover your tracks.”

“I don’t understand. Did he give you this attar of Mome?”

She laughed. “Oh no. He gave me fragrances, French perfumes. L’Eau de Mome is from my own collection—yours, really.”

“You have it then.” He clasped his hands as though trapping a prayer. “Angelica, forgive me for doubting you. You know I can be jealous—”

“And how you hate yourself afterward, Joseph. Don’t waste your strength. I have a box full of your attars, which I will bring out shortly. Then we will see about getting you out of Bamal. It may take a few days, and you must lie very low in this time.”

“I have a great deal of practice sleeping on the ground.”

“Not quite that low, my dear.” She rose, laughing, and kissed him on the cheek. “Now that you know about Kmei I can be straightforward with you. He comes over each evening, and he is far less discreet in his attentions than you ever were, as he does not consider himself in competition with Buique as you were with Mome. I want you out of the way when he is here.” She wagged her finger, as if a reprimand were necessary. “Leon will keep an eye on you, and if you wish to sleep until I am free again, he will bring you to me later.”

Joseph bowed his head, not only to Angelica but to the weight of circumstance, irresistible circumstance.

Thinking of Dodo would get him nowhere. Rest, on the other hand, would give him a fresh perspective. He rose, promising, “I’ll be quiet.”

“Wait a moment. You’re forgetting.”

He checked his chair but it was empty, and there was nothing he could have dropped. Angelica went to the cabinet. This time she extracted a small wooden chest whose contents rattled as she brought it to him. Her smile was gentle, expectant.

“I’m pleased to be able to give this to you,” she said.

He took the box with something like reverence and kissed her, not deeply as he would have liked, but with love and respect and a little regret. He thought he caught sight of old passions in her eyes, but she did not let them get away from her. She blinked and they were gone.

“Sleep if you can,” she said with a smile. “There’s a narcotic attar in there which I used myself once, after the coup, when I could not let go of my fears but needed desperately to sleep.”

“I could be up all night with this,” he said.

“You know your mind best. I’ll see you soon, my friend.”

“Friend,” he echoed.

She looked toward the door. “Ah, Leon, please—”

“This way, Dr. Joseph. I’ve laid out your supper.”

-5-

He fought a great temptation to stand behind the curtains of his room and watch the service lanes between the houses. Chains jangled, the Dobermans howled, and he stepped away from the glass determined to keep away. There were many good reasons why he should avoid glancing out. What if Dodo, home early from the clinic, chanced to look out and see him in an opposite window?

No better were the certain results of seeing the other man dashing between buildings, an experience which would create tormenting memories and foment obsession enough to last him till the end of his life: perhaps bring it on even sooner. No, this sneaking about was too much, he would stay away from the glass—but for whose sake? Until recently he had wished for a confrontation with Dodo, wondered when it would come and what its nature would be. Now nothing seemed worth the trouble. He hoped he never met the man, never saw so much as a photograph. Dodo had come out of nowhere—a military technician and weapons expert in the same wars which had claimed Buique’s proboscis—and he deserved nothing better than to return whence he had come.

What point was there in watching the rear when Angelica had said that Dodo used little discretion? In their own affair, she had insisted on—no, that was self-deception. He had feared Mome’s jealousy, Angelica being one prize the Emperor had been unable to catch.

How stupid I am, he thought. His mind was still trying to turn himself against her, all for the sake of jealousy. He must leave off picking at the past as though it were possible to repair it. Left to itself, his mind would drag in all of human history to justify a current event; he must keep himself anchored in the present.

Fortunately, he had his collection. The box waited, unopened, saved for this moment. Dodo was probably coming up the front walk now, ringing the bell, shouldering Leon aside as he stalked up to Angelica and—now, now. Fingering the tiny clasp, he listened for footsteps in the halls below. The only sound was that of a clock tolling the quarter hour. Then the silver catch clicked beneath his thumb, the hinges wailed faintly, and the smell of musty cedar filled his senses.

His whole being concentrated in the shadowy depths of the box, curling around myriad bottles whose contents he could not quite smell although he was acutely sensitive to their compositions. Every liquor, he had found, possessed a characteristic energy that no known instrument was capable of measuring; he had always been able to feel it. It might have been the subtle differences in specific gravity that he detected, in absolute density or perhaps in the way that each filtered light; surely he was more sensitive than an array of monitoring devices. Each essence had a radiance, incomparable, that penetrated glass. A vial of honeysuckle, when he held it, always provoked a deep humming in his belly; clove oil resonated with a spot at the nape of his neck; still others evoked the sympathies of his back, scrotum, spine. This was a mystery he had never resolved with the attitudes and methods of his science alone, but it had always been there to guide him in the most subtle practical moments of his work. To him, now, it had become a new science. He did not believe that Dodo could reproduce his essences, not without his special sensibility. Perhaps that was not a proper scientific attitude—such creations were meant to be reproducible by anyone—but at this point, this late in the day, who cared?

Now, so close to the chest full of distillations and synthetics, his body felt like a lightstorm: explosions of infinitesimal magnitude trailed through the paths of his nerves, met in the solar plexus, streaked outward again to warm his limbs and dazzle his brains. Even without smelling the liquids, he felt his rhinencephalon come alive, his olfactory bulbs swell almost to bursting. If only he could encounter these pure essences in a state of internal purity; but his nose was clogged with traces of scent gathered during the day. Dung and dust, blood and oil, musk and asphalt, rotting fruit; the cloacal stink of the street was compounded in a sensory mortar with the maze of Angelica’s perfume (a scent so complex it seemed labyrinthine), the bouquet of white wine, the fragrances of soup and his recent dinner. He could not shed these worldly smells, but suddenly he had no use for them, and less love. In the vials, after all, were distillates, purer than anything found in nature, the ripe fruit of his labor. It was at this level that his deepest mind was aroused, the bare neurons that collected dissolved scents connecting him with a realm where memory and immediacy were fused. No one could resist these essences, least of all him, for at the olfactory level every human being (save the impaired) was alike. A scent could reach past any psychological defense, weaken any warrior by inducing a primal longing for better days; one bottle, labeled “Nostalgia,” existed for that purpose. Humanity responded to more signals than it knew; if people were reassured on a basic biological level, their conscious mind would soon follow. Mix a little essential “Truth” with the slaver of a liar, and no one would disbelieve him. Joseph knew that it was possible both to smell a lie and to mask its scent.

Which to try first, which one? He dared not uncap “Love” in this house. “Courage” might be useful, but it was inappropriate for this moment. He wanted sensual fulfillment, consummation of his osmolagnia; he wanted to wash the hardships of the last six months from his psyche and render himself once more fresh as a newborn child, ready for anything.

His mouth began to water when he spied the proper bottle.

“Innocence,” it was called.

With trembling hands he reached into the box. Frightened?

Yes. This distillate could be particularly potent. Perhaps he should start with “Laughter” or “Ease.”

I’ve starved long enough, he thought. He had to get the stench of the world’s shit out of his nose, even if it took drastic measures.

He raised the bottle to his nose before uncapping it. The lid scraped as he worked at it and flecks of dried solution drifted over his nails. His heart caught, capturing his breath, but the first vapors penetrated his nostrils like camphor and an inhalation would have been redundant. He screwed the cap shut again with the last of his old sensibility and dropped the bottle into the chest. His hands fell to his sides as his back seemed to melt into the chair; then the room, including the shadows, filled with light.

Sitting backwards in a speeding car, the desert behind him, stars out at midday brighter than the sun. San Désirée on the horizon, dwindling rapidly, then lost in the plumes of violet dust streaming from the wheels of the car. Professor Lopez, his mentor, in the seat beside him, patting him on the wrist one moment, then fading away like a patch of cloud. The car dissolving, joining the trail of dust that streams from beneath his dragging heels. He is a stream of ashes, a river of smoke that runs into the sky and beautifies the sunset like a cosmetic powder. Shapes in the night of dust and ash: his grandfather’s toothless mouth, the hut where his mother dies delivering a stillborn girl, his Fombeh playmates and tormentors (other children), swallowed in the grit that has been whipped into a fury that may never settle. Now it settles, bringing down emotions, disappointments, hopes. He is a thin trail, a horizon where he is setting, an almost featureless line in an oscilloscope. No motion. No thought.

Until the first breath.

Scented light filled his lungs and for a moment his alveoli burned like a million gems set afire by the intake of oxygen. His head filled with thoughts bright and empty as air, mindless and resonant. He tried his hands, found them firm and whole; his muscles cried out to be used. He could taste his own saliva; feel the cilia sculling in his throat. And at last, when he was about to explode with the sensations that kept accreting in the darkness, he opened his eyes without knowing who he would be or where he would find himself this time.

The black room was quiet for an instant. Then, as the clock down the hall began to toll, Angelica came rushing in through a door suddenly flung wide to crash against the wall. She hung upon his newborn eyes. He knew her name, though she was strange and unfamiliar now. He wished to linger on her silhouette and slowly absorb the details of the room, the subtleties of her coiffeur, but there was something wrong already.

“Hurry, Joseph,” she said, pulling him forward by the hand. “You must go. Now, do you hear me? Now. Wake up, please…”

“I… I…”

“Come back to earth, you damn fool. Buique knows you’re in San Désirée, is that plain enough? Dodo called late and gave me the news. My Dodo. He said I should look out for you, you might come here and do me injury. Your cousin Miguel tipped them off; you trusted him too far. My God, aren’t you listening?”

“I am coming back,” he said. “Slowly. No need to—”

“Rush? You should have been out of here hours ago. How foolish of me. We could have been preparing. I am such a fool.”

“Don’t say that, my Angelica.”

He held her to him as though he were a blind man, she a creature made of light; but it would have been a lethal tableau.

She pulled away, almost rough with him.

“You make me forget myself. Let’s not both be idiots. I must get into Kmei’s house before he comes home. Tell me, old friend, how would you like a new name? In a moment’s time you’ll have one. A passport, that is.”

“You have one forged already?”

“All ready, but not forged. You’ll have to learn the signature, then you’ll be the counterfeiter. Your name, my love, is no longer Joseph Gidukyu. You are Kmei Dodo now.”

“Kmei Dodo,” he repeated, nodding at the name as though it were unfamiliar. He began to hear a distant ringing of bells and regretted that there was no time to enjoy them: they were memories. As the last tingling of “Innocence” ebbed from his nostrils, the name was his.

“I’ll get you money, clothes, whatever I can get immediately. But first, your passport is in another house.”

“My house,” he said, remembering the arrangement of furniture in his bedroom. “There.” He pointed at a dressing table invisible to her. “In my table there is a drawer within a drawer, on the right, where I keep essential papers.”

She nodded. “That’s good, Kmei lives in your house exactly as it was. If that’s where you kept your passport, that’s where his will be.”

“I’ll wait for you, though I wish I could come along.”

“And I wish I could come with you. Away from here. But Bamal is my life. Goodbye.”

When she was gone he walked to the window without fear of being seen now that it was night and the room was even darker. A dog barked, then all was silent below. He heard the gate clang, and after that nothing for five minutes. He paced the floor, grasping for the odd straws of memory that must be woven back into his comprehension. He was Dodo, yet he was not Dodo: Dodo was an enemy. Dodo had taken his house, his clinic—yes, he remembered that now. It was only fair that he should take Dodo’s name; with reversal, things returned.

Then the gate clanked and he heard light scuffing steps on the path below. Several minutes later she stood at the door, Leon beside her bearing a small suitcase. She stepped in and slid the passport into his hand at the instant Leon switched on a light; in the dark, the manservant had already closed the curtains.

“You look somewhat alike,” she said, “you and Dodo, but I think you will need your oils to make your lies convincing. Can you daub this photograph with some perfume that will persuade the customs officials that you are who you say you are?”

“Of course.” He turned to the box of essences. “There is nothing more persuasive than an ol-fact.”

The bottle of “Innocence” was still out of the box. When he replaced it, he felt a moment’s nausea, as though he had taken another mouthful of some rich food on which he had already gorged himself. He found another bottle labeled, “Believe Me.” Holding it at arm’s length, he touched his finger to the gleaming mouth of the vial, capped it again quickly, and opened the passport to paint its pages.

He found himself staring at a black man with a thin, almost skeletal face; his dark-pupilled eyes were rimmed by luminous white, his curls were close and tight. Joseph crossed the room to a mirror hanging by the door, and gazed at himself with new interest. His face was far thinner than that in the picture; his skin was not as dark as the Ife’s, though the black and white photograph would not betray him in this regard; and his hair was too long and wild, where it was not matted and full of stickers, to resemble that of the man in the photograph. He would need the help his chemicals offered, true enough; it would be hard to convince airport officials that Dr. Dodo had been sleeping in weeds.

“Are you ready?” she said.

He dropped a vial of “Courage” into his pocket. “Yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

“You’re coming with me?” he said with disbelief.

“As far as the airport, yes. If it comes to that, I can say you threatened my life, forced me to come along as your hostage.”

“Those men do not care enough for life to respect a ransom.

“Don’t argue with me, Joseph—Kmei, I mean. I will see you off.”

Leon carried the suitcase, Joseph took his precious box, and Angelica ran ahead opening doors, waiting impatiently at every turn. Once in the limousine, Leon took the wheel and headed out past the Dobermans that stood vigil at the drive. He did not turn on the headlights until they were a block from the house; then he also stood on the gas.

“Let’s pray the road is not blocked in the desert. There was a traffic jam last week, though I hear it was cleared with Russian snowplows. There can’t have been time for another to accumulate.”

He watched the last of the estate houses pass; they were replaced by their ramshackle cardboard contemporaries. It was easy to forget how little of the city the estates occupied when one lived cloistered within them.

The open sky painted the windows black, and the stars were like bits of glare from the headlights. Angelica opened her pearl handbag and extracted a leather billfold which she had difficulty keeping closed; it was bulging, he saw, with bills.

“This is about all the help I can give you—a far cry from letters of introduction to the people who could really do you a service. I know I’ll be under suspicion when you’re gone, so I can’t send them messages to look out for you. I suggest you contact your scientists as you planned. Call yourself Dodo; if he’s ever been known outside Bamal, his name should be relatively unstained. Buique gives him good press.”

He glanced at the bills, uncertain of their value. It was American currency, all 100’s. In Bamal it took three 500 notes to buy a loaf of moldy bread.

The limousine blared its horn, a cyclist escaped narrowly by toppling into the dark at the roadside. Just ahead, where there should have been only empty road, he saw yellow and red beacons spinning out a warning.

“Madame,” said Leon before Joseph could point it out.

“My God, a roadblock. Joseph, quickly, let me have your box.”

He handed it to her. She opened it, sorted through the vials, and found the one she wanted; secreted it in her palm as the limousine slowed. Joseph looked out at the soldiers unslinging machine guns as they advanced on the car, both squinting and aiming into the headlights.

Angelica rolled down her window and moved deeper into the car, so that whoever addressed her would have to lean close to the open window.

A stern Ife face presented itself, already drawling in a commanding and derogatory voice, “Fancy cars should stay at home tonight.”

“My good man, why is that?” asked Angelica, the hidden vial now open in her hand; she waved it beneath his nose, a scented glimmer in the shadows. “We’re on the President’s business. You know he wants the airport checked; I’m to see if I recognize anyone there. Now let us pass. You’ve done your duty.”

It was a different Ife, a soft-faced and compliant fellow, who stood back with a grin on his face and waved the other guards away. “Let them through!” he shouted. Oil drums rolled from the road; the soldiers retreated and stood like an honor guard as the limousine cruised past them. The flashing lights gradually shrank in the rear-view mirror and Angelica replaced the vial in the chest.

“Let’s hope things are this easy at the airport,” she said after a sigh.

“There is a flight tonight?”

“A flight was scheduled to leave two days ago, but the pilots were promised a payment which they haven’t received. I think we can convince them to leave, don’t you?”

“I hope so.”

She squeezed his hand. “Ah, Joseph. How strange, this certainty that we will never meet again.”

“Don’t say that. You are free to travel as you like.”

She shook her head. “You know better than that. Let’s make this a farewell and have done with it. We will both go on to other things.”

“Other things, but not necessarily better. I will miss you more than you know.”

He kissed her hand and the last miles passed beneath them in silence. The airport grew out of the dust-hazed night, lights like smoked quartz mounted in the walls of the single terminal building. When Joseph finally released her hand, it was to search for the essence of “Courage.” He tucked it into his breast pocket, smiling awkwardly at her.

“In case I need it,” he said.

“I doubt you will.”

While the box was open, he thought to take out a few more vials which he placed in his pocket. Chief among them was the old Mome distillate, certainly his most successful creation. But the attar he kept out and sniffed as the limousine slowed was called “Tranquillity.”

Through the dingy windows of the concrete building he could see people milling, staring, faces blank with patience. A line of people lay against the terminal, some sleeping, some smoking, few openly watching the car. As Joseph opened the door he saw a sentry come to the door and look out at them; his only response was a sleepy smile. His blood beat calmly in his heart.

“Careful now, Joseph,” Angelica whispered. “I dare not stay with you here. Kiss me, take your things, and go.”

“Angelica—”

At the edge of the curb they embraced and parted with the same will. It was not a good time to do more than that. He turned away, heard Leon bid him farewell, and then the car door slammed and he began to walk toward the sentry. With no scent in his hand, he felt vulnerable, too peaceful. He could only pray that Buique had not had time to organize much in the way of a manhunt; he could hardly tell the soldiers that they sought a man who had been dead six months.

The guard, apparently impressed by the limousine and his attire, did not stop him. Not even Miguel would have expected him to try leaving Bamal in such style. Once more Angelica’s discretion had saved them grief. He could feel the man watching him as he worked his way through the somnolent crowd toward a deserted counter where, presumably, tickets were sold. On the wall behind it was a poster showing a montage of sunsets, swimming pools, elegant dining, children with golden bangles in their hair.

BEAUTIFUL BAMAL, said the caption; WE HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART.

Setting his chest and suitcase on the counter, he looked for a ticket agent and saw no one; he rang a silver bell for service, evoking a muffled sound. Guards at the far door watched him with amusement, but no one volunteered assistance.

“Excuse me,” he called, his voice gentle, polite. It occurred to him that perhaps he should be more forceful, despite the evening’s pleasant mood. He had no time to waste.

The vial he selected was “Obey.” He uncapped it discreetly, strolled over to the guards at the rear door, and nodded in the direction of the counter. “You,” he said to one of the gunmen.

The man gave him a scornful look and swaggered closer; he was a foot taller than Joseph, so Joseph used the gesture of a feisty little man to bring the bottle near his face; he reached up and pressed a medal on the soldier’s chest, as if it were a button.

“Find the ticket agent. I want to leave Bamal.”

The guard blinked, nodded, and turned to the door. As he went out, one of the others remarked, “The plane’s going nowhere. Pilots want money. No one here has it.”

The other guard laughed. “Maybe he does.”

“If that’s what it takes,” said Joseph, “I probably have.”

The door opened between them and the original soldier returned with a harried Kaak, grizzled and stout, his eyes blurred and red behind thick lenses.

“What do you want?” he asked Joseph. “Why bother with tickets? Nobody’s leaving. You can stand in line with the rest. The pilots won’t go, I’m telling you.”

“I can reason with them,” Joseph said.

“Reason?” He laughed madly. “They want money.”

“I’ll give them money then.”

“You haven’t got enough, I—”

As the vial passed near his nose, he began to smile. Noticing Joseph for the first time, it seemed, he drew himself into a proud pose and then bowed at the waist. “Perhaps you have at that.”

“Let me get my belongings,” said Joseph. “I’ll come and meet them.”

“No, no, I’ll be happy to bring them here,” said the Kaak.

He returned to the counter and when he touched his box of essences his skin began to creep with foreboding, tangible as any scent. He glanced around slowly, but nothing had changed. He might have been straining to hear something inaudible, to see something just out of sight. His eyes met those of the sentry by the front door; the other man forced the casual contact into a deadlock. Without looking away from Joseph’s face, he crossed the room. He stopped an arm’s length away, out of reach.

“So, you are a passenger?” he said. He thumped one hand on the counter by the box of attars. “Tourist? You have a passport?”

“Of course, and I’m no tourist. You should know me.”

The man inclined his head. “I think I do. I would like to see your passport now.”

“I’m sure you would, but it’s not for you. I’ll show it to the customs official.”

The man snorted, humorless except for the pleasure he seemed to derive from Joseph’s distress. He was a tall Fombeh, and Joseph suddenly wondered if he might have been among Miguel’s companions, overthrower of the empire. He was certain that this man was the source of his ominous intimations; he must have caught the scent of suspicion coming off him.

“I am the only official here,” the man said slowly. “Now give me your passport, Mr.—”

“Doctor,” Joseph said. To make a sweep of his arm toward the man’s face would have been seen as a hostile gesture; he dared no such thing. He rolled his thumb alongside the cap of the vial, sealing it for the moment.

“Doctor?”

“Perhaps you have heard of me.”

As he reached for the passport in his inner pocket, his other hand found the vial of Mome-scent and loosened the cap; he pretended to cough, putting both hands to his mouth, and in an instant slipped the vial into the hand that held the passport. Presenting the papers, he fanned them slightly so that the scent would carry. Surely, he thought, the memory of loyalty to the old Emperor was not far beneath the surface of this Fombeh’s mind; to reach down and call upon that allegiance would be to contact a powerful ally.

“Doctor Kmei Dodo,” the man said, and he looked rather stupefied. “You, here?”

Joseph prayed the scent was strong enough to convince the man—but suddenly he had no idea of what he was trying to convince him. Dodo and Mome were antagonists. What had he done?

The scent had some effect. The official blinked, eyes watering, and wiped his nose. He walked around the counter, flattened the passport, and stared at it from a distance, still blinking as though trying to clear away the tears.

“Is something wrong?” Joseph asked. “Can I help? I am a doctor.”

The official straightened quickly, snapped the passport shut, and thrust it back at him. “Nothing is wrong, Dr. Dodo,” he said brusquely, still twitching as though a flea had gotten up his nose. “I have never seen you here before, that is all. I would think the President’s plane suits you better. But I will speak to the pilots. If I can’t give them money, I can promise bullets.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Joseph began as the man wheeled away, shoulders jerking like those of an ill-handled marionette. “Why don’t you stamp my passport?”

The far door banged open, the fat Kaak ran in hauling a man in a shapeless, sleeped-in uniform by the wrist. “He’s over there, you talk to him. He’ll tell you, he has money.”

“Everyone tells me they have money,” the pilot began.

“I have something better than that,” said Joseph’s interrogator, raising his machine gun barrel toward the pilot’s face. The pilot stopped dead, eyes bulging, then started to back away.

“No, no,” cried the Kaak. “None of that!”

“The plane is leaving!” someone shouted. There was a rush of bodies, not away from the confrontation but toward it. “I have a ticket!” “The plane is leaving!” “Go, go!” Others shoved in from outside, crowding the room further.

The officer came out from behind the counter and pushed back at the crowd, jabbing with his gun. His face was bland.

“No shoving,” he barked, and the gun coughed once.

A boy crumpled, clutching the rags of his belly. The rest turned away in a crushing mob, squeezing into the corners of the room; some limped, wounded by bullets that had passed through the boy. The official turned back to the pilot, who was halfway through the door now that the other guards had moved toward the crowd.

Joseph leaned against the counter—or caught himself as he staggered. His eyes lingered on the still body whose life had deserted it in a rush, a torrent. He reached for the only thing that mattered to him now, the chest full of essences; he started sliding it across the counter, toward the far door. The soldiers were intent on the shrieking mass of bodies that was trying to pour in one piece through the doorway. A window shattered, then another, as the trapped people found other exits and clambered through broken glass to be free. Out of the wailing and clattering, he heard one clear voice that made him stop.

He looked to the front door and saw a figure in the crowd, her arm upraised, a delicate lace handkerchief waving from her fingers to catch his eye.

“Angelica,” he said.

She could not move against the press of the crowd, her eyes were hopeless, shining out between the terrified masks that overwhelmed her. Why had she come back? What was she telling him?

Then, louder than the mob, he heard the roaring of jeeps and the chatter of machine guns from outside the terminal. The crowd reversed, surged back into the room, this time bearing Angelica along with it. He held fast to the counter so that she could find him.

“They’ve come, Joseph,” she cried; her words were isolated from the screaming, she might have been speaking to him in a private silence. “We saw them on the road and I had to warn you. Get on the plane, Joseph. It will go now.”

She shouldn’t have come, he thought, but there was no way she could go back now. He forged toward her while the mob stood paralyzed, packed tight as beans in a jar, trapped between the soldiers in the terminal and those that had just arrived.

“Give me your hand,” he said. Her touch was hot; he could not pull her from the vise of bodies. “You must come with me now, Angelica.”

“All right, Joseph. Yes—”

He tugged but her hand slipped away, carried by a tidal shift in the crowd. His box of attars snagged, holding him back; he lifted it free, held it aloft, and started after her.

“Angelica!”

He searched for her among the many heads, but it was a different face that he finally recognized, at the same instant he saw her between him and the doorway. Miguel stood at the threshold. His grin was simultaneous with Joseph’s groan.

Angelica did not see Miguel, but he spotted her. “Here!” she cried, looking straight at Joseph.

Miguel shouted a command and soldiers pressed in around him. Joseph fell back, but he could not bring down his arm for a moment; he could feel himself losing his grip on the chest. As he jerked forward to keep it balanced on his palm, the crowd parted miraculously, leaving an empty corridor down which Miguel—or Angelica—could walk to him. It was not a miracle, however: it was the guns.

She rushed toward him.

“Down!” he cried, too late, and threw himself sideways, abandoning the box of essences, reaching for his life.

Everyone fell.

The shooting went on forever.

Mass burial, bodies still writhing, presided over by the deific voices of the guns pronouncing death for all. He crawls through a tunnel of flesh and nails on a floor slick with blood. Broken glass cuts his hands, his blood joins the rest, but in such insignificant quantities that he wishes he could laugh.

Then he sees Angelica’s face, cooling eyes and tattered throat, and screaming he drags himself backward, though never far enough. Everywhere he looks, he sees her face. Deeper into the nightmare now, he sees the scattered vials, all shattered, distillations mingling with the vital liquids of the dead and dying. The perfumes blot out the smell of blood, bringing a whiff of heaven, or delirium. A woman with half a skull sits up laughing, ripping at her hair, overcome by the stench of rapture. Someone howls an ecstatic prayer. Miguel stands over his men, regarding his handiwork, while over his face parades a chaos of conflicting emotions: pleasure, anger, innocence, malevolence, flickering and disjointed. Then, as the cloud of scent-molecules becomes thoroughly combined, and as Joseph holds his breath, every emotion in the air comes into Miguel’s face at once. It should be a phenomenon like the joining of a spectrum’s colors into unity, into brilliant white light. But it is not at all like that. No matter how many attars Joseph had captured, he had by no means forced the whole range of humanity into his bottles; critical things are missing, essences he’d never had time or thought to distill.

It was not white light that came pouring from the soldiers’ faces: it was pure madness.

Joseph worked his way backward, head bowed, breathing through his collar. The dying crowd had begun to roar.

A hand fastened on his sleeve and he pried it off, gasping at the sudden bite of nails; the involuntary gulp of scent provoked a kind of fury, gave him the strength to tear himself away, to keep moving.

He sipped the air slowly but it was too much; he wanted to take in huge draughts. Now he exhaled, fighting the tide of atoms streaming in against his olfactory nerves, hoping that he could hold onto himself an instant longer. It might be long enough.

The guns held a brief conversation. He glanced up as the soldiers at the rear door toppled; the customs official stared at him as he crept past, though his eye was not in his cheek.

His heart beat against his ribs, clamoring for oxygen. Only when he had reached the far door did he look back, and all he could see was the dead. Miguel and his men lay staring, heaped around the door they had been so eager to enter; his cousin’s face was fixed in madness, as he would ever remember it.

Then he was outside, inhaling great breaths of the warm dusty air, absorbing the whole of the night.

Ahead of him he heard a metallic whining and saw a row of bright lozenges floating in the air. Long moments passed before he realized that it was an airplane. He shouted. A figure appeared in the doorway, hurrying to pull the door shut, and he screamed again at the silhouette. The person stopped, uncertain.

“Wait for me!” he cried, on his feet and running. “I’m alone, please don’t go, wait for me.”

The short run took an age; the night had made distances deceptive. The stairs were a mile high, or the scents he’d inhaled made them seem that way. Now all he could smell was blood. It soaked his clothes, engloved his hands. The door full of light was before him; he tumbled in and heard it shut. He lay on his face, hearing voices above him, feeling the plane begin to move slowly, jostling. He knew the instant it left the ground because he began to sob with relief and terror, grieving for Angelica even as he gave thanks for his own survival. Most of the emotions passing in the flood were unfamiliar to him. Very few had mixed with the blood on the terminal floor.

“Can you hear me, sir? Can you get up? We have a seat for you, you’ll be more comfortable.”

He rolled over weakly and saw a black face looking down at him. Ife or Nmimi or Fombeh or Kaak, he couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter which. It was simply another face, a human face, a living being. He reached up to take it in his hands.

“Your name, sir? Can you tell me your name?”

“My name?” He choked, almost laughed, remembering in time not to give himself away.

“I’m afraid if you’re injured there’s not much we can do. We have a first aid kit, but no doctor aboard.”

“No doctor?” he said. “Yes there is, yes there is. I’m a doctor, my friend. Doctor Dodo, that’s me.”

* * *

“Mad Wind” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Century #4 (Jan./Feb. 1996), edited by Robert K.J. Killheffer.

TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT

(An Excerpt from Mock-Up, An Abandoned Novel)

When Morris was seventeen, he didn’t see much of his parents. His stepfather was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying with his customers in those same tubs. Morris’s mother had accompanied her husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband’s behavior—though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times—had uncovered some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral pharmaceutical companions.

Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in search of something he would know when he saw it—in search of some magic that might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the radio spewed Barry Manilow (“At the Copa—Copacabana…”) and Eddie Money (“I got… two tickets to paradise… won’t you… pack your bags and we’ll leave tonight,”) and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him—as if the dream of packing his bags for paradise were something his spirit yearned for. He nearly drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into oblivion.

Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys and Copper Pennys and 7/11’s, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise unremarkable Holiday Inn: “Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!”

He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer, and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie Walker Red (his stepfather’s drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and then a third time before braving the party again.

He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him he vaguely recognized from the jackets of novels he had glanced at, if not actually finished. The faces seemed to swim and bob around the room, so he was less than eager to approach any of them, until two came rather close to him. A woman and a man, both like enough to have been brother and sister, with similar hair long and curled, although the woman was tall and very thin, while the man was quite short and plump. Hers was the deeper voice; his was very faint and distant, almost indistinct, as if lost in his thick moustach and bush of beard just shot through with a few strands of grey. Her hair had much more iron in it, threads that stood out like white wire, unruly hair that was held in place with a unicorn pin, which made him think of virgins, which Morris still was. Their eyes were the same shade of green, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were related; it might have been only the reason they had been drawn together. Morris’s own eyes were green, after all, and now they had been drawn to him.

The couple eventually took him aside, although not without filling his cup again, and introduced themselves as Janet Kutz and Sherwood Spierman, authors, editors, partners in a vast enterprise of fictional empire building. Under the name of Jan Kutzwood they had penned more than a dozen volumes of fantasy, a triology of trilogies and sequelae. They had edited, they told him, nearly twenty anthologies under various other names. Not to mention solo novels each had produced and published in the last several decades. He had been vaguely aware of their presence on the edge of the book racks, though he could not bring himself to tell them that theirs were the last sorts of books he would ever turn to. He read science fiction for its stranger aspects, for the truly wild talents harbored and hiding there, not for the tame generic stuff. He would rather re-read Gravity’s Rainbow for the third time than open volume one of the Dragonstaff Chronicles.

The couple, whom he came to think of as the Kutzwoods, since that was the shared identity that had brought them to the convention, continually implied that there were depths to themselves that no one suspected… that they dared not reveal in their books, although they would bare the secrets for a small, select circle of friends.

What this baring eventually amounted to was the somewhat anticlimactic culmination of an event Morris had been looking forward to with mixed anticipation and dread for the entirety of his adolescent life. It required all of his considerable sense of humor to get through it without laughing; but afterward he felt anything but joyful or amused.

He had drunk enough that night to render his memories of the event patchwork and hazy and warped. In the least pleasant of them, he was vomiting while Janet rubbed his shoulders and whispered that yes, he must cast out the poisons of guilt and insecurity that mundane life had instilled in him. He vomitted Johnny Walker Red and something else besides, a gluey white foam that rode on the surface of the burning scotch, which he couldn’t remember ingesting (quite), although he feared that if he thought about it hard enough he would remember, and that might be even worse. Sherwood hovered above him, near the toilet bowl, throughout his wife’s minisrations, with a distraught look; and Sherwood was quite naked, his penis looking raw and red, ropy and wrung-out between his fat thighs. The sight made Morris gag again and commence the further emptying of his guts.

He was not sure where exactly in the evening this memory occurred, but it was unrelated (except thematically) to the others that surrounded it. The best of them, he supposed, was in the darkened Holiday Inn room, on the creaking bed, with Janet bouncing on his crotch, then leaning forward to rub her almost perfectly flat chest against his own, a sensation that thrilled him even though it felt like someone pressing pencil erasers over his nipples. He realized that he was in her, inside a woman, although he couldn’t quite feel himself down there; as if from the waist down he was numb. But even the qualified pleasures of this memory were further qualified when he turned his head and saw Sherwood kneeling on the floor beside the bed, right up against the mattress, clutching at the bedspread as he bucked and banged against the bedframe, as if humping the tight crease between mattress and boxspring while his wife humped Morris.

And another memory, of his face between Janet’s legs, the musky, leathery, horse-like scent of her, as if she had been riding in the saddle all day and her thighs were lathered with horse-lather. Her thighs gripping tight around his head as she shook and tremored, and he gripped at her nonexistent breasts, and at the same time felt something sucking hesitantly at his own limp penis, and the brushy sensation of a beard between his legs.

He could not remember, further, how the evening ended; but he did recall clearly waking in the darkened room and slipping out and into the parking lot and finding his car, and finishing his night’s sleep there, until a cop woke him and sent him on his way. And he supposed that would have been all for the Kutzwoods, except that for some reason during the night he had given them his address, and they began to send him letters and copies of their books.

The letters evoked indistinct memories of conversations they’d had at the convention, a generalized plumbing of his bored and anguished adolescent soul. They meant to minister to him long-distance, he realized; and it was some kind of reflection on the state of his day-to-day life that after a few months of receiving their correspondence, and responding with a few halfhearted postcards, he began to think about that night at the hotel with a quickening, and he masturbated to images of Janet squirming against him, and the taste of her came into his mouth; and even the thought of Sherwood did not completely put him off anymore. So when they extended an offer for him to come visit them in Berkeley, to spend “a weekend among the mysteries,” as they put it—he listened to his mother and his stepfather arguing in the living room, and immediately picked up the phone and called them and agreed to come if they paid for his ticket.

The Kutzwoods had always been coy about “the mysteries” until the night they collected him at the Oakland Airport. They were different tonight, in their own element, looking supernal and aristocratic in black robes, moving gracefully among the airport’s ranks of Krishna beggars. Even when he saw their broken-down wreck of a truck, he thought there was something transcendent about them.

He had visited San Francisco once with his mother, but never Berkeley. He had no idea where he was when they pulled up on a quiet street among quiet houses and took him down an overgrown path to a small house that looked weirdly slumped upon its tiny plot of ground. Somehow, as prolific authors, he had figured they would be living in some grand estate; but it became obvious to him that the place was a decrepit old farmhouse lacking (his biological father was a contractor) even a foundation. The walls were covered with mold; green fur had climbed the curtains; there was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets. He drank wine from a milk glass until he had swallowed enough to reveal rings of hardened matter like the remains of a petrified parfait. Scraggly marijuana plants grew under fluorescents in the bathroom, and a softshell turtle lazed in an algal green scum in the bathtub, eyeing him aggressively when he leaned to look inside, in disbelief. There was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets, and the toilet was so calcified that there was hardly an opening left for drainage, and so it was full of paper and cigarette butts and tampons, and he went instead into the backyard under a pretense of touring the house and pissed near a rabbit hutch, hoping he could survive the weekend without taking a shit.

The Kutzwoods were not alone in the house. They had roommates, somewhat younger than themselves, but no more wholesome. They looked like refugees, junkies, and he distinctly saw scabby tracks on the arms of one or two, which they scratched distractedly. It did little to reassure Morris when these other roommates vanished into their fetid little rooms and reappeared wearing black robes like those Janet and Sherwood wore. He sat in a corner of the front room, trying to avoid contact with any and all surfaces, and let his eyes roam the titles of paperbacks crammed on the shelves that ran from floor to ceiling along every wall. There were pots of half-eaten food on the floor, looking like charred soybeans, solidified and clouded with mold. Dishes where food crumbs mingled with cigarette butts. He distracted himself finding titles he hadn’t read, or had the slightest interest in reading, and at least unearthed a huge cache of Philip K. Dick, all stacked more or less in one teetering pile. Most were so yellow they looked pissed upon, rescued from garbage bins or incinerators. Old Ace-doubles, Dr. Futurity, Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, the Man Who Japed. He hadn’t read most of these. But others, more recent, were on the top of his own stacks of favorite and frequently re-read titles: Martian Time-Slip, The Crack in Space, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle. When Janet came through beaded doorway, he raised a copy of Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, as if in a toast.

“Oh, the good stuff,” she said. “I’ll take that as a sign you’re ready.”

“Ready,” he said.

“For the kiss of Valis.”

“Valis,” he repeated.

She knelt before him, and now the others came through the curtains behind her. They had been making some preparations in there, talking in hushed voices. He smelled incense burning.

“This was his house,” she said. “That’s only the first of the secrets to be revealed to you tonight.”

“Whose house?” he asked.

“Phil’s.”

“Philip K. Dick? He lived here?”

“When he was starting out… it’s a focal point for Valis now. A shrine. Why do you think you’ve been drawn here?”

“I—I didn’t know—”

“You haven’t read Valis, of course. It’s only in manuscript. Secret copies have been passed around. Later we’ll show it to you, and you can read and understand. Soon it will be revealed to the world, but for the moment our society is still very secret. Even when the light has dawned, we shall be the small dark heart of it, at the center of the mystery, and you, Morris, perhaps you will be at the center of that heart, if you can clear your mind of all else tonight and make room for the movement of the spirit.”

“Philip K. Dick lived here,” he said, shifting and feeling the floorboards splintering softly beneath him. He felt that he could easily kick a hole through with his heel, and dig right into the earth beneath the house. If he pushed hard enough on the wall behind him, it would give way. His skull felt equally soft, equally invaded by something stranger than mold; as if the slightest bit of pressure would cause it to burst, letting his thoughts out.

“Was… was there something in that wine?”

Janet crouched before him, and put out her hand, palm up. In the center sat a small purple pill.

“What…”

“Chew-Z,” she said. “The sacrament.”

“What is it really? Is it LSD?” Because in this respect, also, he was a virgin.

“Don’t be afraid, Morris. Valis will come through tonight. Maybe you will be chosen.”

“Chosen for… for what?”

She put the pill on her tongue and closed her mouth. Then took his hands and drew him to his feet, leading him back toward the veiled room. Through clacking plastic beads, into a room dark except for a small pink globe like a nightlight in the center of the room.

“The pink light touches us deep within,” Janet intoned, urging him to sink to a sitting position. “Beyond all rational thought. It shows us the truth. Gaze into the light, Morris.”

Morris gazed. He could see the wire filament inside the round globe. It was intricately coiled; it was difficult to believe that anything could be so small and fine. What hand could have shaped it so precisely? What immortal hand of fire did shape thy nightlight’s burning wire? He was thinking insanely, but it was no less than was expected of him. The others now had shed their clothes, and in the pink dimness began to move around him, forming a human freize of interwoven forms— only, when he jerked to look at them they weren’t moving. Except that Janet came forward now, bearing two bright pink human figures in her hands, naked plastic dolls. She bathed them in the pink light, and he almost laughed to see Barbie and Ken stripped of their garments, sexless, except that the ceremony with which she handled them made them seem portentous, more menacing than voodoo dolls, if you believed in that sort of thing. Belief was not exactly what filled Morris at the moment; there was little room left in him for anything but fear.

“For behold,” she said, “in the days of Perky Pat, Valis did move among them, and bring life even to the frozen forms. And Valis did descend among the discarded objects, the shattered toys of childhood, past the amphetamine capsules and empty prescription vials, into the very tomb of the world, into the keys of his typewriter, and through those keys into Phil’s fingers, so that the light first blossomed there and came to us that we might see the workings of Valis in the world. And the demiurge sensed that Valis had arrived, and was working to undo his evil works, and in that moment the battle proper was joined.”

Janet Kutz pressed Barbie to her lips, and held out her hand so that Ken might lay his cold sealed mouth against Morris’s mouth, a tiny frigid peck that filled him with terror, since he could feel his life sucking out of him, into the doll. His teeth began to chatter.

Now he felt hands kneading his shoulders, and twisted around to see Sherwood Spierman behind him, unclothed again. He tried to rise, but the hands pushed him down gently, and he was so weak and wobbly that he couldn’t resist even the fat little science fiction writer. And then something very warm and firm enclosed him, like an enormous snake, and the pink light drew far away below him, like a star burning in an abyss, the only star in existence. But it wasn’t Valis. Its light could not heal him. It was only a pink nightlight, too far away to do any good, and Janet Kutz had hold of him, nor could he move, for his socketed limbs obeyed only hers, and his eyes were sightless and his lips were sealed and he had no sex.

Through the abyss came Perky Pat, his ideal mate. The sexless two of them were fated for some unimaginable union. Her stiff blonde tresses, her nipple-less breasts, her belly devoid of umbilical scars…. Whatever had given birth to her, whatever machine had stamped her out, he also was the child of that soulless monster, and between them they would give rise to the next race of men, the demiurge’s true spawn, the plastic people, the unsexed race, the machinists and manufacturers, immortals, beyond the reach of decay or growth alike.

“Let go of fear, let go of self, let go of will,” the air intoned. “Let Valis in, let Valis in, let Valis is.”

But it was not Valis, whatever that was, who came in.

There was a commotion in the room, and Morris was dropped, dumped on the carpet. He sprawled by the pink light, staring at the stained ceiling, as the half-robed others stared at the beaded doorway where now a hairy, bearded, beer-bellied, grey- haired man stood in a grubby white t-shirt. Morris was lost between bodies, half in the form of Ken, half in his own flesh. His vision was doubled, with one of the two turned sideways and superimposed at an angle upon the other, so that the world looked as though it had been mirrored and fractured and badly reset.

The Kutzwoods rushed toward the intruder, but the faintly seedy figure in dirty white raised one hand and they recoiled as if burned with a flamethrower. Janet said, “Phil!”

“Get out of my house!” he intoned. “Get out, all of you. You bunch of quacks and crackpots! Charlatans!”

“Valis moves among us!” Sherwood cried. “He comes in human form!”

“I said clear out, you fucking windbag!” Phil stepped in, his beer gut hanging out between his flapping t-shirt and his bleach-stained whitish flares.

“Valis isn’t in here,” he said sourly, “but I can call it. This is the work of the demiurge—this is evil, illusion. Sucking this boy’s life out of him. Fucking him full of death. It’s my house and I want you all out of it right now, before I summon Valis through that snapping turtle and sic him on you. Catch a few snaps of that beak and I’ll bet you won’t be so eager to feel Valis.”

When even after all this, no one moved to obey him, Phil stepped fully into the room and aimed a kick that Morris irrationally feared was meant for his head. He flinched, but Phil’s toe merely shattered the pink bulb, and as it popped Morris jerked upright, and staggered for the exit, the plastic beads dragging over his face. The others were behind him, fleeing in a rush, and looking back into the room he saw a huge, an inconceivable shape seemed to mushroom into existence in the center of the room, beyond the beaded curtain, striking the Kutzwoods full of a revealing pink irradiation, their skeletons standing side by side, one short and squat, the other tall and angular. And as the light died they came staggering out as if blind, clutching at each other’s hands, and followed the rest of their followers out the front door, sandals and bare feet slapping away on the weedy path.

Morris sat in a corner of the room, where he had fallen, his hand on the stack of Philip K. Dick novels. And then Philip K. Dick himself came out of the room and gave him a concerned look.

“Assholes,” Phil said. “I would like to have messed with their heads a little bit longer, though.”

“You—you’re really here?”

“Sure,” Phil said. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m—” He was about to answer affirmatively, but a wave of something negative swept through him. All his fear came flooding out of him, then. It dawned on him suddenly where he was, and what was happening to him, and his surroundings sprang into awful clarity—so bright that he could barely look around himself.

“Take these,” Phil said. He took a pillbottle out of his pants pocket and emptied it into his palm. There were pills of all sizes and shapes, all colors. He sorted through until he had picked out a yellow capsule, a golden gelatinous globes, a red ones and a green one. Some of the pills had the names of pharmaceutical companies on them, number codes, but these were all blank.

“Relax, they’re vitamins. I’ve been experimenting with megadoses, and I think this combination will do you good. I’m not exactly sure what they dosed you with, but this can’t hurt.”

Morris swallowed them dry, and soon the surfaces of things began to cling more firmly to the objects which they normally covered; the edges of reality were all tacked back in place. Phil ghosted around the house, muttering to himself at the state of the place, waiting for Morris to settle. He brewed coffee and washed cups and finally came down and handed Morris a mug, and sat opposite him and gave him a wink.

“How did you know to come?” Morris asked.

Phil opened his hand. In it was a pink pill. “This,” he said, “is Can-D.” He popped it in his mouth.

Morris spilled out his story, as much of it made sense to him. Phil listened, and when he was finished, he began to speak, just weaving stories about the demiurge who had created this world, and how humanity was trapped in a false creation far below the notice of the demiurge’s own creator—except that Valis moved among them, with messages of hope, with practical methods of transcendence, ways of unknotting the hopelessly tangled strands of reality and following them to… to what? Morris could not follow a fraction of it; he only lay there, letting the voice speak on, while he dodged in and out of consciousness. Toward morning, Phil rose and gestured him to his feet, and they set out under the paling skies, past quiet houses and trim green lawns marked inexplicably with Clorox bottles like squat little sentries beneath the camellia hedges. Phil brought him to the BART station and showed him how to buy his ticket, which train to take to the Oakland Airport. He turned from the turnstile after feeding his ticket through, turned to thank Phil, but he was already gone.

* * *

“To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared at Dark Carnival Online, February 1996, edited by Paul McEnery.

NETHER REACHES

To our right, the Reaches fell away into bottomless blackness. We struggled down a narrow trail, hugging close to the rock, every hundred yards or so coming upon the mouths of inner caves that coiled away where our lights could not penetrate. We hurried past, feeling the exhalations of dry air from deeper galleries, no one wishing to linger on those thresholds despite the escape they offered from the brink.

I began to imagine that down in the valley of blackness, luminous shapes stirred and swam. These may have been afterimages of lamplight and my companions’ faces, or the random firing of sensors in my optic nerve; but that knowledge, uncertain at best, did nothing to reassure me when I began to imagine huge blind eyes floating up like helium balloons from between imaginary grey-glowing peaks deep in the abyss.

My fear, in fact my very behavior, became childlike. Not since childhood had I felt any such terror of the dark. It was nothing I had ever imagined facing again, not as an adult, an experienced explorer among others of equal skill. It took me by surprise, nor was I reassured to discover I was not the only one.

Katherine was the first to speak of it. Ward had begged a halt some three hours into our descent. We squatted down on the trail carved unknown ages before, and untouched for millenia— until recently. Still tethered together, we shared water and food. As I offered the canteen to Katherine, I noticed her gaze fixed not on the abyss, the sight of which I also kept avoiding, but on the unbroken ceiling of darkness above us.

“Can’t see it anymore,” she said.

I knew she meant the outer threshhold, which for a time had hung behind us like a dim grey star, visible only in contrast to such utter blackness. Now it was long gone, and except for the light we carried, or could generate, there would be no more until we reached the camp. I squeezed her shoulder. Like me she was covered with perspiration despite the chill of the Reaches. Mine was an icy, unpleasant sweat, like that which one feels when rising from a nightmare.

“Why am I so frightened?” she said.

Justin, a veteran of the Reaches, laughed. “Afraid of the dark?”

“There’s just so much of it,” she answered, unashamed. “No stars… nothing.”

“Try turning off all the lights,” he said. “Then you’ll really feel it. It’s a good idea to let yourself get used to it. “

“That’ll happen soon enough,” said Beth, our leader.

“Really,” said Ward, who like Katherine and myself was making his first trek into the cavern. “I’m in no hurry. It’s claustrophobic enough already.”

“Claustrophobic?” I said. “There’s nothing but open space.”

“But the blackness feels solid. As if, if we didn’t have lights, it would completely crush us.”

“Jesus, don’t say that!” said Katherine, rising. “You’re really scaring me now.”

“Relax,” I whispered, trying to pull her down next to me.

It made me nervous when she moved so near the edge of the trail. But my own reaction, though I kept it to myself, was the opposite of Ward’s. I felt as if I were expanding outward infinitely, sending my mind into the Reaches, to touch their limits, to fill the entire interior tracts of the icy cave-riddled planet.

“You’re like a bunch of kids around a campfire,” Beth said. “Come on, we’re not doing any good sitting here scaring each other. We’ve a long way to go before…”

Katherine laughed, forcing it. “Before what? Nightfall?”

“Before we can stop,” Beth finished. She was already striding away, forcing Justin to jump up before the cable could pull taut between them. Ward followed Justin, and I rose up reluctantly, clasping Katherine’s hand for a short moment.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “When we get to the catacombs, it’ll seem worthwhile.”

I didn’t understand her expression of doubt.

We had covered less than a third of our journey, as Beth indicated, but we were already near the end of the ridge route. Within a short time the trail broadened further. We pulled away from the brink of the abyss, still without any sight of its bottom, and moved first along the face of a sheer wall that rose to our left, then headed directly out across a broad stone plain whose surface undulated like the swells of a petrified sea, crazed with deep rifts. The narrower of these were spanned by rigid plastic ramps, still nearly brand-new, scuffed by very few boots. I grew a little bolder on the plain, because the fear of falling was gone, and I walked with ever lighter steps despite the occasional thought that I might be visible to anything peering down from above—though what I expected to be watching from the black heights above, I could never have named. I stabbed beams of light out into the surrounding plains, picking out heaps of stone, shattered scales that must have flaked and fallen from the cavern’s ceiling miles above. It seemed strange that the whole surface was not thickly littered with these piles, as if they had been swept up into tidy mounds over the eons, leaving all else clear. They reminded me disturbingly of enormous anthills, and after a time I stopped looking at them.

Justin fired a flare out into the dark; and while Beth cursed him for wasting it, the rest of us stood and watched it arc up and up and finally peak and fall, to land sputtering far out on the plain, somewhere beyond a jagged wall of stone scrapings. It made the silhouettes and shadows of those heaps twitch and shamble toward us. Dreadful illusions multiplied behind my eyes, and I felt an unlikely terror grow until I had to look away. The dull flare flickered for much longer than seemed right, and I glanced back at it repeatedly as we marched on.

Hours later, we saw another light ahead of us, first a dim suspicion, like a wishful mirage; but gradually it brightened. As we gained higher ground, we saw a raw spark of white fluorescence, stationary, with three smaller reddish sparks beneath it. It was the central beacon of the catacomb camp. As we grew closer, we saw the somewhat dimmer lamps mounted on shorter poles all around the site for constant illumination; and then we gradually made out the shapes of the camp shelters, tents and prefab huts, scattered pieces of machinery and vehicles, even a one-man pedal glider—all the necessities, as well as the detritus, of a three month occupation. The camp was staffed with nearly fifty people, yet none were visible as we approached.

Beth raised her radio, addressed the main station loudly, but received only static in reply.

Suddenly Katherine collapsed. I called to the others and sank down next to her to find her gasping, hyperventilating, full of repressed terror.

“Goddamn it, what now?” Beth said.

“She’s dizzy—she needs to rest.”

“Well stay with her then, unclip your line, we’re going on.”

“No!” Katherine said, struggling to pull herself upright. “I’ll be fine.”

“Have it your way.” Beth tried the radio again.

“Where are they?” Justin said.

“In the catacombs, where else?”

“All of them?”

We hurried to keep up, Katherine keeping one hand in mine, but we needn’t have worried about falling behind. Beth hadn’t gone fifty yards when suddenly she stopped short, cursing. At her feet was a rift much wider than any we had crossed thus far.

“Where’s the bridge?” Justin said.

Beth didn’t speak for a moment, watching the luminous screen of her hand-map. She shone her light left and right along the fissure, but there was nothing. Finally she aimed it straight down into the cleft, but I could tell without moving to the brink myself that she could see nothing down there.

“It was here,” she said.

“Hey, there’s someone,” Ward said, and he began to shout, waving in the direction of the camp. I looked toward the tents and sheds and at first saw nothing; then a figure pulled away from the shadow of one shelter and began to move across our view. Ward waved his lantern from side to side, the beam cleaving the air like a banner, until Justin struck his arm with a nervous cry and the lantern flew from Ward’s hand, striking the edge of the ravine and shattering before it rolled over into the darkness and began its plunge.

“Goddamn it “ Ward said.

“Shut up!” Beth cried, whirling on him, pushing us all back from the brink.

Somehow, I had kept my eyes on the figure between the tents until Beth got in my way. The last I saw, it was heading toward us, perhaps coming to help; but when I looked again there was no sign of it.

“What’s wrong?” Justin said desperately. “What’s happened?”

Beth turned her lantern down to its lowest setting, still herding us away from the edge. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Put your lights out, all of you. We don’t want to attract attention.”

“Attention?” Ward said. “From who?”

“Just do it!” she hissed.

Katherine, trembling beside me, made a fearful sound as she switched hers off; then I did likewise. We needn’t have feared the coming of utter darkness, for the lights of the camp still towered on the far side of the fissure, bright enough to print our own shadows on the plain. The five of us, Beth still leading, moved behind a small stone heap. We sat there without speaking at first. I gulped some water and wondered how frightened I should be, and of what.

“We have to go back,” Justin said.

“Maybe. But not yet,” said Beth. “We’re not sure it’s anything.”

“But the radio, the bridge….”

“You’re inferring too much, and you’re in a paranoid state of mind. There’s no evidence of… of anything.”

“What?” Ward said. “What are you two talking about?”

Beth glared at him sullenly, then away.

“It’s true,” Katherine said. “You’re mystifying us deliberately. You two are the only ones who’ve been down here before. You must tell us what you know.”

“We don’t know anything,” Justin said. “No more than you.”

“That’s not exactly true,” said Beth. “We’ve visited the catacombs. And I know they scared you, Justin, just as they did me. “

“That has nothing to do with this!”

“No? Maybe you’re right. But the feeling is similar, isn’t it? When you were in there, didn’t you feel as if they were simply sleeping? Wasn’t there a mood of fear that came over you as in a nightmare? Isn’t this the same mood, but wide awake now?”

“You’re crazy,” Justin said.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted.

“Please,” Ward said. “Let’s just go back. I’m tired, but we can’t stay here.”

“Unclip yourself,” Beth said.

“What? Why?”

“I want to climb up and have another look.”

“But—no. We’ll all go.”

“Christ.” She stood up. “All right, then. Let’s move.”

We started up the stone heap, careful not to put our feet wrong, for it would have been easy to twist or even break an ankle among the gaps of sharp-edged stones. The mound was higher than it looked. We ended up unclipping anyway, for each of us climbed at a different rate. I was second to the top, just behind Beth, who crouched peering out at the lights of the camp, shaking her head.

She and I were alone there when we saw a figure again—the same one, or another, dashing silently across the compound. It threw itself behind a piece of treaded machinery, some sort of a digging device, and vanished.

“Did you see that?” she said. “It was a man.”

I nodded. “Of course it was.”

The others came up around us. I turned to give Katherine a hand, so I missed what the others saw, though I heard them gasp.

“What happened?” I said.

“A light went out,” Justin said. He pointed, though there were a fair number of lanterns about the camp and I couldn’t remember the location of any particular one. That didn’t matter much, though, because another went out as I watched, and another. These were the main lights around the camp, at its outskirts and between the tents, mounted at perhaps a third of the height of the central pole which bore the three red indicators strung along its height. There were no lights on inside the tents any longer; I couldn’t be sure I’d ever seen any.

“What’s doing it?”

“Listen,” Beth said.

The silence of the Reaches was utter, as thorough as the darkness. Away in the distance, as another light blinked out, we heard a fragile tinkling sound, the crashing of glass. I knew the bulbs were extremely durable, thick glass, and could barely be shattered with a bullet at close range. Yet they were exploding right and left, dousing greater portions of the camp with darkness. The very light which lit the scene for us was on the verge of going out.

Suddenly, unnervingly loud, Katherine screamed. I clamped my hand over her mouth, anxious that she make no further sound or bring us to the attention of any possible listeners. Huddling down beside her I asked what was wrong.

“On the pole,” she said. “It was climbing. A-and then, one-handed, squeezed it out.”

“What, a light? But that’s impossible. Why would anything trouble to climb the poles and crush the glass when they could simply switch off the power?”

“Maybe they don’t know how it all works,” Beth said.

There was no irony in her voice.

“Well, you don’t see anything do you?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what I see.”

I stood up to look over the top of the mound, and was in time to see a huge winged shape blotting out the remaining lights of the camp, including the red bulbs on the central post. It went soaring over the tents, a black shadow swinging toward us, and I nearly lost my footing in terror until I realized what it was.

“The glider!” Justin said. “Someone’s gotten away.”

It drifted higher as it approached the fissure that had blocked our approach to the camp, and now Beth grabbed my lantern and rose up with it and her own, waving the pair in a signal pattern. Twin beams swept the upper air. The craft veered toward us, seeming to buck on an updraft as it passed above the cleft.

“It sees us!”

“Here he comes!”

Behind the glider, the last of the low lamps went out. Only the central pole with its three red and one tall white bulb remained lit.

We hurried down the treacherous slope, flailing our lanterns. The plane circled above us, humming like a dragonfly. When we reached the ground, the plane passed so low that we could see the pilot’s white face in our lights. He waved, managing a grin despite his obvious exhaustion, and then he lifted again, coming around for a landing. As the glider came about it suddenly dipped one wing drastically, for no apparent reason. I shone my light back at the pilot again, not wanting to blind him, and for an instant my light seemed to glitter on a blank patch of darkness where his face had been. Several of us screamed then, and the plane came down abruptly, crashing into the hard rock floor. We ran for it, and I tugged at Katherine, but she stood stock-still, staring back at the camp. On the central pole, the lowest of the three red lights had gone out.

“Come on,” I said, suppressing my panic. “He may be hurt.”

I would have been more surprised if he’d been alive at all. When we finally caught up with the others standing around the shambles of the craft, there was no need to ask. Beth rose and faced us, shaking her head. There was blood on her fingertips; I pulled my light away, but not before I saw that his head was a crushed ruin. I decided that what I’d seen before his plunge was a premonition. There was no sign of any black thing, nor any reason to think that it and not the fall had destroyed his face.

I don’t think anyone was surprised to find the last of the red lights had been extinguished. And now the white bulb, high on its pylon, began to sway back and forth, stretching our shadows and the shadows of those black heaps around us, causing everything to rock nauseatingly.

Then, matched with the sound we had grown accustomed to, it too went out.

“Now we’ll head back,” Beth said, as if this were the release she’d been waiting for.

Thank god for our lanterns. I had been dead tired from the march when we came in sight of the camp, but all that was fled now; adrenaline gave me new strength to match my renewed sense of purpose, though my nerves were frayed to such an extent that I thought a month’s rest could only begin to heal them.

Our thoughts must have been remarkably similar as we started back toward the trail, across the plain. If the others were at all like me, then they tried not to think of the black fissure, of the silent camp behind us, of the uncharted Reaches spreading away to either side. And the nameless pilot’s fruitless flight, what had it accomplished? Questions like this, for sanity’s sake, were forcibly suppressed. Later would be the time to ask them. Later, when we stood in the sunlight of the world above, where night was a thing that came to an end and not an endless constant. It was important to think of the sun as a reward for our harrowing journey. I was to think of it often in the hours to come, when I could push away those other thoughts.

I’m not sure how long it was before we noticed we’d lost Ward. Ward, who had been without a lantern. Beth was the one who noticed, and none of us could remember who’d last spoken to him, or what had been said. Cursing herself, Beth insisted that we refasten our lines before we made a move toward searching for him. We had been straggling along separately in the dark, watching Beth’s lone leading beam.

Justin began to call his name, but the night seemed to swallow it up without a second chance. No one wanted to head back; and it seemed unlikely that if Ward had strayed away, he would be in any place we were likely to intersect. Why hadn’t he cried out when he lost sight of Beth’s light?

“We can’t just leave him alone out there,” Justin said.

“We’ll be sending a search party back before long, to look for everyone. He won’t get very far, and it should be easy enough to find him if he just holds still and doesn’t blunder into a crevasse.”

That was a gruesome thought. We had crossed several of the black plastic bridges so far. Worse was the thought of what would happen if, in retracing our steps, we found any of the bridges vanished, snatched away, like the one near the camp.

“Come on,” Beth said.

But Justin held his ground, even though she tugged her line taut and threatened to pull him off his feet. “Justin! Listen to me don’t!”

This last command was ignored, as Justin raised his flare gun again and fired another signal flare straight overhead. We stood petrified and blinded as it shot up and up, dwindling. I half expected to see the ceiling lit as it approached, a dim distant reflection in an obsidian lid. But there was none of that. The flare reached its peak and began to fall, and should have continued burning throughout its descent and long after landing. Instead, a quarter of the way down, it snuffed out as completely as any of the lights in the camp.

“A dud,” Justin told us, hopelessly. Beth seized him by the arm and wrenched him away.

“He’s not coming, Justin. We have to keep on. It’s the best hope for him or for any of us.”

Justin began to weep, but it didn’t stop him from following her now. She went in the lead, Justin behind her, and then Katherine, and finally myself. Justin’s weeping, soft and mournful at first, began to turn into ragged curses and phrases I couldn’t at first understand. Gradually I realized, as Beth exhorted him futilely to silence, that he was speaking of the catacombs, of the camp, of something he had seen on his prior visit to the Reaches.

“What about the bridge?” I heard him say, and Beth ignored him pointedly. “Did they push it in? I mean why? To cut off the team’s escape? Or did the team do it, to keep them from crossing over?”

“Shut up.”

“You know what I’m talking about!” he said. “Why don’t you admit it? You know what I mean!”

“Shut up!” she screamed, her voice falling among the rocks of a heap nearby. Then she struck him, hard, on the mouth. Katherine caught him before he fell. He lay unmoving, sobbing through a bloody mouth, his face as red as a wailing infant’s. Beth looked sickened, with herself most of all. She knelt, speaking softly, apologetic now, and clutched at him, trying to draw him to his feet. But he resisted her, rolling about, becoming knotted and snarled in the line. Katherine and Beth finally had to unhook themselves in order to sort out the tangles, and as they began to work at the knots, Justin scrambled to his feet and scurried away, quiet now, as if his sobbing had been a ruse, a distraction, all along.

We all screamed for him now, oblivious of how loud we might have sounded, how far our voices might have carried. Hidden by darkness all around us, still we felt naked and exposed, utterly disadvantaged by the nightscape. No one made a move to follow him except with our lights, and he moved quickly beyond their pale. His own light roamed across the ground, flickering on and off, and as he ran we could hear him calling for Ward. But there was no answer, and eventually his light went out as well.

Katherine and I looked at Beth. Beth looked at the luminous map. Then she clipped herself to Katherine, and we set off again.

We walked abreast now, except where we had to cross bridges. But we didn’t speak. Beth offered no thoughts, and I found I had nothing to say. In the darkness, chameleonlike, I had decided to become more like it myself. We were all reverting to a childlike state; we existed in an aura of pure awe. It was all a strange dream. Katherine’s hand felt very firm and warm, if slightly sticky, in mine. She was like a companion in a dream, a good imaginary friend whom you miss very much when you awake. And God, how I wished for a time that I could have woken, even if it meant losing Katherine.

We were crossing a bridge, not far from the base of the trail. “This is the last bridge,” Beth said. She stopped in the center and looked back briefly, as if waiting to see if Ward and Justin had been tagging behind us all this time, as if now they had decided to show themselves.

Katherine and I stepped to the far end of the bridge. There was some slack in the line connecting Katherine and Beth. Beth wouldn’t move, staring backward, her face hidden from us. I watched the map screen glowing faintly in her hand. It had begun to flicker, that was what caught my attention. I started to point it out to Beth, when something—some density of the darkness, a form with no apparent origin—crept over the map and snuffed it out. Only a tiny dim greenish light, yet its symbolism surpassed in importance the strength of any actual illumination it offered.

“Beth,” I said. “Beth, the map.”

She didn’t move. Katherine, I noticed, had begun to tremble.

“Beth, what is it?”

As I started onto the bridge, Katherine whimpered and pulled me back. I turned to see her unclipping her line, shaking her head. “Don’t you see?” she said to me.

There was a sound that made no sense, and I swung around once more to face Beth. She was making the sound but I couldn’t see how because I could no longer see her face. Her lantern left her fingers, still glowing for the moment; it struck the edge of the bridge and the beam swept upward as the light dropped down into the chasm. It lit Beth’s face, and I remembered the pilot’s face—a brief reminder that nothing is impossible. Katherine pulled me quickly from the bridge, her own light charting the way for us now, and we ran wildly, hand in hand, somehow finding our way to the head of the trail just as our lights, too, went out.

As we headed up, knowing that hours of a taxing climb lay ahead of us, we listened first for the sound of Beth, or anything, following. Sometimes we paused, clinging to each other, and rested for as long as we dared, but only because our bodies would be punished or pushed no more; and like swimmers miles from the shore, who dream only (longingly) of drowning, we forced ourselves to move on as soon as our breathing slowed. All I really wanted was to lie down on the cold slope and stay there till darkness found me. Which was absurd, because of course it already had found me. It owned me, permeated me. I climbed through darkness, swam in it, ate it, inhaled it. And soon… very soon… I became darkness.

For the longest time Katherine failed to realize the change that had come over me. The Reaches were utterly dark, so I was indistinguishable from the rest of it. Her hand rested warm and secure in mine, apparently not noticing how mine continued to grow cold and even insubstantial. Our route grew easier for me;

I felt as if I were floating, sometimes tugging Katherine along behind me, sometimes being towed by her, as if I were a black balloon drifting along behind. Then, climbing higher, we entered the realm of the yawning mouths, those tunnel openings that had frightened me on our descent but which now beckoned, so that I wished to follow their contours inward to the deeper completion of the dark. But a small voice, or a collection of voices, a droning hive of sleeping voices recently awakened, spoke to me, promising a larger emptiness somewhere ahead, a great expanse more suitable to my vastness, something I could swell to fill and feed upon and thoroughly engulf, as it had been my dreaming desire to do for as long as I’d lain bottled in the inner realm.

Katherine saw it first, as I watched her. A grey speck of starlight far above us, dim rays falling down the ceiling that had been my upper limit for impossible ages. I watched her outline dawning ahead of me, her graceful silhouette, the edges of her downy cheeks, the polished crystal convexities of her eyes, oblique rays of light scattering over them, promising immensities, veritable oceans of light just ahead. We were almost there. The nearness of our escape quickened her step and her breathing, and I realized that she was laughing as she pulled me along. Laughing so loud that she couldn’t hear the sound I made, until she glanced back at me and, in the light from above, saw what I had become.

She let go of me then. It was almost painful, and I regretted it. I had grown so used to Katherine that I had almost become her. But now all gentleness fled. Her screaming fell harsh upon the rock as she turned and rushed away from me, toward the bright round opening no more than a hundred feet ahead, the gap through which sunlight streamed freely, that fissure with shards of carved and mortared stone scattered at its base, the broken remains of the Threshold itself, its lintel carved with sigils no one could remember how to read, nearly erased by time and then finished off completely by the helpful excavators.

A hundred feet, and she ran fast, with a good start ahead of me on the narrow trail.

Yet I slipped around her easily and passed through the neck of the evil stone bottle whose exterior was so thickly inhabited by those ignorant of its interior; whose contents had been a black wine aging slowly in the dark, growing more potent with each passing cycle. I slipped out and felt myself expanding, much grown in strength since the time of my confinement, all my voices rising rapturously, my millionfold wings unfurling, black sails hurling me outward into space as they caught and quickened in the all-enveloping—but all too easily smothered—light.

And poor Katherine, coming up to her salvation, found only a black sky, curdling, and me in it.

* * *

“Nether Reaches” copyright 2106 by Marc Laidlaw. Read aloud at a WeirdCon circa 1996. First appeared in print at marclaidlaw.com in 2016.

TOTAL CONVERSION

On his way home from CompUSA with the latest overdrive processor and another 128 megs of RAM chips in the tiny trunk of his Alfa Romeo, Barton Needles cruised slowly past the high school and gazed through the chainlink fence at his so-called peers. It was a scene that should have set him tingling with nostalgia, like something out of a PG-13 teen romance movie: sociable kids taking lunch in the quadrangle, running laps on the track, throwing themselves at football dummies, laughing and shouting. But as the bell rang, calling the students back to classes, Barton mouthed the word “Losers,” and stepped on the gas.

At home, he slung his backpack under the computer desk and nudged the mouse to kill the screensaver, which played continuous looped demos of his personal online Gorefest victories. A dozen e-mails sprang onto the screen, all received since that morning. He idly scrolled and deleted with one hand while gnawing at a tortilla smeared with peanut butter and jelly—he needed fuel before getting to work under the hood.

There were three messages from GoreX: more optimistic notes on business plans and the revised royalty offer for the Skullpulper total conversion. Total bullshit was more like it. He would never work for them again, despite the latest personal pleading e-mail from Tom Ratchip, GoreX’s owner: “Bart, I am asking you as a friend and as your biggest fan to please reconsider your unreasonable position.”

It took him about five seconds to type in, one-fingered, “TTML, AW” and sent the message. Talk To My Lawyer, Ass-Wipe. In other words, his dad.

Ironically, Ratchip had forwarded a handful of semiliterate messages from delirious gamers, praising Skullpulper in what passed for gushing flattery. “wOOpee! Man thass kewl!” “Barton Needles is GOD!” “wtf is Needles doin workin on TCs? IMHO he shud have have his own fkn company—and prolly will!”

My sentiments exactly, Barton thought; and how odd of Tom to send that one along. He “prolly” thought it was magnanimous of him.

He deleted the fan transmissions as fast as he could scan them, holding back only on the last message, caught by its surprisingly formal structure—not to mention the absence of spelling errors.

With stunning architecture, fantastic textures, terrifying new monsters and brilliant new skins for existing monsters, everything about Skullpulper is an improvement on the original game. This is the best Total Conversion we have seen of any game. Given that it is a TC of Gorefest, the reigning blockbuster, this means that Skullpulper is now the best 3D game in the world. Period.

Barton leaned a bit closer to the screen, cramming the last of the tortilla into his mouth. Was this an advance review?—something from an upcoming issue of PC Gamer, maybe?

Then he saw that it hadn’t been forwarded from GoreX after all. The return address read simply: “n01@noware.org.” Mildly weird. Orgs were generally, what, nonprofit groups, religious institutions, stuff like that? The thought of a Skullpulper fan heading up an organized religion was amusing. Like getting fanmail from the Pope.

He continued scrolling through the letter, but the praise of Skullpulper was confined to one paragraph. The next one was far more intriguing:

Because of your obvious brilliance, Mr. Needles, we are writing to inquire as to your team’s availability for another total conversion project.

My team, he thought. That would be me, myself and I.

We have acquired from a third party developer the code to what we consider an extraordinary game. The original program has never been released, and due to legal complications cannot be published or otherwise distributed in its current form. While the source code may not be altered in any manner, we believe that would make your task all the easier. You need not concern yourself with programming or behavior issues, but merely convert the outward appearance of existing game elements. We believe you could accomplish this quite rapidly, and we are prepared to pay extremely well for your services. If you would kindly respond to this e-mail with a simple affirmation (and the appropriate information regarding your financial institution), we will be delighted to demonstrate our intentions by immediate electronic deposit of a one-third advance into any account you specify. Once you have verified the availability of the funds and consented to this project, we will forward everything you need to commence the conversion. You may use your own utilities if you prefer; but we will provide all textures, skins, and entity models for conversion. You may work independently and at your own speed (keeping in mind that time is of the essence), transferring files to us only when you are pleased with them. We will compile the files and, of course, take full responsibility for the ultimate conversion.

Barton was sitting down by the time he’d read this far. Could this be real money? The GoreX boys were a bunch of cheapshit assholes. The artists and programmers were okay, but a bunch of suits had taken over the company since he’d first agreed to do the conversion, and they had done nothing but try to chisel him down and cheat him out of a profit from the moment they’d realized they had a wildfire hit on their hands—something that might give the original game, Gorefest, a run for its money.

If these Noware people were serious, he was prepared to put together something that would blow away even Skullpulper. It would be supremely satisfying to snatch the ground out from GoreX.

He’d have to top himself, work harder than he had on Skullpulper, and of course it all depended on the raw materials he had to work with. He couldn’t imagine how some nonprofit organization had come up with decent code—let alone code competitive with what was already on the market—but they seemed serious. No harm in seeing how serious.

Barton composed a one-letter reply—“Y”—and regretted having to mar its perfect symmetry by appending his clunky account information.

At 4:17 he sent the message. At 4:26, when he walked back into his room, gouging a cold spoon into a pint of espresso ice cream, a reply was waiting in the mailbox: “Electronic deposit complete.”

Was this for real? No organization worked that fast. There were committees, accountants, people who filled out the requests and submitted them to others who had authority, and on and on.

He connected to his bank. Checking deposits. There was something new, today’s date, timeclocked at 4:22 p.m.

At first the amount itself didn’t register. Until he saw the dollar sign in front of it, he thought it was his account number. It had almost that many digits.

* * *

“Well, the money’s clear, but I can’t get a lead on these Noware people,” his father announced the next evening over dinner.

“Keep trying,” Barton instructed. “I’ll start work on the TC. Put that money somewhere nice and warm where it can breed. I won’t touch it yet. I’ll be too busy. This is the last sit-down dinner I’ll be eating with you two for a while.”

“What about school?” his mother asked. “Have you given any thought to going back?”

“Did you see the size of that deposit?” his father asked. “At this point, for what Barton wants to do, school has become irrelevant.”

“This conversation has become irrelevant,” Barton said, pushing away from the table.

He went to his room and organized his desk to the tune of explosions and screams from Gorefest battles. He meant to replace the screensaver with a Skullpulper deathmatch, but so far he hadn’t done much online battling in his own game. The TC had only been available for a week; he’d been busy.

He decided that before beginning on the Noware project, he would treat himself to one last Skullpulper battle—one that would leave his name ringing in the ears of the Pulper community. It was time to liquefy a few skulls.

He pulled on his Intraspexion 3D goggles and connected to GoreWorld, the network of servers dedicated to endless Gorefest and Skullpulper online wars. It took about a second to find a battle in progress; he mouse-clicked on a maelstrom icon and was sucked right in.

“Lord Needles enters fray,” said a little voice in the headset, barely audible above the screams of his first victim. He was in the best of his own deathmatch levels, “The Killing Floor”—three stories of metal ramps and catwalks with adjoining corridors that wove in and out of each other. The Killing Floor was a Möbius strip, a hollow hypercube; you could walk through a gate at one end of a room and find yourself coming in at the far side of the same room. There were ten players already in the map, and as soon as news spread that Lord Needles had jumped in, the number of players joining from other sites began to soar. It topped at thirty-six—the max limit for this level—and by then things were getting crowded.

Lord Needles cleared the mob as fast as it respawned.

From his first victim—a startled blur of neon colors with a human face, quickly transformed into beautifully rendered chunks of flying meat—he had liberated a stomp-gun and an ammo pack. As orange streaks of firebolts began to seek him on his ledge, he spied a lift just rising past. He leapt aboard, riding the platform two levels up, clearing catwalks of upright figures and strewing the room with a rain of bloody meat.

Within seconds he had the high-ground. A Tesla-cannon floated in midair, just out of reach, but for Lord Needles it was money in the bank. A normal jump would fall short, and leave you plunging to the Killing Floor below, which rippled periodically with gnashing spikes as the walls closed in and caught anyone not fortunate enough to have rocket-jumped onto a ledge. Lord Needles turned his back to the gun, slid until his heels were at the edge of empty air, then fired the stomper at the nearest wall. The recoil blew him backward, all the way across the gap; in midflight, with a clang, he snagged the Tesla, then came down smack on a suit of glowing armor that snapped into place around him. He held his fire until the level was full again, crawling with gamers hoping for a shot at him. They’d all go to bed happy tonight, bragging of how they’d actually been reduced to ground-round by Lord Needles himself.

The world is good, he thought. This one, anyway.

* * *

“Who’s building your levels?” he queried n01. “If you want an exciting, comprehensive package, full of traps and murderous surprises, I’m a skilled mapper as well. I can do more than just straight conversion.”

“We understand that you are an excellent level designer,” n01 replied via e-mail. “However, the world is already complete in every respect. It merely needs total conversion, element by element. Please restrict yourself to that task.”

Oh well. Maybe they’d come around. He’d never seen a game yet that couldn’t stand to be improved—unless it was one of his own.

Barton saw no reason not to use the same procedures he’d used when converting Gorefest into Skullpulper. You built a world up from the basics. Code was more basic than textures, but he didn’t have access to that. So he’d start with textures, then do models (and the sounds that went with them), and finally (best for last) invent a new armament.

“The number of textures in the game is immense,” a message from n01 had informed him. “However, if you will kindly assemble the elements of a new visual language, we have utilities to employ your textures as the basis for an almost infinite variation of new patterns.”

So they took shortcuts, but that was kewl. So did he. Even his rush-jobs still had the definitive Needles look. With the money he was making, he could have afforded to hire a few artists, but he prided himself on being a renaissance kid. This was to be his vision, start to finish.

He began with a tile, 64 by 64 pixels square, blown up to fill his screen. One pixel at a time, he began to shade and sketch and manipulate until he had an interesting texture. He used his much-hacked version of Mickey’s MasterPainter, a Disney painting program he’d been using for all his art projects since he was six years old. Sometimes he started with a blank tile; more often he worked from an existing image—such as a photograph or a modified tile from Skullpulper. He designed brown panels striated with darker lines, punctuated with knotholes like long, torn, gaping faces. He made tiles of grainy gray and speckled brown, poking up from matted green, to serve as rocky ground and sparse vegetation. He created panels set with gruesome demonic faces, leering fanged gargoyles. Mushroom-hued alien textures. Metal meshwork smeared with what looked like old, rotten blood. Tessellated grids clotted with hair and tissue. He made everything a designer would want in a world.

After days of unbroken work, Barton began to see his custom textures everywhere. This always happened in the middle of a project. When he lay down to snatch a few hours of sleep, colored tiles replicated themselves on the undersides of his eyelids, wallpapering the interior of his brain with riveted blue panels, ocher brickwork, coppery asphalt. When he woke and wandered upstairs for more of the sugary espresso fuel he craved, the walls seemed to crawl with patterns he had designed. The biggest difference between the visual content of his dreams and his waking hours was the lack of a monitor framing his dreams. And sometimes he dreamed the monitor as well.

It was more than a week before he had a complete set of textures he was happy with—the makings of a new world. He gathered the files into a single pack, zipped it up, and e-mailed it to Noware. That was at 3:14 a.m. on a Saturday.

Just before noon of the same day, when he finally rolled out of bed, there was a message from n01 waiting in his mailbox. He expected, at worst, a mere confirmation: Textures received. At best, the usual raves. What greeted him was both unexpected and unwelcome.

Excellent work, Mr. Needles (may we call you Lord?)! Many of these are everything we had hoped for, and should serve to fill in every aspect of our game. However, we note that overall there is a certain grim, even cruel, quality to the work. We discern little of lightness here, little of humor or human kindness—

“Human kindness?” he said with a sleepy snarl. “What is this shit?”

We are therefore returning certain textures which we consider inappropriate for this conversion, and request that you kindly recast them with a somewhat more benign demeanor. It is our intention that this game be significantly less grueling and gruesome than the usual fare. We believe our conversion will find a ready niche in a world already saturated with bloodlust and senseless violence.

Attached to this message was a file comprised of every tile that was even slightly macabre or sinister: the demon faces, the gory floors, the gears clogged with flesh.

In Barton’s first flush of disgust and indignation, he started a letter like those he had fired at GoreX toward the end of the Skullpulper conversion, letting his venom shape and seethe through every bitter sentence. But gradually he found himself reconsidering such a rash response. If Noware had stated their intentions at the outset, he could have told them to flick off before agreeing to their terms. But now… the money. Yes, the money, already beginning to bubble yeastily and rise like wonderful dough, inflating….

In the end, he deleted the letter.

Why had they picked him for the TC? They knew his work—they’d praised it. Had they sought him out with the ulterior intention of subverting his natural style? He still suspected they were some sort of quasi-religious outfit. Maybe it was Barton himself they wished to convert.

Well, they couldn’t touch him. He would do what they asked, but in the end he would have his way. In the end it would be Lord Needles’s world.

He treated the revision work with economical disdain, devising a program to switch the goriest tones of clotted blood with soothing pinks, soft blues, subdued nursery-room yellows. The multitude of fierce icons were more difficult to alter, but he devised a fractal filter that softened and blurred the masks of evil, then re-sharpened them into whimsical forms. Wicked spikes and jagged fangs softened into curls and spirals like multicolored rotelle pasta. The grimly leering slits of demon-serpent eyes became cheerful crescent moons mounted on the fuzzy cheeks of smiling-snouted orange teddy bears.

Barton reserved the serpent smirks for himself. And carefully laid the groundwork for his subversive masterpiece.

The batch of revised textures, fired back at Noware approximately 12 hours after their rejection, met with no further objection: “Textures received. More than acceptable. Please commence entity conversion based on the attached model files.”

This terse message was accompanied by an immense collection of .mdl files. Once he began to examine the files, he was disappointed to find how utterly unimaginative they were.

No monsters. No aliens. No marine sergeants frothing bloody foam.

Instead, he found people, all sizes and shapes and colors, all ages, but all utterly ordinary. The fact that they were naked was the strangest thing about them. Game models were usually decked in flamboyant colors, military garb, savage armor. So the nakedness of these was odd… but ultimately boring.

His first task, therefore, was to make the models interesting again. That should be no problem. There were enough similarities in the basic human forms that one good all-purpose program would be able to remake the entire tedious population on a global basis.

On a whim, and for consistency’s sake, he went back to the image of the stupid cuddly teddy bear he had concocted for his tiles. Having settled on a basic teddy bear model, he went through the human model files, altering all of them in one sweep, creating a motley army of awkward, patchy teddy bears. He spent the next day tweaking them individually, keeping limbs aligned and furry snouts smiling.

The next group of models was harder to comprehend: batches of limbs, unattached to any creature; horns and fur and scales. There were machine parts, things that looked like the hoods of generic midsized cars, lampstand bases, twigs and fronds. He no longer had any idea what he was altering. He followed his own sense of style, hoping to make all these oddments look as if they shared some common source; he teased the limbs into long strings and let them snap back into floppy curls. He turned gentle arcs into spadelike parabolas. He had never worked in the dark like this before, guided only by a sense of rightness; but after a time he found it addictive. He enjoyed the alterations for their own sake, without a thought to their purpose or ultimate use, or to what sort of game this all added up to. Days passed; and, more importantly, nights, when he hardly stirred from his seat. But while he reveled in the work, his plans for revenge were far from forgotten.

All the grimness, all the cruelty, that was such an essential element of everything he’d done before the Noware TC, he carefully set aside for a private project. It was to be a secret entity, something made all the more hideous by contrast to the warm and whimsical creatures which surrounded it.

Barton distilled his conception of evil into a hybrid bearing the worst features of every monster he had ever wrought or dreamed of. A Demon Lord. In scale, it was several hundred times the size of the human figures; it was gray and black and dripping with blood; its maw a festering pocket of abscessed fangs and sucking lamprey tongues. Its body was a slimy mass of chancres from which razor-hooked tendrils uncurled, and it moved on a carpet of insect legs that could adhere to any surface. It was covered with eyes and armor, and was all but unstoppable. He decided to include one—and only one—weapon in the artillery pack which, if cleverly used, might kill it.

The hardest thing was finding the right sound for the beast. He experimented for days until hitting upon a satisfactory noise, achieved by feeding glass and bone and masses of sinewy fat into the kitchen sink garbage disposal and recording the gurgling, grinding sound with a microphone taped to the plumbing down where the razors whirled. By raising this to an almost intolerably high pitch, he captured what sounded like a scream of demonic triumph.

The Demon Lord would be Barton Needles’s signature. Anyone who played the game would recognize his handiwork as soon as the monster devoured them.

But naturally he could not simply e-mail the Demon Lord to n01@noware.org and expect accolades. He could imagine their shock and horror, and then their polite rejection. Well, he would not give them a chance to reject it before letting them know what he thought of their namby-pamby vision of a peaceful world. First, there would be a good long reign of carnage.

Noware had unknowingly delivered the means of its undoing into his hands. The original collection of models had been accompanied by a large DLL file—a dynamic link library containing a number of animation and other routines shared by many of the models. Changes to the models necessitated changes to the animation functions; and Noware had entrusted him with this rudimentary programming task.

He compressed his Demon Lord data and hid the unlabeled array among others in the DLL. He then found an ordinary animation function, one that would be called fairly frequently during runtime, and made one minor alteration: at random intervals the normally useful function would return a pointer not to an ordinary animation function, but to the Demon Lord array. The game would then decompress, load, and let loose the monster.

If Noware eventually did locate the monster array and tried to remove it, all model animations would fail. Meanwhile, it was self-triggering, and would spawn at random but frequent intervals. Over time, if the creatures were not killed, there would be hordes of them all through the game. By then, of course, the hard-core gamers would have risen to the challenge and mastered the tricks of the arsenal.

On the other hand, no hard-core gamer of Barton’s experience would spend more than two minutes in this particular world anyway. With all its soft edges and pastel colors, it would repel them instantly. It was just as well he was working anonymously. A world like this would be death to his reputation… except for the Demon Lord aspect.

He would do things differently next time. Not that there need be a next time. Once he’d been paid in full for the Noware TC, he would have the capital he needed to start his own company, with a few hand-picked employees. He’d rent an office on the cheap end of Water Street, and a renaissance of coolness would surely crystallize around his arrival. He’d buy a new car… something fast and flashy and astronomically expensive. Yes, it was time to think along those lines.

He packed up the model files and shipped them off to Noware. The money was almost his. Nothing remained now but to create or convert an arsenal of weapons, an immensely enjoyable task after so much tiptoeing around. It was hard to imagine how even the grubs at Noware could expect him to make chainguns and rocket launchers seem sweet and innocent. Ultimately, a weapon was a weapon, even if it shot marshmallows and had a fuzzy pink handgrip.

Acknowledgment arrived no more than forty-five minutes after he’d sent off the models.

Dear Lord Needles:

Thank you for delivery of your model pack. The models appear more than satisfactory—certainly there is nothing in the least offensive or inappropriate here; further minor modifications can be attended to by our staff if necessary. We have deposited the balance of your payment in the account you previously specified. We thank you for your participation in our TC, and look forward to working with you in the future should any similar project ever again arise.

Barton’s surprise was enormous. He typed a hasty response: “I don’t understand. I’m still waiting to convert the weapons pack. If you gave that work to someone else I’ll be really p.o.’d—and you don’t want to p. me o.!”

His fingers slammed and skittered on the keyboard. He smashed the Send button and waited in a fury for n01’s reply.

It came almost instantly:

All weapons code has been expunged from source. No weapons in our TC. This is to be a peaceful game as we have previously stated. Thank you again for your participation. All elements are in place, and we have received final approval to embark on Total Conversion immediately. We trust you will be pleased with results.

Barton couldn’t force himself to stay at the screen another moment. He got up snarling and stormed out of his room.

It seemed to be morning—what hour exactly, or what day, he felt unsure. His mother wavered in the kitchen doorway until she saw his face; then she retreated to the safety of her pots and pans. He rushed out of the house, past his neglected Alfa Romeo. He didn’t trust himself to drive right now; he would kill someone—maybe even himself. Well, he wasn’t stupid or rash, and he wasn’t about to take chances like that. He felt as if he hadn’t been out of the house, or used his legs, or felt the sunlight in weeks. He was not far wrong.

Usually—in a deathmatch for instance—rage and thoughts of revenge sharpened his mind, providing a clear black background to his thoughts, allowing him to stalk and slay his enemies with deadly precision. Today, for some reason, murk accompanied the anger. The sky was blue, the streets looked fresh and bright, as if a storm had swept them and moved on; but his mood clouded everything. He kept surfacing to find that he’d walked another few blocks. He soon found himself downtown, entering the town square. Trees threw their shadows over him. Up ahead, preschoolers clambered on a climbing structure. A dog chased a Frisbee.

Good, he told himself, calmed by the exercise. You’re getting a grip.

It was better to plan his next move, and put Noware behind him. He had their money now, that was all that really mattered. With money he could do anything: start his own company, take all the time he needed to make a game that was pure Barton Needles, pure and unadulterated evil. Yes, his next game would be everything the Noware conversion was not.

In that moment of anticipatory calm, he realized he had made himself dizzy by rushing out so quickly after weeks of concentrated mental effort. Dizzy and sick. That explained why the world seemed to be rippling—and why he saw his textures everywhere he looked, as if they were pouring out of his eyes again. Maybe it also explained why the pine trees were suddenly wrapped in blue and scarlet fleurs-de-lis with ornate tessellations; and why the thin, beaded trickles of sap shimmered with a weird fluorescent orange glow.

He headed toward a park bench to sit down, but it was changing, growing narrower at the ends, beginning to sag and spiral into limp dangling curls like the tendrils of a creeping plant. He crouched in the grass and put his head between his knees, eyes shut, hoping his textures would stop crawling over everything he saw.

He would get help next time. He wouldn’t try to do it all himself. It was too much for one kid to make over an entire world. He kept his eyes closed until he saw only sparkling darkness, devoid of the self-created patterns he’d been staring at for weeks.

When he opened his eyes, he gazed straight down at the grass and earth underfoot.

The grass was red. The earth beneath the blades was purple, faintly shot through with lime. Things were crawling in the soil—things like soft enormous pink ants with floppy legs.

Barton shot upright—too fast, for it made him even dizzier. As the world spun, he saw it had been completely remade with his textures. He couldn’t stop seeing them no matter where he looked. The buildings at the far edge of the square were all colors but the proper ones; they were shaped like enormous saggy mushrooms, puddling on the soft cushions of streets that were not so much paved as upholstered.

Barton turned and ran toward home, hoping he could find his way now that he’d lost his senses.

Near the edge of the square, something darted to and fro, dragging a leash across grass that stubbornly refused to revert from red. If he squinted his eyes it was still mostly a dog, but the sound it made was not at all canine. Where had he heard it before? It shot between his legs, snagging him in the dragging leash. Somewhere in the distance he could hear its owner piping on a weird shrill dog whistle. Hopelessly tangled, Barton fell. As the dog circled toward his face, he braced for a licking.

Then he remembered where he had heard the creature’s call. Like the textures, it was something he’d carried in his head that had somehow spilled out into the world. It was glass and bone and metal and meat, all grinding together in a bottomless bubbling throat.

The cries, with all their overtones of impending total victory, grew louder as the Demon Lord overshadowed the square, then dimmed to a muted slurping as the first of many lamprey tongues found his face.

Next time they’ll want weapons, Barton thought indignantly. Lots of weapons!

His final conscious act was the unhappy one of seeking his reflection in a million rheumy eyes, but failing. There were no Lord Needles or even Bartons anywhere.

All he saw were a million orange teddy bears, screaming.

* * *

“Total Conversion” copyright 1999 Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1999.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM: HALF-LIFE & LESSONS HALF-LEARNED

The early millennium, as anyone who lived through it can attest, was a time of almost constant crisis, social and political.

But enough about all that! I was having trouble writing videogames!

Half-Life had been well-received by the public, but behind the scenes it had felt like a desperate, last-minute salvage operation, barely cobbled together out of spare parts. Now I was floundering as I tried to figure out how we might develop a more stately, well-proportioned narrative for Half-Life 2. At some point, I realized that I could no longer tell if I was any good at the thing I was supposed to do. I wasn’t sure I could write anymore. I made several erratic attempts to return to my roots, to sharpen my tools, to flip through my life’s thesaurus.

I had given up any thought of writing another novel; game design had taken over that part of my brain. But it seemed like a reasonable self-compromise to write the occasional short story.

Anyway, as I said, it was a time of strife and crisis and videogames. “Sleepy Joe” was my response to 9/11, and I trust it did far less harm than invading Iraq, even though I undertook the story without the backing of any of my traditional allies.

Several stories written in this period simply channeled my idiot love of video games (“An Evening’s Honest Peril” is pure fanfic) or tried to capture the dizzying oddness of making them for a living (“The Vicar of R’lyeh”). “Sweetmeats” was the fulfillment of a long-held wish to express my debt to Roald Dahl’s Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, the novel that more than any other had made me want to be a writer.

Rudy Rucker’s self-published online zine Flurb was the perfect venue for stories I wanted to write but knew would be very hard to sell. Writing these, sending them to Rudy, felt a bit like sitting at the back of a stuffy lecture hall, cackling and drawing cartoons to share with your friend.

There was no thought of being respectable, and little thought at this point of ever again having a typical career as a writer. Hey, I was writing games for a living!

Whatever was in the air, it wasn’t typical.

SLEEPY JOE

The plan must have come to Rog fully formed that first morning, as he stepped off the elevator into the lobby of Szilliken Sharpenwright and saw the old soldier newly stationed there in his omnichair between the potted silk ferns and the coffee tables.

“Oh. My. God. I am in love.”

Megan, her arms loaded with Rog-House props and paraphernalia she hadn’t had time to ditch yet, said, “You say that an awful lot for someone who styles himself completely asexual. Not to mention atheistic.”

“There’s no conflict! He’s completely post-human!”

“Hm. You two even look a bit alike.”

“Oh please don’t say that. You flatter me.” He stalked up to the omnichair, tugging at the collar of his black turtleneck, adjusting his thick black plastic spectacles. Crouching down before the chair’s inhabitant, he put out a stick-thin finger, gingerly. “Can I touch him?”

Antoinette, the receptionist, said, “He’s not in yet, do you want his voicemail? Be my guest. I just wish he’d stop staring at me. Law offices.”

Megan watched Rog examining the old soldier. They did look alike. Rog was completely hairless. He scrubbed his head with some kind of depilatory agent that had eradicated even his eyebrows. The old vet, in the omnichair which hummed and slurped and quietly took care of all his hidden functions, was similarly shorn, although in a military style. Unlike Rog, he had eyebrows like bristly fiberoptic filaments with a faint orange light playing through them. And where Rog blinked continually behind his thick lenses, the old vet’s eyes were half-open, sleepy-lidded, and actual blinks came so infrequently that it would be days before Megan had a confirmed sighting. His face, in sharp contrast to Rog’s utterly unblemished pallor, was dark, creased, chapped—like a weathered boulder sharpened by the elements, instead of worn away. But there was nothing sharp about the expression. The brain inside could have been a lump of dough, to judge by the drowsy eyes.

“Could you turn him to face the elevators?” Antoinette called across the lobby. “Gives me the creeps, him staring at me. And he’s got some kind of smell. Law offices.”

Megan didn’t smell anything except perhaps a whiff of machine oil, which she supposed had something to do with the chair. But she took the handles of the chair and wheeled it around to face the elevator bank. On the back of the seat was a small embossed label: Property of Civilian Rehabilitation Foundation.

Rog stayed crouched before the chair, declaiming poetically under his breath, even as she shifted it. “Oh veteran of foreign wars unnameable, at least by me. Defender of this hoary law firm’s priceless horde of Fortune Magazines and rented modern art. I welcome you. I honor and appreciate all that you have done at great personal sacrifice to keep this country safe for me and my community access cable show, the Rog-House. As seen each Tuesday at 2 a.m. I hope I can someday prove myself worthy to call you a fan, as I am of you.”

“Rog,” Megan said.

“Hush a moment, we’re communing.”

“Rog, I need coffee.”

“Elixir of Mammon.”

She turned aside. “Whatever!” And halfway down the hall to her cubicle she looked back and saw him still gazing deep into the old vet’s eyes. “I’ll drop this crap on your desk!” she said. He waved her off with a distracted hand.

At that moment, Mr. Szilliken himself arrived, striding from the elevators with the look of extreme distaste he reserved especially for Rog.

“Get away from my sentry!” he snapped.

Rog straightened up like an odd black heron on stilts, stumbling backward, barely catching himself. “Sorry, Mr. Szilliken.”

“Show some respect and stay out of his face.”

Megan rushed back. “Hey, Rog, you said you Acco’d that full set of exhibits last night? I need it for a rush filing. Good morning, Mr. Szilliken.”

“Good morning, Miss Megan!” A smirky smile and a wink, saved especially for his favorite paralegals. She shuddered and knew it wouldn’t register. “I suppose you noticed the latest addition to the firm?”

“We were just admiring him. I think it’s great you volunteered for this.”

“Well, there’s a small fee involved, but it’s not much to pay for his eternal vigilance. I’m a vet myself, you know.”

“You mentioned. Come on, Rog. I already called a courier.”

She stuffed her load of kitty-cat ears and pig snouts on elastic bands into Rog’s arms, and hauled him away from Szilliken. She could feel the old name partner watching her ass all the way to the end of the corridor.

“Thanks for the rescue.”

“You owe me a coffee.”

“I owe you one anyway for keeping you up all night.” He untangled a pig’s snout from the supply in his arms, and cupped it over his nose.

“No, that I do gratis,” she said. “Pro bono. For the Rog-House.”

“Oh my God, Megan,” he said suddenly, sounding more nasal than usual under the pink snout. “I just had an amazing idea.”

“That’s because you’ve been awake for 24 hours straight.”

“I’m going to put him on my show.”

“Who… oh no. You can’t do that, Rog. It’s completely crazy.”

“All the more reason!”

“Rog… they’ll fire you. And worse.”

“You’ll see.”

* * *

Despite his protestations of post- or trans-humanity, Rog was a sloppy sentimentalist. Megan suspected he affected the robot thing for contrast. And although the old vet quickly slewed in status from waiting-room weirdo to office mascot, it was Rog who lavished actual affection on him, in the way of party hats and thrift-store scarves and doilies of only slightly yellowed lace for the arms of the omnichair. While an attendant from the Vets Administration came by twice a week (and hauled him away completely on weekends) to change the chair’s canisters and replace various tubes, Rog was a constant ministering presence. He propped magazines in the vet’s lap. He brought in CDs he thought the vet would appreciate and had Antoinette pipe them through the lobby. (Rog’s tastes were just old fashioned enough that it seemed quite possible the vet might have listened to, and even loved, such strained melodies in his youth.) All this gave him a semblance of life, to which some reacted badly—particularly Mr. Szilliken, who found all Rog’s attentions inappropriate.

“Roger!” Szilliken stepped out of the elevator, irritated to find Rog settling an embroidered sampler across the old soldier’s knees. He gave a wink to Megan, then instantly shut it off and turned back to Rog. “Get away from him! I’ve talked to you before about tampering with my property. By the way, I’m going to need you here tonight, pulling exhibits for my hearing tomorrow in Landauer. Megan can give you more information. She’ll be staying as well.”

Megan stiffened. It was the first she had heard about it. The assignment was clearly intended as punishment for Rog, though it was not entirely out of character for Szilliken to drop all-nighters on Megan just as she was preparing to head home.

Rog flashed her a desperate look.

“But… but Mr. Szilliken, I’m supposed to tape my show tonight. I’ve booked time in the studio already, and—and I’m going to need Megan there as well. She’s my right hand man.”

“You know what I say to that,” Szilliken growled. “If you can’t handle the responsibility of a paralegal career, I suggest you go find yourself some form of employment that doesn’t involve a framed certificate.”

Downcast, Rog chewed his pocked cheek. “No, I… I’ll stay and work with Megan.”

“Really? Are you sure? Because you’re welcome to go home any time you wish.”

“It’s no problem.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

Szilliken glared at him, making his contempt quite plain. Rog’s eyes flicked sideways to the old vet, and then away, as if he were embarrassed to be seen in such a light, humiliated by the lawyer. Rog was too well mannered or repressed to curse under his breath as Szilliken walked away, but the old lawyer glanced back once as if expecting to discover some treachery at his back.

“Sigh,” said Rog, instead of actually sighing.

“Sorry, Rog. I didn’t see that coming either. On the other hand, Landauer is a class action suit. We can order cordon bleu, eat like pigs, and put it on the public’s tab.”

“Oink,” he said dispiritedly.

* * *

Shortly after 8:30, just as they were digging through piles of documents and Rog was clipping sections of the Supreme Court Reporter for copying, Szilliken waltzed through the lobby and gave Megan a jaunty farewell. “See you bright and early!” And to Rog: “No sneaking in at eight fifteen.” He tapped the old vet on the shoulder as he waited for the elevator. “Keep an eye on ’em for me, Joe.”

Ding!

The elevator opened and closed, carrying off Szilliken.

“The nerve,” Megan said.

“What do you mean?” Rog said excitedly, shoving the law books aside. “I thought he’d never leave!”

“So we’re stuck here all night doing his damn work… that doesn’t bother you?”

“Not tonight it doesn’t, because as soon as a suitable period of mourning has passed, we’re getting out of here.”

“What? Where?”

“The studio, doll. Where else?”

“No way, Rog. That’s suicide.”

“Then it’s going to be a double suicide, lovey. Because I’ve got big plans for this one, and I can’t do it without you.”

“Not.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“There are forty-two parties to serve in this case. I’m going to be up half the night just stuffing envelopes!”

“Those can go out in the afternoon mail; we just need enough to send Szilliken off to court. We can do the show and get back here in time, and you know it.”

“No way. No way, no way, no way.”

“And not only that, but the old soldier’s coming with us.”

“You can’t do that. He’s here to protect the firm—night and day. What if, what if something happens while he’s out? He’s government property! You know what’ll happen to us?”

“Nothing will happen except… we’ll put together the best damn episode of the Rog-House the world has ever seen!”

Half an hour later, they were wheeling the old vet out to a waiting cab. The driver had apparently seen more than one omnichair in his day, because he handily undid the tubes and belts and clasps and Velcro fastenings, collapsed the chair with a liquid sound, and stuffed it into the trunk. Megan meanwhile manhandled the old vet onto the back seat, finding him light as a moth. She and Rog sat on either side of him, propping him up between them.

“So,” said the driver when they’d given directions, “I see you got yourself a Sleepy Joe.”

“He’s in rehab,” said Rog.

“I’ve been seeing them all over lately. Must be quite a backlog at the VA hospital. They’re getting more popular at banks and grocery stores. Saw one at Gas and Electric the other day when I was paying my bill. They must come cheap.”

“Well, our friend here is rather special. I’d go so far as to say he’s unique. And we’re planning to make a star out of him.”

“A star? Oh really.”

“I’m the host of the Rog-House. Perhaps you didn’t recognize me without my platinum wig.”

“Contrary to popular preconception, all cabbies don’t live to watch porno. I was just noticing that the fella you’ve got there seems wound pretty tight.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he was a sentry wasn’t he? They shipped these guys off to some godforsaken hole, right? I mean, literally. Stuck them in a foxhole or a cave and then just kept them waiting there, wound up like an alarm clock, in hibernation basically, until some thing, whatever they’re primed for, set them off. You know, enemy movement… political target goin’ down the road…”

“Fascinating,” Rog said. “Did you know that, Megan?”

Megan looked more closely at the old vet’s craggy features. He jiggled as the cab jostled along, with the liquid reflections running over his unblinking eyes.

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

“Sure!” The cabby had inside knowledge. “They’d drop a Sleeper into some locale where they expected trouble someday… but no time soon. Where they needed Johnny on the spot and wanted to be sure and have someone on the inside extra early, to be ready for anything. Used a combination of drugs, wiring, whatever… kept them waiting indefinitely for the trigger. Some of these guys, I heard a lot about it on talk radio, they’d go into trances so deep it’s like time just came to a stop. And for lots of them, the action’d go by, right? The gov would extract them, maybe snap them out of it, maybe not. So in this guy’s case, and a lot of the other Sleepers, he never did snap. I mean, look at him. Doesn’t look like he ever snapped a pretzel. He’s still wound up. A lot of ’em, personally, I think they just burned out and they’ll never come out of it. This rehab thing is just for P.R. Supposed to make people feel good about the whole effort. But you’ll notice they stopped the program.”

“In other words, they don’t make them like this anymore,” said Rog with a touch of sniffy pride.

“Good thing, too. There’s probably more on the streets than in the banks. Hey, I’m a vet myself. I know how easy it is to get steamrollered if you’re not right in their face asking for what’s yours. Hell of an honorable discharge. They probably think if they give these guys a chair, they’ve done their duty by ’em. Cut ’em loose. Is it somewhere around here? Man, this neighborhood sucks. Don’t expect me to wait for you.”

“The studio’s right here. And we’re perfectly safe.”

Megan never felt safe until they were actually inside the studio. She stood on the slimy curb hugging herself while Rog opened up his wallet and thumbed through his cash, counting bills by the flickering light of a streetlamp on the edge of failure. The district was dark and empty. There was no obvious threat except maybe that of tetanus. But as always, she had the sense of someone watching from the shadows, bleary eyes waiting for them to make a false move.

The driver pulled the chair out of the trunk and they fit the old vet into it. She hurried toward the door of the warehouse, urging Rog to unlock it before the cab pulled away.

Inside, they passed through yet another locked door and into a cavernous room where quilted pads, and in some cases simple white sheets, hung from the walls. There was a row of rickety aluminum bleachers for any audience that might have been in attendance. Rog had been known to rope in a few other paralegals when his a capella group gave a performance, but usually it was just Rog and Megan and whatever guest they had managed to snare.

The first time Rog brought her to “the studio,” Megan had expected banks of monitors, busy technicians, a full-time staff. The reality was quite different. It was a shoestring operation, designed to be run single-handedly if necessary. Plenty of cable access programs were solitary endeavors, one person reading poetry or ranting about conspiracies before a fixed camera. There was a single camera, a computer with some basic editing software installed, and several monitors which Rog had to position so that he could see himself at all times. The edges of the room were piled with boxes full of crummy styrofoam props.

Rog switched on the few spotlights, then pulled a fat sofa chair into the brightest spot. Megan’s somewhat smaller chair, more patched with duct tape, went to Rog’s left. The old vet was granted the place of honor at Rog’s right hand.

While Rog set up the camera, and pulled his silvery Warhol wig into place, Megan paced nervously in front of the chairs.

“What are we going to do with him, Rog?”

“I was planning a Veteran’s Day special. It’d be good to have that in the bank.”

“But… what if someone recognizes him? I know it’s unlikely anyone will ever see this, but… just in case…”

“Never fear.” Rog produced several of the essential props he always carried with him. Cat ears and pig snouts, on elastic bands.

To the vet he said, “We’d be honored, honestly, if you would join us. I hope you don’t mind.”

He slipped the snout onto the vet’s knife-sharp nose and stood back to admire his handwork. “Magnifique!” he said, pronouncing the “g.”

Megan laughed behind her hand. Somehow it broke her sense of growing anxiety. They were doing the show; they were really doing it. This was going to be cool.

She took her own pig nose from Rog and put it on; and then the cat ears which she alone wore.

“Solidairnosh!” Rog proclaimed.

“God, Rog… just imagine what Szilliken would say!”

“Of all the people we don’t have to worry about watching the show. Places, everyone!”

Giddy, Megan took her seat. Rog made his last adjustments to camera, computer and wig, then came over and dropped into his overstuffed chair. Megan looked up to see the three of them on the monitor. They were well framed. It would have been nice to have an operator tonight, but these last minute programs never allowed for frills, apart from whatever Rog would add in the editor after the basic show was shot.

“Hello,” Rog said, primly folding his hands in his lap, addressing the camera. “And welcome once again to the Rog-House. I’m Rog, and this is my inseparable co-host, Miss Megan, and we would like to welcome a very special guest… direct from Civilian Rehabilitation… please extend a hearty howdy-do to our very own Sleepy Joe! Um… Miss Megan? Is that your cell-phone?”

Megan heard the muted chirping coming from out beyond the lights. She jumped out of her seat and grabbed her purse where she’d set it on a bleacher.

Still within the camera’s eye, Rog continued with his duties: “I can’t imagine who would be calling Miss Megan at this critical juncture, but let’s listen in, shall we? Miss Megan, be sure to speak up so we can all enjoy your conversation!”

Megan waved him to silence. “Hello?”

A grim voice squawked at her. “Megan? Where the hell are you? I tried reception and the conference room phone.”

“Oh, Mr.—Mr. Szillikin! Uh, we had to go downstairs for some folders…” She turned and faced Rog and made desperate, eye-bulging, throat-cutting, fish-out-of-water gestures at him. Rog went white. Whiter. “…wh-where are you?”

“I’m at home, but I’m heading back to the office. I just realized I left a whole load of horseshit on my desk that I need to get ready for tomorrow. I want you to get it organized for me before I get there… make a copy of everything. Are you taking this down?”

“Just a sec… I need to get a pen…”

Szilliken started unreeling instructions she could barely pretend to follow.

Rog was moaning. “Oh god oh god…”

“Give me… give me an hour and I’ll have everything ready,” she promised.

“Make sure Rog helps you. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“Okay… see you…”

She stuffed the phone in her purse. “We have to get back. Now. Get ready, I’m calling a cab.”

Rog hurried about shutting off lights and powering down the computer. Megan waited on hold at the cab dispatch number, and finally got a human on the other end.

“We can have someone to you in forty five minutes,” she heard.

“Forty five? But we were just dropped off here ten minutes ago! Can’t we get the same guy back?”

Rog was already pushing the vet out the door. “We’ll flag someone down,” he called. “Hurry, Megan!”

“Yeah, hurry,” she said, stuffing the phone back into her purse. “As if I need you to tell me that.”

Outside, Rog was rushing over the sidewalk like a kid racing a shopping cart down the aisle of a grocery store. “Wait up!” He idled unhappily until she caught up. “Where are you going?” she asked.

She had thought the main street was dark. Rog pointed down an even darker one. “There’s a busy street about three blocks from here… plenty of traffic. We’ll have to cut through here to save time.”

“I’m not going in there.”

“You want to lose your job?” And he started off without waiting any longer.

She caught her breath and plunged after him. I shouldn’t be afraid, she told herself. There’s no one here. Who would haunt such a derelict district? Bums? You’d have to wait forever for a handout. Even muggers would find victims hard to come by.

Halfway down the block, she slammed into Rog, knocking his scintillant wig right off his head into the dark. He had come to a hard stop. Just ahead, as she strained her eyes trying to penetrate the gloom, she saw a few… shapes. Seated and waiting. Something about them was familiar. Seated figures, men in the dark. They were sitting very still. Then they started to rise.

The chairs. She knew those chairs. Omnichairs.

She couldn’t tell who was making the sound that came next. It seemed to be coming from the figures in front of them and from the old vet, at the same time. It was a low horrible growl that slowly grew louder and more shrill.

“Help!” Rog screamed. “Help us, somebody!”

They’d been ambushed. There would be no rescue. The whining, wailing sound suddenly exploded as Megan and Rog both screamed.

The old vet, at that instant, burst out of his omnichair. He was a blur in the shadows, but a blur of motion. The snarling was his. The others converged on him, drawn together into a solid clot of darkness. Megan’s stomach turned at the sounds of rending, the muffled shrieks and animal noises.

“Rog, come on!” She grabbed him by the hand, already running, past the commotion, down the dark street, toward the promise of traffic noises somewhere ahead. Seconds later, as they reached the first functional streetlight, Rog actually passed her. He was still pushing the chair.

“Get in!” he said.

“No way.”

“Megan, it’ll look weird if I’m pushing an empty chair, people will remember. We need to get back without… without drawing attention. Forget about the cab.”

“What’s happening back there, Rog?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Now get in the chair.”

He didn’t slow down for her. She had to drop into the seat while he was running. The chair sloshed as she sank into it, but there were hard things in the gelatinous pads, things that shifted as she moved and then reasserted themselves. She didn’t want to think about what the chair must do to take care of the old vet, day in, day out. They turned a corner and she saw a steady stream of cars, a block ahead. But Rog didn’t go that way. He kept on the parallel street, which was darker and depopulated and would eventually get them back to the offices of Szilliken Sharpenwright.

Megan closed her eyes, trying to decide if there was anything else she ought to be doing to save her own neck. But her thoughts were scattered all over. Those omnichairs back in the alley. More old soldiers? Sleepers? Did they wait there, drowsing in the cold and dark, like dormant ticks waiting for blood-warmth to draw near?

Something groped her from beneath.

“Jesus!” she cried.

“Stop moving!” He pushed down on her shoulder as tubes pressed up between her legs like intelligent, insistent catheters, trying to find their way in.

“No! It’s this chair! It’s… doing something to me…”

“Megan, sit still.”

“God damn it, no!” She gave up trying to fight off the chair’s advances, and jumped out completely.

Rog came to a stop. “What?” he said.

“You sit in it. Let me push.”

Sigh. “Don’t complain when you’re the one with sore feet.”

Rog dropped into the chair. His eyes widened. Then he shrieked and leapt back to his feet.

“You see? I’d rather have sore feet than…”

“Never mind! I’ll push.”

He took the chair handles again and didn’t say another word about anyone riding.

They ran through the night, toward the office towers. Megan tried not to think about the fact that Mr. Szilliken was bent on the same destination.

After awhile she realized that Rog was muttering something under his breath.

“What’s that?”

“He… he saved me, Megan. He gave his life for me.”

“He doesn’t even know you exist, Rog.”

“Yes he does. He knows me. He… he wouldn’t have done that otherwise. Sacrificed himself like that.”

“He just snapped because he’s programmed for it… it was something he knew. You heard the cabbie. He was all wound up.”

“It was more than that, Megan. He did it for me. Maybe for us. I’m sure of it. Sleepy Joe cares for us.”

“You’re slowing down,” she said.

* * *

As they approached the building, reality snapped into sharper focus, and she began to worry about their immediate situation. On the outside chance that they might beat Szilliken to the office, they had to get their story straight.

“We… we have the chair,” Rog said. “We’ll just put it back by the elevators and say, say, we were working away, we—”

“—we went downstairs, that’s what I told him,” Megan finished. “We went downstairs for some exhibit folders, and when we came up he was gone.”

“That’s good, that’s fine. Exhibit folders. And we didn’t call because…”

“Well, we freaked. We’ve been looking for him.”

“Freaked! That’s good. We can definitely pull that off.”

They rushed through the deserted street-level plaza beneath the building, boarded the elevator, and tried to catch their breath as the car rose 40 floors. Megan’s ears popped repeatedly.

Ding!

The doors opened.

She had prepared herself to find Mr. Szilliken waiting for them with a look of certain doom on his battleship grey face. But he wasn’t there, and for a moment she felt herself overcome by relief. The conference room was empty, the tables still piled with their unfinished tasks.

Then relief was replaced by shock.

There was someone in the waiting room, seated on the couch.

The old soldier had beat them to the office. He’d come home by some shorter route and resumed his sentry post at the elevator bank. He sat there with the same sleepy-lidded face he always wore. Eyes like raisins, face a lump of dough. Just as before. Except…

Now he was naked. A few tatters of his old clothes clung to his collarbone, fastened around his throat by the one remaining button. His pale, mole-ridden body was covered with colorless hair, streaked with grimy welts, blood smears and dark scabs. A huge gash ran like a gaping skull suture across his shaved scalp. Worst of all, his arms were glistening red all the way up past the elbows, and a butcher shop reek rose from the gore-clotted sofa cushion.

“Oh my god,” Rog said quietly. “I… I don’t believe it. We’re saved!”

He pushed the omnichair forward, and Megan, still speechless, joined him at the couch. Rog started to pull the vet up from the cushions.

“Give me a hand, let’s get him back in his chair.”

“Are you crazy? We have to get him cleaned up… and dressed! Where the hell are we going to find clothes for him? And look at these cushions! What are we going to do about…”

Ding!

“We are so… dead,” Megan whispered. That was the only sound for a moment.

She turned around slowly.

Mr. Szilliken stood there with his briefcase dangling. It slid to the floor after a moment, but the lawyer didn’t move; his finger remained crooked on nothing. His eyes went to the conference room table, taking in pile upon pile of unfinished work. Then they fixed on the old soldier. Ignoring the blood, ignoring the scarred naked frame, he seized upon the most outrageous detail: The rubber pig snout still clinging to the dreamy face. It must have been the simplest part of the scene to comprehend.

Szilliken crossed the lobby in three strides and snatched the snout from the sentry’s cheeks. The band snapped with a twang.

The lawyer spun toward Rog, waving the snout in his face.

“You!” he screamed. “How dare you abuse my property!”

“He’s not property,” Rog said quietly.

“Shut up! You’ll be lucky if I don’t kill you!”

“Please don’t say that,” Megan said.

“Do you hear me, Roger?”

But Roger didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Behind Szilliken, the old vet was rising, straightening from the couch, shuffling forward slowly with a look of devotion in his warming eyes. When he spoke, his voice was creaky with disuse, like an ancient engine turning over, shedding flakes of rust.

“Don’t worry, kids,” he fondly croaked. “Let me take care of this.”

* * *

“Sleepy Joe” copyright 2001 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at The Infinite Matrix, edited by Eileen Gunn.

CELL CALL

He wasn’t used to the cell phone yet, and when it rang in the car there was a moment of uncomfortable juggling and panic as he dug down one-handed into the pocket of his jacket, which he’d thrown onto the passenger seat. He nipped the end of the antenna in his teeth and pulled, fumbling for the “on” button in the dark, hoping she wouldn’t hang up before he figured this out. Then he had to squeeze the phone between ear and shoulder because he needed both hands to finish the turn he’d been slowing to make when the phone rang. He realized then that for a moment he’d had his eyes off the road. He was not someone who could drive safely while conducting a conversation, and she ought to know that. Still, she’d insisted he get a cell phone. So here he was.

“Hello?” he said, knowing he sounded frantic.

“Hi.” It was her. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the car.”

“Where?”

“Does it matter that much?”

“I only meant, are you on your way home? Because if you are I wanted to see if you could pick up a pack of cigarettes. If you have money.”

“I’m on my way home, yes.” He squinted through the window for a familiar landmark, but considering the turn he’d just taken, he knew he was on a stretch of older suburban road where the streetlights were infrequent. There was parkland here, somewhere, and no houses visible. “But I don’t think there’s a store between here and home.”

“You’ll pass one on the way.”

“How do you know which way I went?”

“There’s only one way to go.”

“No there isn’t.”

“If you have any sense, there is.”

“I have to get off. I can’t drive and talk at the same time. I’m driving the stickshift, remember?”

“If you don’t want to then forget it.”

“No, I don’t mind. I’ll take a detour.”

“Just forget it. Come home. I’ll go out later.”

“No, really. I’ll get them.”

“Whatever. Goodbye.”

He took the phone out of the vise he’d made with jaw and shoulder. His neck was already starting to cramp, and he didn’t feel safe driving with his head at such an angle, everything leaning on its side. He had to hold the phone out in front of him a bit to be sure the light had gone out. It had. The read-out still glowed faintly, but the connection was broken. He dropped the phone onto the seat beside him, onto the jacket.

The parkland continued for another few blocks. The headlights caught in a tangle of winter-bared hedges and stripped branches thrusting out into the street so far that they hid the sidewalk. It would be nice to find a house this close to woods, a bit of greenbelt held in perpetuity for when everything else had been bought up and converted into luxury townhouses. If all went well then in the next year, maybe less, they’d be shopping for a house in the area. Something close to his office but surrounded by trees, a view of mountains, maybe a stream running behind the house. It was heaven here but still strange, and even after six months most of it remained unfamiliar to him. She drove much more than he did, keeping busy while he was at work; she knew all the back roads already. He had learned one or two fairly rigid routes between home and office and the various shopping strips. Now with winter here, and night falling so early, he could lose himself completely the moment he wandered from a familiar route.

That seemed to be the case now. In the dark, without any sort of landmark visible except for endless bare limbs, he couldn’t recognize his surroundings. The houses that should have been lining the streets by now were nowhere to be seen, and the road itself was devoid of markings: No center line, no clean curb or gutter. Had he turned into the parkland, off the main road? He tried to think back, but part of his memory was a blank—and for good reason. When the phone rang he’d lost track of everything else. There had been a moment when he was fumbling around in the dark, looking at the seat next to him, making a turn at a traffic light without making sure it was the right light. He could have taken the wrong turn completely.

But he hadn’t turned since then. It still wasn’t too late to backtrack.

He slowed the car, then waited to make sure no headlights were coming up behind him. Nothing moved in either direction. The road was narrow—definitely not a paved suburban street. Branches scraped the hood as he pulled far to the right, readying the car for a tight turn, his headlights raking the brittle shadows. He paused for a moment and rolled the window down, and then turned back the key in the ignition to shut off the motor. Outside, with the car quieted, it was hushed. He listened for the barking of dogs, the sigh of distant traffic, but heard nothing. A watery sound, as if the parkland around him were swamp or marsh, lapping at the roots of the trees that hemmed him in. He wasn’t sure that he had room to actually turn around; the road was narrower than he’d thought. He had better just back up until it widened.

He twisted the key and heard nothing. Not even a solenoid click. He put his foot on the gas and the pedal went straight to the floor, offering no resistance. The brake was the same. He stamped on the clutch, worked the gearshift through its stations—but the stick merely swiveled then lolled to the side when he released it. The car had never felt so useless.

He sat for a moment, not breathing, the thought of the repair bills surmounting the sudden heap of new anxieties. A walk in the dark, to a gas station? First, the difficulty of simply getting back to the road. Did he have a flashlight in the glove box? Was he out of gas? Would he need a jump-start or a tow? In a way, it was a relief that he was alone, because his own fears were bad enough without hers overwhelming him.

He started again, checking everything twice. Ignition, pedals, gears. All useless. At least the headlights and the dashboard were still shining. He rolled up the window and locked the door. How long should he sit here? Who was going to come along and…

The phone.

Jesus, the cell phone. How he had put off buying one, in spite of her insistence. He didn’t care for the feeling that someone might always have tabs on him, that he could never be truly alone. What was it people were so afraid of, how could their lives be so empty, and their solitude of so little value, that they had to have a phone with them at every minute, had to keep in constant chattering contact with someone, anyone? Ah, how he had railed at every driver he saw with the phone in one hand and the other lying idly on the steering wheel. And now, for the first time, he turned to the damned thing with something like hope and relief. He wasn’t alone in this after all.

The cell phone had some memory but he’d never programmed it because he relied on his own. He dialed his home number and waited through the rings, wondering if she was going to leave the answering machine to answer, as she sometimes did—especially if they had been fighting and she expected him to call back. But she answered after three rings.

“It’s me,” he said.

“And?” Cold. He was surprised she hadn’t left the machine on after all.

“And my car broke down.”

“It what?”

“Right after you called me, I got…” He hesitated to say lost; he could anticipate what sort of response that would get out of her. “I got off the regular track and I was looking to turn around and the engine died. Now it won’t start.”

“The regular track? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I, uh—-“

“You got lost.” The scorn, the condescension. “Where are you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Can you look at a street sign? Do you think you could manage that much or am I supposed to figure out everything myself?”

“I don’t see any,” he said. “I’m just wondering if something happened to the engine, maybe I could take a look.”

“Oh, right. Don’t be ridiculous. What do you know about cars?”

He popped the hood and got out of the car. It was an excuse to move, to pace. He couldn’t sit still when she was like this. It was as if he thought he’d be harder to hit if he made a moving target of himself. Now he raised the hood and leaned over it, saying, “Ah,” as if he’d discovered something. But all he could see beneath the hood was darkness, as if something had eaten away the workings of the car. The headlights streamed on either side of his legs, losing themselves in the hedges, but their glare failed to illuminate whatever was directly before his eyes.

“Uh…”

“You don’t know what you’re looking at.”

“It’s too dark,” he said. “There aren’t any streetlights here.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Maybe I got into a park or something. Just a minute.” He slammed the hood, wiped his gritty feeling fingers on his legs, and went back to the door. “There are lots of roads around here with no lights… it’s practically…” He pressed the door handle. “…wild…”

At his lengthy silence, she said, “What is it?”

“Uh… just a sec.”

The door was locked. He peered into the car, and could see the keys dangling in the ignition. He tried the other doors, but they were also locked. They were power doors, power windows, power locks. Some kind of general electrical failure, probably a very small thing, had rendered the car completely useless. Except for the headlights?

“What is it?” she said again.

“The keys… are in… the car.” He squeezed hard on the door handle, wrenching at it, no luck.

“Do you mean you’re locked out?”

“I, uh, do you have the insurance card? The one with the emergency service number on it?”

“I have one somewhere. Where’s yours?”

“In the glove box.”

“And you’re locked out.”

“It looks that way.”

Her silence was recrimination enough. And here came the condescension: “All right, stay where you are. I’ll come get you. We can call the truck when I’m there, or wait until morning. I was just about to get in bed, but I’ll come and bring you home. Otherwise you’ll just get soaked.”

Soaked, he thought, tipping his head to the black sky. He had no sense of clouds or stars, no view of either one. It was just about the time she’d have been lying in bed watching the news; there must have been rain in the forecast. And here he was, locked out, with no coat.

“How are you going to find me?” he asked.

“There are only so many possible wrong turns you could have taken.”

“I don’t even remember any woods along this road. “

“That’s because you never pay attention.”

“It was right past the intersection with the big traffic light.”

“I know exactly where you are.”

“I got confused when you called me,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at the road. Anyway, you’ll see my headlights.”

“I have to throw on some clothes. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

It was an unusually protracted farewell for such a casual conversation. He realized that he was holding the phone very tightly in the dark, cradling it against his cheek and ear as if he were holding her hand to his face, feeling her skin cool and warm at the same time. And now there was no further word from her. Connection broken.

He had to fight the impulse to dial her again, instantly, just to reassure himself that the phone still worked—that she was still there. He could imagine her ridicule; he was slowing her down, she was trying to get dressed, he was causing yet another inconvenience on top of so many others.

With the conversation ended, he was forced to return his full attention to his surroundings. He listened, heard again the wind, the distant sound of still water. Still water which made sounds only when it lapped against something, or when something waded through it. He couldn’t tell one from the other right now. He wished he were still inside the car, with at least that much protection.

She was going to find him. He’d been only a few minutes, probably less than a mile, from home. She would be here any time.

He waited, expecting raindrops. The storm would come, it would short out his phone. There was absolutely no shelter on the empty road, now that he had locked himself out of it. He considered digging for a rock, something big enough to smash the window, so he could pull the lock and let himself in. But his mistake was already proving costly enough; he couldn’t bring himself to compound the problem. Anyway, it wasn’t raining yet. And she would be here any minute now.

It was about time to check in with her, he thought. She had to be in her car by now. Did he need a better excuse for calling her?

Well, here was one: The headlights were failing.

Just like that, as if they were on a dimmer switch. Both at once, darkening, taken down in less than a minute to a dull stubborn glow. It was a minute of total helpless panic; he was saved from complete horror only by the faint trace of light that remained. Why didn’t they go out all the way? By the time he’d asked himself this, he realized that his wife had now lost her beacon. That was news. It was important to call her now.

He punched the redial number. That much was easy. The phone rang four times and the machine answered, and then he had to suppress himself from smashing the phone on the roof of the car. She wouldn’t be at home, would she? She’d be on the road by now, looking for him, cruising past dark lanes and driveways, the entrance to some wooded lot, hoping to see his stalled headlights—and there would be none.

What made all this worse was that he couldn’t remember the number of her cell phone. He refused to call her on it, arguing that she might be driving if he called her, and he didn’t want to cause an accident.

Should he… head away from the car? Blunder back along the dark road without a flashlight until he came in sight of the street? Wouldn’t she be likely to spot him coming down the road, a pale figure stumbling through the trees, so out of place?

But he couldn’t bring himself to move away. The car was the only familiar thing in his world right now.

There was no point breaking the window. The horn wouldn’t sound if the battery had died. No point in doing much of anything now. Except wait for her to find him.

Please call, he thought. Please please please call. I have something to tell—-

The phone chirped in his hand. He stabbed the on button.

“Yes?”

“I’m coming,” she said.

“The headlights just died,” he said. “You’re going to have to look closely. For a… a dark road, a park entrance maybe…”

“I know,” she said, her voice tense. He pictured her leaning forward, driving slowly, squinting out the windshield at the streetsides. “The rain’s making it hard to see a damn thing.”

“Rain,” he said. “It’s raining where you are?”

“Pouring.”

“Then… where are you? It’s dry as a bone here.” Except for the sound of water, the stale exhalation of the damp earth around him.

“I’m about three blocks from the light.”

“Where I was turning?”

“Where you got turned around. It’s all houses here. I thought there was park. There is some park, just ahead… that’s what I was thinking off. But…”

He listened, waiting. And now he could hear her wipers going, sluicing the windshield; he could hear the sizzle of rain under her car’s tires. A storm. He stared at the sky even harder than before. Nothing up there. Nothing coming down.

“But what?” he said finally.

“There’s a gate across the road. You couldn’t have gone through there.”

“Check it,” he said. “Maybe it closed behind me.”

“I’m going on,” she said. “I’ll go to the light and start back, see if I missed anything.”

“Check the gate.”

“It’s just a park, it’s nothing. You’re in woods, you said?”

“Woods, marsh, parkland, something. I’m on a dirt road. There are… bushes all around, and I can hear water.”

“Ah….”

What was that in her voice?

“I can… wait a minute… I thought I could see you, but…”

“What?” He peered into the darkness. She might be looking at him even now, somehow seeing him while he couldn’t see her.

“It isn’t you,” she said. “It’s, a car, like yours, but… it’s not yours. That… that’s not you, that’s not your…”

“What’s going on?” The headlights died all the way down.

“Please, can you keep on talking to me?” she said. “Can you please just keep talking to me and don’t stop for a minute?”

“What’s the matter? Tell me what’s going on?”

“I need to hear you keep talking, please, please,” and whatever it was in her voice that was wrenching her, it wrenched at him too, it was tearing at both of them in identical ways, and he knew he just had to keep talking. He had to keep her on the phone.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Whatever it is. I won’t make you stop and tell me now, if you don’t want to talk, if you just want to listen,” he said. “I love you,” he said, because surely she needed to hear that. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’m just, I wish you could talk to me but—-“

“No, you talk,” she said. “I have to know you’re all right, because this isn’t, that’s not, it can’t be…”

“Sh. Shhh. I’m talking now.”

“Tell me where you are again.”

“I’m standing by my car,” he said. “I’m in a dark wooded place, there’s some water nearby, a pond or marsh judging from the sound, and it’s not raining, it’s kind of warm and damp but it’s not raining. It’s quiet. It’s dark. I’m not… I’m not afraid,” and that seemed an important thing to tell her, too. “I’m just waiting, I’m fine, I’m just waiting here for you to get to me, and I know you will. Everything will be… fine.”

“It’s raining where I am,” she said. “And I’m…” She swallowed. “And I’m looking at your car.”

Static, then, a cold blanket of it washing out her voice. The noise swelled, peaked, subsided, and the phone went quiet. He pushed the redial button, then remembered that she had called him and not the other way round. It didn’t matter, though. The phone was dead. He wouldn’t be calling anyone, and no one would be calling him.

I’ll walk back to that road now, he thought. While there’s still a chance she can find me.

He hefted the cell phone, on the verge of tossing it overhand out into the unseen marshes. But there was always a chance that some faint spark remained inside it; that he’d get a small blurt of a ring, a wisp of her voice, something. He put it in a pocket so he wouldn’t lose it in the night.

He tipped his face to the sky and put out his hand before he started walking.

Not a drop.

It’s raining where I am, and I’m looking at your car.

* * *

“Cell Call” copyright 2003 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in By Moonlight Only, PS Publishing, edited by Stephen Jones (October 2003).

FLIGHT RISK

They brought Foster to the boy by a route of back alleys and parking garages, changing him from car to car several times, until eventually, although he’d thought he knew the city very well, he found himself uncertain of his whereabouts. They were near the airport, he knew that much. Condemned buildings, empty shops, and the rumbling pall of jet trails over all. A massive extension of the runways planned, this part of the city had known it was doomed; the exodus occurred before delays set in. A perfect place to hide the boy without seeming to hide him.

The final car, a black sedan with dented doors and fenders thinned by rust, drew to a stop at the rear of a building that had too many windows to be a warehouse, too few to be a residence. The man riding shotgun stepped out and opened the door. Foster slid from his seat in back, clutching his worn black bag to his gut. Along the alley, tips of garbage poked through humps of snow. There was just enough warmth in the air to carry a threat of the sourness and rot waiting beneath the ice. A black wrought iron gate swung open in the rear of the building, and a third man, large and heavy browed, appeared there, beckoning. Foster recognized features of gigantism, but felt no thrill at the fact that he was seeing his first giant.

As Foster passed inside, the door clanged shut, cutting the rumble of a jet engine to something felt rather than heard. Foster saw a dim hall with access to a slightly brighter lobby just ahead. The giant held back the accordioned bars of an elevator cage. Foster stepped in and waited for the giant to crowd in beside him.

“I’ll meet you up there,” the giant said, this voice thick with menace. “Don’t get off until I let you out.”

“No,” said Foster. “Of course not.”

The giant pressed a button and retreated, letting the doors clang shut. The elevator jerked and began a scraping ascent.

If the illuminated numbers above the door were to be believed, the elevator was skipping floors. More likely the lights were burned out. When the car finally ground to a halt, Foster knew only that he was somewhere above the seventh floor. He waited what seemed a full minute before he heard clanging, and then the giant appeared, hauling open the door and peering in at him. Out of breath and sweating profusely, he made scooping motions with his hands.

“Yes, yes,” Foster said, following him out and down the hall.

The giant stopped at a door with 909 painted on a frosted glass pane. He dug into his pocket until he found a ring with two keys on it. In the giant’s hand they looked like keys to a child’s diary or a toy padlock. He unlocked the door and pushed it open, making it clear to Foster that he should go in first.

Foster heard a hum of voices mixed with the rumble of another jet passing above. They stepped into what had been the waiting room of an office, more recently being used as a residence. The domestic touches were few: a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, a card table and several folding chairs. An old office desk butted up against a sofa bed. Pizza boxes, cereal cartons, dozens of paper coffee cups. A television with poor reception, volume almost inaudible–the source of the muted voices, probably.

There was another door on the far side of the room, frosted glass pane in its upper half. It was ajar, and through the gap he saw a mattress laid flat on the floor. On it lay small thin legs in parachute pants, bony feet in frayed socks.

The giant saw him looking, gave a shrug in that direction. “Go ahead. Look him over.”

The boy glanced up as Foster entered, wary and unsurprised, as if he had already seen many strangers come and go, Foster just another. A movement in the corner startled Foster. A second man stood up, tall and thin, so pale his face might have been a streak of light cast by headlights, sliding along the wall.

“Thank Christ,” the man said. “I can get the hell out of here.”

“He’s not your replacement, Gaunt,” said the giant, coming in behind Foster. “This is the doctor.”

“Doctor? So when do I get a break?”

“When this is all over.”

“When—“ Gaunt cut himself short, glaring at Foster. “What does he know?”

“I don’t know or care about your business,” Foster said. “I am here for the boy.”

The pale man laughed. “You’re not the only one. Wish the others were as prompt, though.”

“Shut up,” said the giant. “You need to learn patience.”

“That’s the doctor’s department. Go ahead with him, Doc. I think he needs a good worming myself. Where he comes from, they’ve got all kinds of crud. Little brat doesn’t know how good he’s got it here. No appreciation. All the toys we bought him, he just sits there.”

“Please,” Foster said.

“All right. I’m going out for some swill. Since the doctor’s here. If that’s okay with you.”

“Be quick,” the giant said.

The two men stepped out into the other room, leaving Foster and the boy all the privacy they were likely to have. The lock had been removed from the inner door. Foster knelt down next to the mattress.

The boy watched him carefully.

“I am a doctor,” Foster said. “Do you know that word? Do you speak English?”

The boy just stared. His hair was as much grey as brown, like the fur of a mangy wolf he’d seen in the zoo. His eyes were almost as feral, and far more aware of being caged. Foster tried to smile, but felt it might be misinterpreted. A smile could just as easily have foreshadowed cruelties in the boy’s recent past.

“Do… do you know if he’s had any inoculations?” he called back into the other room.

“What?” The giant’s shadow swam up beyond the frosted glass. “You mean, like, polio shots?”

“The usual vaccines. Measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus. Kid stuff.”

“They found him in an orphanage.”

“There must have been medical staff.”

“The place was a hundred years old. Rotting wood. A lot of the kids were sick from the same thing, but it was nothing you could catch. That plant in Belarus or wherever… the one where they had the leak…”

“Hell,” Foster said, leaning closer to the boy. “If that’s it, if he’s that sick—“

“No one’s expecting any miracles out of you. We just want to make sure he’s strong enough to make it until we’ve unloaded him. So you check him out.”

“If he’ll let me.”

“He won’t give you any trouble. Never has.”

Foster reached for the boy’s wrist, took his pulse. From his bag he took the stethoscope and listened to the boy’s chest through a thin sweater. The boy’s breath was warm and smelled of sugar and milk and something else, a smell remembered from youth, working on old radios and television sets. It was like the smell of electrical discharge, yet not quite ozone. And it was stronger, closer to the boy. He leaned in, nostrils flaring, and the boy reared back abruptly.

“Sorry,” Foster said. “Didn’t mean to—“

“Well?” It was the giant, having come up quietly behind him.

“He’s well enough. But he could use some fresh air, some exercise. It’s not healthy for a child to be shut up in a place like this.”

“It’s out of the question. He has toys, if he’d play with them.”

Foster hadn’t noticed the box full of jumbled plastic pieces pushed into one corner of the room. Decks of cards, sponge-rubber balls. No cars or planes or anything that would make noise. Nothing such a boy would be likely to have any interested in playing with.

Foster rose and walked to the window for a look at the icy day. He poked a few fingers through the dusty blinds. “Air,” he whispered.

The window ledge was brick, crusted with grime, mortar that had welled up like grey dough. Pigeons milled somewhere nearby; he could hear them cooing.

There was a very small playground across the street, between old apartment buildings, a few bare trees stretching up from muddy snow around climbing equipment the color of rust. Even looking at the iron bars put the tang of cold metal in his mouth.

“Down there,” he said. “There’s a playground. It’s totally deserted.”

“How do you think it would look, this boy, with the two of us?”

“I’ll take him myself. There’s nothing suspicious in that. He’s what… not even school age? No one will question.”

It was impossible to tell what the giant was thinking. His face gave no clue whether he was considering the situation, or had closed himself off to any possibility of compromise.

“I’ll take care of him,” Foster said. “You can watch from up here. And the other, your friend…”

“…eh…”

“Gaunt. He can watch from somewhere closer. In case you’re afraid the boy’s a flight risk.”

The giant made a dismissive gesture. “He has nowhere to run.”

Foster glanced over at the boy, who watched them intently, but seemed unable to decode their conversation.

“He speaks no English?”

“None. That’s another problem. How will you make him obey you?”

“How do you?”

The giant didn’t answer. There was no need. He was an irresistible force, albeit not as malevolent as he seemed. Because now he shrugged and opened his hands, palms upward.

“All right. But I’ll stay with you.”

“Fine.”

“We’ll be his uncles. If anyone asks.”

“Yes, good,” Foster said. “You have some warm clothes for him?”

The giant slipped away and returned with a heavy coat, dark and thick, brand new. The boy was worth that much investment, to someone.

“Don’t want him catching cold,” the giant said with a shrug, and thrust it at the boy. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going out. The doctor thinks you need to play.”

“He’s a child,” Foster repeated. “Of course he needs to play.”

In the deserted hall, they kept the boy between them. His small face was hidden in the folds of the thick hood. Foster started toward the elevator, but the giant shook his head, wagged a finger. “Not that way.”

“You think I might run?”

“With this boy, I take no chances.”

The stairwell was not much larger than the elevator car. The boy went first, down to a lobby of cracked marble that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The giant opened the front door and looked both ways, then waved them through. There were few cars in sight. He motioned at the empty playground. “Go ahead. I’ll wait in here. I’d rather not be seen if I can help it.”

“Come whenever you like,” said Foster. “It will do him good, I’m sure of it.”

“Go.”

Foster put his hand out, and was both surprised and gratified when the boy took it without hesitation. They needn’t run, there was no traffic, but Foster felt like running all the same. On the far sidewalk, he stopped with a hand on the low gate that opened into the park. He grinned down at the boy and was rewarded with a small smile. A hint of color was coming back to his cheeks. Foster truly saw his eyes for the first time, and they were blue. Blue as the sky that hid somewhere beyond clouds grey as the underside of a trashcan lid.

“Go,” Foster said, swinging open the gate. “Go play. You know play? You know fun?”

He clapped his hands and gestured at the swings, a roundabout, a teeter-totter. No wonder no one played here. The playground was an anachronism, full of archaic devices considered unacceptably dangerous by insurance brokers. The toys of his own childhood, and that of his own children. Fearful mothers and city councilmen conspired to tear these places down.

The boy looked at him in disbelief, like a wild creature that has been caged and finds itself suddenly free. He stood staring up at Foster, then looked back at the ground-floor façade of the office building. The giant had drawn back inside. The boy spun around and ran toward a towering slide of buckled metal, undoubtedly a dangerous, rickety, tetanus-bearing thing. It took Foster a moment to realize the sharp sound he’d heard as the boy took off was a laugh.

The boy hurtled down the slide, sweeping snow off as he went. From there, leaping across the puddle of slush at the bottom, he rushed toward the swing set and threw himself into a frayed rubber seat, the swing chains grating as he began to push and pull himself into widening arcs. On the highest arc, Foster feared for a moment that the boy was about to hurl himself off into the sky. His face and chest and legs, every part of him strained upward, where the sun seemed to promise it would soon tear away the clouds. It was such a visceral certainty that he startled himself by taking a step toward the swing, as if to catch the boy.

Then down he came, slowing, slowing, slipping off. The boy rushed to the next amusement—the roundabout. He pushed it round and round and leapt on, then off, pushed it again and again until Foster grew dizzy from watching.

Methodically, the child extracted every bit of amusement from each toy. After a while, Foster looked for somewhere to sit. The snow had begun to melt and the benches were dripping. Mounds of brown sand revealed themselves through mounds of snow. He began to sweat inside his jacket, and loosened several buttons. The monkey bars clanged with a hollow sound as the boy climbed to the top. Foster had to suppress an urge he had not felt in many years: the urge to call out a warning. As a father, he had developed the less instinctive response: let the boy be. This was the best Foster felt he could offer the orphan child: the freedom to reach to the sky, proclaiming himself master of this small height, at least for this moment. Let the boy have it. It was little enough.

Across the street, the pale man was just returning from his errand with two paper cups. At that moment, the sun burned a hole through the clouds and set the street gleaming. Foster watched the men talking to each other in the doorway of the building, the giant taking one of the cups, then gesturing across to the playground. Gaunt’s confusion turned to anger. He came striding across the street, while the giant snarled something behind him.

Foster put up a hand as if to say there was nothing to be concerned about, but at that moment, he heard fluttering and felt a vast shadow spread over him from behind.

He turned in surprise and growing astonishment as the other men began to shout. Foster saw that the giant, as he came, had reached into his jacket and drawn a gun. But for Foster, that scarcely registered.

The electric smell which he’d whiffed earlier was a strong presence now, but that was the least of it. The boy still stood at the apex of the monkey bars with his hands outstretched, but now he was more clearly signaling, summoning, something. Making a gesture of desperate pleading and abandon, as if he were clawing at the sky, as if he were pulling it down to him, as if it were a curtain he would tear into rags. It was a child’s gesture, grasping and selfish and uninhibited, completely unaware of its strength.

And in response, came birds. Pigeons. Muted greys and browns and patched white, spiraling from their roosts on the surrounding buildings. They circled and swept in, drawn to the boy.

As Foster stared, something hit him hard from behind. The giant shoved him aside. Gaunt leapt snarling at the bars, trying to clamber toward the gathering cloud of wings. The bars were icy and slick. Gaunt immediately lost his grip and went down hard, banging his jaw. With a grunt, he collapsed into slush.

The giant began waving his hands in the air, heedless of the gun.

“No!” Foster said. “Put that away!” And lower, “You want someone to see?”

As if anyone would notice a mere gun.

The boy was barely visible now at the center of the birds. How quickly it had gathered. He was lost in there, all but hidden. However, in glimpses Foster saw his face, peaceful and beaming, eyes closed, grinning. Then the wings closed in again.

“Get down from there!” the giant shouted, and he pointed the gun into the mass of wings. Foster had the delirious impression that the whole swarm was shifting… pulling away from the bars… impossible, but…

“Please!” Foster said. “Let me—“

The gun went off. The sound was lost in another, louder sound that tore the atmosphere apart like a sonic boom, accompanied by a flash like that of lightning. The air seemed to crack and split, like a thin sheet of quartz shattering under pressure, firing sparks as it shattered.

Then the light failed and the sun was swallowed up in clouds again, and the sound was but an echo.

Whether it was the gunshot or the other shock that did it, the birds scattered, exploding from the scene as if flung in every direction. For a moment Foster saw the boy hanging in midair, several feet above the monkey bars Then he fell. His knees struck the bars with a bang. He went through them like a ragdoll, striking his head once as he went. He hit the ground just as Gaunt was rising to his feet with a hand cradling his jaw.

The ozone smell mixed with the dusty miasma of feathers. Foster rushed for the boy, pushing himself through the bars of the cage, lifting him from the snow. He moaned in Foster’s arms, beginning to shiver, soaking wet.

The giant put out his arms, and Foster carefully fed the boy to him through the bars. The gun was hidden again.

“He needs to get to a hospital,” Foster said.

“No way!” said Gaunt.

They ran across the street, Foster struggling to keep up. “He might be concussed. It is extreme neglect not to—”

“Your fault, doctor,” said the giant bitterly. “If anything happens to him….”

“He needs immediate care—“

“No hospital.”

The lobby door slammed shut behind them. This time the giant crowded into the little elevator with the boy, leaving Foster and Gaunt to climb the stairs. Because of me, Foster thought, not for the last time.

As they climbed, Gaunt stopped once to hold a rail and catch his breath. His teeth were chattering. Foster realized the other man was terrified. He struggled to regain control of himself, then grew rigid as he saw Foster staring at him.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

It struck him again: Because of me.

* * *

The boy had a broken leg, that was the only certainty. The giant made several calls, and supplies arrived soon after, then Foster set the leg himself. If there were other more serious injuries, hidden ones, he had to content himself with patching the ones he could see. He worried about the possibility of concussion, other complications, but there was nothing else he could do about them.

The boy had a mark on his brow which went from bluish black to yellow over several days, as the weather warmed and the snow receded and the streets began to stink. Foster spied the coming of spring from between the blinds, when he wasn’t watching the boy. Gaunt and the giant took turns prowling the outer room. They shared the couch with Foster. They would not let him leave. At this point it was out of the question.

He was glad, in a way, because he would have worried to leave the boy in their care. The blue eyes watched him come and go as he puttered about the room and sorted through the contents of his black bag. The boy lay on the mattress, mostly unmoving, and said nothing, only watched him, or the window. The TV muttered at the edge of perception, but he showed no interest in that—unusual child. He kept gazing toward the sky, his attention growing always especially rapt when the pigeons began to stir somewhere above, and when the shadows of winged things went flickering across the blinds.

When Foster smelled the ozone whiff from time to time, he worried, remembering the cyclone of wings.

At one such moment, the giant came storming into the room, scouring the corners with his eyes, as if searching for some traitor or enemy hiding there. His nostrils flared. He strode to the window and drew up the blinds; and there, startling Foster, was something to feed their apprehension.

The crumbling brick ledge was lined with pigeons. Several dozen of them milled about, curiously mute, staring through the cracked and grimy glass as if looking for the boy. The giant let out a yell. He unlocked the window and pushed it up, shedding flakes of ancient paint. The birds swirled away from the screaming giant. Then he slammed the window down so hard the glass cracked, leaving it intact but looking like a puzzle made of shards.

The giant stormed out of the room, then out of the suite. Gaunt paced about in the other room, his pale face swimming back and forth across the rippled glass of the inner door.

Foster sank down on a corner of the mattress and leaned toward the boy, who had learned to trust him enough not shy away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could help you somehow. Do you know what they want with you? What use are you to them?”

The boy stared at him with eyes unblinking and undefeated. So young, Foster thought.

The giant returned less than an hour later, carrying shopping bags. He busied himself in the next room. Foster left the boy and wandered in to watch ominous preparations. The giant had a loaf of cheap white bread. He pinched out lumps of dough and rolled them into balls. The desktop was scattered with flour. The giant dropped a large box back into one of the bags. Not flour, he realized, for the box bore a skull and crossbones.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“I have to protect my investment,” the giant said. “You don’t know what trouble I’m in if anything happens to that boy.”

“Yes but I don’t see—”

“No repeats of the other day. I can’t allow it.”

Filling his pockets with the dough balls, the giant opened the door to the boy’s room. The boy looked on with blue eyes unblinking.

The giant returned to open the cracked window. It opened easily now. He carefully arranged the balls of dough along the ledge, emptying his pockets. He lowered the window gingerly, and then the blinds.

He turned and saw the boy watching him, and brushed his hands together, smiling.

“Nice birdies,” the giant said.

By the next morning, the cooing above the casement had all but ceased. The dough balls were gone. In their place lay a solitary pigeon which must have died during the night and fallen from somewhere above. Crumpled and stiff, its glazed eye seemed to stare at Foster through the cracked pane. He stared back at the bird, feeling as if his own eye were equally crazed.

Behind him, a thud. An exhalation. The boy had risen, pulled himself from the bed. He limped up beside Foster, dragging his cast. When he saw the bird, the boy collapsed. Foster felt himself crumbling from within, but he found the strength to catch the boy. The boy had learned to cry soundlessly and without tears. Foster carried him back to the mattress, amazed by his self-control. In the other room, the giant had no clue what transpired in here. The rumble of jets masked whatever sounds they might have made.

“There, there,” Foster said, keeping a hand on the boy’s back as he shuddered with dry weeping. “It’s all right.”

The next day was warmer still. The suite began to grow uncomfortable, even suffocating. Foster asked the giant if they could open a window, although he knew the answer in advance. Gaunt and the giant were growing more impatient and nervous; their mood verged on paranoid. Foster gathered that some crucial deadline had come and gone; that someone they were counting on had failed to appear. There were numerous hushed, harsh phone conversations on their countless cell phones, but they were diligent about keeping him in the dark.

“Please,” he said, pleading the boy’s case, “just the one window, just an inch or so, to let some air in.”

“No. Nothing. You saw what happened.”

“Just a crack.”

Gaunt shot up from his chair, kicking it backward, lunging at him. The giant held him back. Foster retreated.

Foster’s only relief from the interior of the room, from the constant haunting of unanswerable questions in the boy’s eyes, was to stand at the window and see what passed outside. But always the bird came to dominate his view; his eye incessantly returned to the increasingly active colony it had attracted. The first flies touched down on the dead eye, then darted toward the rawness of flesh inside the gaping beak, and finally lost all caution and began to explore the carcass thoroughly, inside and out. Sometimes he thought he could smell a faint putrid odor, only as much as would have drifted through the fractured pane. But the one time he started to unlock the window, to nudge the bird out of his view and dispel the flies, he found that the giant had appeared at his shoulder.

“If you even touch that lock, I’ll break all your fingers.”

Foster laced his fingers behind his back and watched the flies touch down on the pale grey ruff of feathers and tap across the glass, tasting everything.

“I want that bird there as a reminder,” the giant said.

That night Gaunt and the giant spread an assortment of Chinese take-out containers across the desk, and sat on the sofa griping. So weary of their vigil that they had begun to betray bits of it, and to discuss it openly, ignoring Foster.

“—have to do something. They’re never coming.”

“We lose the money and the boy, is that what you mean?” said the giant. “Throw it all away?”

“The boy’s nothing to us except money. And if the money’s not coming…”

“You don’t waste something like what he has.”

“What does he have? What use is it?”

“That’s not a question we have to answer. We just have to find someone who’ll make the same deal.”

“You’re dreaming. It was hard enough to get this one in place.”

“There’s interest, believe me.”

“There’s also danger the longer we hold onto him… if he gets desperate or… or who knows what he’ll do. Those birds, they were nothing. What if he pulls down something else?”

“Like what?”

“Like what. How about something heavier than birds? Something to make a crater where we’re sitting.”

“That’s not his talent.”

“How do you know? You’re guessing. No one knows the limits exactly. It’s just potential right now. In Belarus, remember, the cluster of debris? Space junk… all in a small radius around the orphanage…”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“But if it’s not, if he gets upset enough—”

“He likes the doctor. He won’t let anything…”

The giant paused, looked over at the door to the boy’s room, saw Foster standing there watching them. He shook his head and stuffed a forkful of noodles into his mouth.

“It’s stupid to sit here and wait to be picked up. Admit it. The opportunity’s gone. Something happened to them and they’ll never—”

At that moment, one of their many cell phones rang. The giant found it among the scattered take-out containers. Foster watched his glum face shift almost imperceptibly. “Yes? Yes. All right, yes.” Then he switched it off and put it back down and simply stared at Gaunt.

“You’re kidding, right?”

The giant slowly shook his head.

“In the morning,” he said.

Foster sank back into the inner room. The boy was asleep, whimpering softly down in the dark. Foster stepped lightly to the window and peered through the blinds as if some new solution might offer itself. No fire escape. Barely enough room on the ledge for the pigeon’s fly-blown carcass. Even if he dared to unlock it, there was no escape here. If he could, he would have opened the window, he would have raised the boy up, he would have stepped off into space and taken them both away from here.

But he could do nothing. Nothing but watch through the night. The street was rarely busy, except for a brief time in the morning when a flurry of cars passed through on their way to other destinations. The sun came up among TV aerials and satellite dishes and ancient water tanks. The last trace of snow had melted, and the clear sky promised warmth. The flies were already busy, buzzing and bumbling about beyond the glass, nearly as loud as the voices from the other room as the giant and Gaunt roused themselves. Gaunt, in a rare good mood, volunteered to venture out for coffee and rolls.

Foster watched him walk away from the front of the building, nine floors below, and head off on foot. The sun began to beat at the glass, but the boy slept on. An ominous rumble from somewhere above the building made him flinch, then he realized it was only a jet; a tracery of contrails hung in the sky, dissolving. He saw no planes, but he could hear them. It sounded like many of them. With an eye to the sky, Foster traced the web of broken window glass; it was a useless web that couldn’t trap a single one of the flies on the far side of the glass. One of the vermin rose up from the flyblown corpse and lit upon the glass; clung there, separated from his fingertip by the thin pane. The thought of the filthy insect coming near the boy repulsed him, and he tapped the glass to frighten it away. Instead, there was a sharp crack, and a small shard tipped out and fell to the bricks with a sharp sound, shattering into bits of angular glitter. The sound of rumbling grew perceptibly louder, Foster’s hearing rendered hypersensitive by fear. It didn’t help to realize he’d opened the way for flies now; and that the giant might have heard the sound of breaking glass and would come to investigate, disturbing the sleeping boy.

His eye traveled past the ledge, caught by a black car cruising to a stop on the street directly below.

Foster turned away and looked at the boy, wondering if he should wake him.

To his surprise, he found the boy was awake and smiling at him.

“Run,” Foster whispered. It made him sound ridiculous in his own ears. His only excuse was that he knew the boy could not understand him.

The car doors opened, and a small dark figure stepped out, and then another. Men in black suits. From up here, they were not much bigger than the flies that had begun to swarm around the bird in the warming light.

The men walked out of sight below the window ledge. He pushed his brow to the glass, but they were hidden. He turned toward the boy, biting his lips, never having felt more helpless in his life. But for some reason, meeting the boy’s eyes, he felt suddenly released. It was as if he had had done all he could do, and the boy knew it; and although it amounted to nothing, although he had failed completely, still it had been enough.

But there must be something more, Foster told himself. Even if it meant throwing himself in their path, making some extreme gesture no matter how futile.

He put a finger to his lips and gestured toward the other room. The boy nodded. It was the most conspiratorial they had ever been. Foster put his hand briefly on the boy’s head, tousled his hair, then stepped into the other room. He made a great show of easing the door shut.

“No need for that,” the giant said. “He’ll have to wake up soon enough. This is his last day with us.”

Foster pretended surprise. “Really? Well… that’s a relief. It’s bound to be better for him, wherever he’s going.”

The giant looked at Foster as if he were impossibly naïve. “If you say so.”

Foster glanced back at the door. He had thought the murmuring came from out here, but now he realized it must be coming from another floor completely. It was hard to remember they were not alone in the old office building. Hard to remember, at times, that they were not alone in the whole world.

Out in the hall, he heard the elevator creaking. The giant looked perplexed. He rose to his feet and started toward the boy’s room, but Foster stepped deftly toward the hall and the giant had to veer to intercept him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I thought I heard someone at the door.”

The giant moved between Foster and the hall door. He opened it and looked out. The approaching elevator sounded clear and clangorous. The giant straddled the threshold, as if suspecting that Foster was looking for a chance to slam the door and lock him out.

The elevator stopped. The doors took their time squealing open. Foster peered out past the giant as two men he had never seen stepped out of the lift and looked around in the dimness. The giant beckoned them over and stepped back into the suite, forcing Foster in first.

Someone was talking urgently now in some room nearby. He could almost make out the voices. Foster wondered if the sound was making made the men apprehensive. They did not look like men who were ordinarily nervous about anything, but perhaps they knew a little about the boy—enough to fear him.

It occurred to Foster that he had never feared the boy, only feared for him.

“Where is he?” said one of the new men.

The giant said, “I’ll get him.”

“No,” Foster said.

The strangers turned to glare at him. One said, “Who is this?”

“Nobody,” said the giant.

“I’m the boy’s doctor,” Foster said. “He’s sleeping. He hasn’t been well. He had a blow to the head and he… he needs rest. He needs special care.”

Anger. “Is he serious?”

The giant shrugged. “He’s grown attached.”

They stared at Foster as if this were unfortunate and unnecessary. Foster had been about to plead his own case, to ask if they would let him come along to care for the boy, but he could see now the futility of such a request. He didn’t mind making a fool of himself, but there was little point in wasting his energy. There must be something else he could do.

The murmuring, though still indistinct, had grown louder. Foster realized where the sound was coming from an instant before the others did. He saw the giant’s eyes widen as he turned his massive head toward the inner door. The frosted glass was dark, darker than the room had ever been in daylight, even with the blinds shut.

The giant cast a malevolent look at Foster, as if he were behind this somehow, then he took a step toward the door. The two strangers looked on without a clue what they were witnessing.

At that moment, Foster heard banging in the hall and the outer door flew open. The strangers whirled with guns drawn out of nowhere, as Gaunt hurled himself into the room, gasping and out of breath from rushing up the stairs.

“Stop him!” he croaked, not even seeing the guns. He lunged at the boy’s door.

The giant beat him to it. Foster staggered back toward the hall. The giant hurled himself against the door, but although it could not be locked from within, it seemed to resist his heavy blows.

Gaunt fell in beside him, and the two men threw themselves at the door until the very frame began to crack. The frosted glass pane shattered and the door crashed open in the same instant, unbottling the darkness sealed within.

The room beyond was utterly black and thick and crawling and alive. It was filled with a million seething voices. The giant and Gaunt and the two strangers with their useless guns, all fell back from the demonic cloud with their mouths slowly moving, as if they were trying to mimic or interpret the sounds. But they were not words, not really. They were meaningless, incoherent yet full of expression.

“Get in there!” screamed Gaunt.

“You get in!” the giant cried.

Then Foster did a senseless thing. He turned on the strangers, about whom he knew nothing except that they were likely to be ruthless, and without a second thought he snatched the gun from the hands of the nearest. The man let out a shout, and they all turned to look at Foster. There were three guns pointing at him. They stared at him as if he were crazy, suicidal.

Foster turned toward the inner doorway. He could see the faintest glow from the far window. He fired into the mass, but it was like shooting into smoke. He was thrown backward, his shoulder wrenched by recoil, deafened by the gunshot, the weapon falling from his hand. Even through the shock of sound he could hear glass shatter, and it was the sound of release. From out of the horrible buzzing came a peal of high pure laughter.

The smoke that wasn’t smoke had already cleared by the time he regained his feet. It had thinned so much he could see the walls again, the blinds hanging limp and tattered, the window completely shattered from its frame, and the open sky beyond.

Foster ignored the fallen gun, ignored the guns still aimed at him, and walked alone toward the window.

He stared out into the morning.

Above the rooflines, still rising, still laughing, he caught sight of a dark coherent cloud that surged and gathered and regathered itself. And persisted.

Foster looked down at his hands, which rested on the ledge among strewn shards of glass. A fly spiralled down and landed on his knuckle. It took several steps, rubbed its forelegs together as if giving thanks, then kissed his skin quite tenderly. Foster raised his hand, meaning to lift it up until he could meet its eyes, wondering what he might find there–but the fly was only a fly after all, and too restless for such formalities. Casting itself onto the wind, it hurried to catch up with the rest of its legion.

Foster turned to face the other men, ready to accept their blame—whatever came.

Because of me, he thought. And was content.

* * *

“Flight Risk” copyright 2004 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at SciFiction, April 2004.

JANE

The first we knew of the travelers was the tinkling of our falcon’s silver bell. She landed on our Father’s glove, and he leant his whiskered cheek against her beak. When he raised his head there was a look in his eyes I had not seen before.

He sighed and put his hand on my head and said, —Jane, go tell your mother we have visitors.

I walked across the wet grass to the house, and I heard him whispering to the bird as he clipped the leash to the silver varvels in her leather jesses. He climbed the porch and set her on her perch, and sat beside her in his rocking chair, oiling his glove and watching the bamboo thicket through the afternoon, while I stayed inside and played with little Anna to keep her out of mother’s way.

The sun was at five fists when the travelers appeared. They stood at the edge of the clearing, staring at the house as if they feared it, until our Father rose and crossed the grass to greet them.

Two men and a woman. Although I studied them so closely that our Father had to shoo me away, I never thought to ask their names nor anything else about them. I only listened to the questions our Father asked, and to the answers they gave, and in so doing I learned as many new things about our Father as I learned about the visitors. I learned he had once lived in the city, which surprised me greatly since he had never told us he knew its evils from experience. I learned he had once been a traveler himself, with intimate knowledge of the roads he forbade us approach. I learned he spoke languages I’d never heard him speak until that night, when the three travelers stayed and shared our supper.

I remember steaming crocks of stew; mother’s dense loaves of dark bread with cracked corn toasted into it; falcon-caught squab and squirrel, and wild pig my brothers had brought back from that day’s hunt. I remember the glow of the lantern light in the travelers’ eyes and the loudness of their voices as they drank our Father’s wine and then his brandy late into the night.

Somehow Anna and I were forgotten, we girls allowed to stay up and listen, as if this were a special lesson. We knew it was rare. Even our brothers, old as they were, had never seen visitors before. Sometimes while hunting they heard the sound of travelers on the far-off road, but our Father always hushed them and made them retreat in utter silence so as to betray nothing of our presence. It was for the same reason they hunted with crossbows and never a gun. And although our Father had once been a fine shot, he now relied completely on his falcon.

The travelers admired his falcon greatly and asked many questions as she perched near the table with the family. They remarked on the intricate designs on her polished silver bell and varvels, and I warmed with pride, for it was my task to keep the little cuff rings untarnished, although the designs etched in them meant little to me, being letters in a language I could not read. The lady traveler said the falcon was the bird of royals, to which my father replied, —Birds do not distinguish one type of man from another but will accept any master who treats them with dignity.

To prove his point, he took his huge glove and slipped it on my brother Ash’s hand, and the falcon flew to Ash and landed on the glove.

And the woman said, —But the son of a royal is still a royal.

Then I noticed one of the men staring very hard at the glove, and the emblem stitched upon it, which always fascinated me though I knew not what it meant. It was a hook like a question mark with a barbed arrow for a tip and a slanted line cut through it, as if the question had been struck out.

I had seen the emblem all my life, but it had never meant a thing to me until I saw the travelers looking at it with such wonder. Our Father must have seen them looking as well, for he sent Ash to take the falcon to her mews and then began to question how they had happened upon us.

They had lost the road, they said, in a night of rain. They should have stopped and made camp but had hoped to find an inn.

—What night was this? our Father asked, for it had been dry several nights now; but the travelers could not say how long they had wandered. They asked if we knew the way back to the road, and father nodded.

—My sons and I will see you there safely in the morning, he said.

This surprised me greatly, for our Father had commanded us to keep well clear of the road, my brothers most of all. I think he feared they would use it to escape, but in truth they were more scared of what lay at the ends of that road than of our Father.

At this time, Anna began to grow upset beneath her hood, which normally kept her so calm; and my mother bade me take her to bed. This made me angry, as I hated to miss any of the rare evening; but when the lady traveler made a comment about Anna being too old for such devices and said that the world no longer looked kindly on the practice, I rose and took Anna’s hand and led her away so that the woman would not see how much she had offended me, for my own hood had not been off for long at all.

Sometime later I found myself in my own bed, with Anna’s arms around me and voices coming from the next room where the firelight still flickered. I loosened Anna’s arms and went to see who spoke. The table had been cleared. I saw my parents standing over the sleeping forms of the travelers, wrapped in their bedrolls by the low-banked fire.

Our Father must have heard me, for he turned and gave me a look of grave concern and tenderness such as I had rarely seen on his hard, hard face. Then my mother followed his gaze and saw me watching. She crossed the room and turned me gently back toward my bed, but not before I saw that in our Father’s hands, its head full of warm orange light, he held an ax.

—Back to bed, Jane, she told me.

The sight of the ax meant less than the look of tender love. Nor did I fully wake to the sharp sounds that came soon after, while my mother stroked my hair and told me that our Father loved us more than anything and had taken every step to see we lived in safety, and would do whatever he must to make sure no one ever threatened that, or us.

We were his sweet, sweet angels.

That night I dreamt I was an angel, flying in the clear night air, and around my neck I wore a tinkling silver bell, and around my ankles leather cuffs with silver rings that bore my name. And in the morning, the travelers were gone. We found mother washing the floor and cleaning up after having fed them early and sent them on their way. She scrubbed the house so thoroughly that soon there was no sign they had ever passed through, and for once she did not insist that Anna and I share the chores but bid us go amuse ourselves outside. We went as far as the bamboo thicket, I leading Anna by the hand as she could not be unhooded until our Father’s return, since the hooding was always and only at his discretion. I thought to look for the departed travelers’ tracks. Then Anna said she heard something, and I stopped and listened with her. From far off we heard sounds that continued through much of the morning, rising and falling but never going any farther, never coming any closer until some time past noon when we heard our Father and brothers crashing through the jungle from a direction I had never associated with the road. We had been listening to them all along.

—We took the long way round, my brother Olin said. The river was in flood and forced a detour.

—Yes, our Father said. But we saw them off all right in the end.

Olin and father chuckled, but Ash looked angry and threw aside the machete he carried for cutting through undergrowth. He stormed off, with our Father glowering after him. We were all used to his moods.

Our Father scooped up Anna and unhooded her, to cover her rosy cheeks with kisses; and Olin took my hand; and we turned to see mother waiting on the porch, smiling as we crossed the grass. It was the kind of moment I had always known. It was as if the visitors had never come. But everything had changed without my knowing it.

For the next few weeks, our Father forbade Olin and Ash to hunt, although with winter coming on, this made no sense to me. Already there were fewer birds, the great migrations having passed; and the prey available to our Father’s falcon was scarce. Ash began to stomp about, and although he never spoke against our Father, his anger became a thing you could almost touch, though it would burn your fingers.

Our Father finally eased his restrictions when mother wept about the state of the larder. There were signs that winter would come early and harsh and outstay its welcome by many weeks. I was there at the edge of the clearing when he sent my brothers out with express instructions to hunt until the sun was at five fists and no lower. I was there when the sun sank to five and then four fists. It was almost night when Olin finally stumbled from the jungle in tears. He had argued with Ash, and they had fought; Ash had struck him in the temple with a broken branch and fled while he was down. Olin had followed as far as he dared. And our Father said, —How far was that? Through sobs Olin said he had seen Ash step onto the road and set off in the direction of the city.

That night, after hours of sorting through belongings and packing them into old canvas knapsacks from the shed, we left the house. Anna and I did not ask where we were going, or when we might return, but father put on his glove and fetched his falcon from her mews, and I knew we were going far and would be gone for a long time. Anna was hooded against the fearful shapes of the night, and it fell to me to take her hand; and I remembered when I had been much younger myself and how it felt to be led along through darkness, trusting completely in the hand that guided me; and the smell of the hood; and I almost wished for that same security now. But I was a girlchild no longer; I had left the years of hooding behind when our Father felt I was too old for it, so the sheltering blindness was Anna’s luxury and not mine. I tried to be a good guide, in spite of needing guidance myself. At first I thought we were heading to the road, in search of Ash, but Olin said no, the road was in the opposite direction. Sunrise proved him right. We were somewhere in the jungle I had never been, following a track the wild pigs and small deer must have made. Our Father knew it well enough to have guided us in the dark. My mother moved carefully, without complaining, though I knew her joints were swollen and always troubled her. When Anna began to complain, Olin picked her up and carried her, even though his pack was heavy. From that point on, I walked in front with our Father, holding his free right hand.

When I looked up at our Father, I saw the hardness there, and the worry; but in catching his eye, I also saw the love that drove him, and I felt such love in return that I never thought to question where we went, or why.

We rested as often as we dared. Our Father was mindful of Anna and me and solicitous of my mother’s pains. You never would have thought he’d had any infirmities himself; he strode along as powerfully as my brother. When we stopped to make camp at the end of the day, he built us a shelter against the night rain; then he sent up his falcon, and before long we heard her bell and she descended with a bright-plumed bird that we roasted over a small fire. Our Father joked that he should teach her to catch bats, and then we should be well fed. But he put out the fire as soon as we were done, and I heard him whispering to my mother that we dared not make another. The falcon took stand in a branch above our camp, where I could hear her wings rustling in the dark from time to time. Among all the noises of the jungle I found comfort in that sound.

The morning of the second day, we woke and marched, and that day was like a dreary dream. Anna could be carried, but I could not, and I wished that like our falcon I could fly aloft to take the weight off my blistered feet. Yet I tried not to complain, especially after looking upon my mother, who said not a word although you could see in her face that she thought of nothing but Ash.

The third day dawned in horror. We woke to screaming and woeful calls, which came from somewhere we could not imagine. Our Father needed not caution us to silence, for none of us would have made a sound against the awful cries. They seemed to fill the jungle, echoing from every shadow. And as the sun rose and filled the dark places with light, the sound grew stronger, moving now this way, now that, as if buffeted by the wind.

We crept through the woods, away, always away from our homestead, but the screaming trailed us. My mother wept silently, and Olin’s face was pale and our Father’s grim beyond belief. He must have known immediately what the rest of us did not, for it was hours before mother said, —It’s Ash! And he nodded only once.

We did not sleep that night. Nor did Ash by the sound of it, for the sourceless, ceaseless wailing roamed the dark, ragged and full of pain. On this night there was no rain, and the clouds kept back as if agreed the moon should shine on us remorselessly. We cowered in a clearing and tried to rest, and as I looked up at the moon I tried to make my peace with it and prayed it would keep watch over us somehow. I did not know what other power to pray to.

Then across the face of the moon, something drifted like a skeletal kite; but only the bars of the kite, with the sail itself all twisted and in tatters. And then I woke, thinking it was a dream, but did not wake, for it was not a dream. The kite drifted untethered, under its own power, and the thing that writhed upon it began to scream and beg for death and mercy. It cried out in my brother’s voice:

—Father! Mother! Anna! Olin!

—Jane! it called, for I was always his favorite. Jane!

We all lay still as it passed above. Something fell from it and splattered on my face like a raindrop, a tear, or more likely blood. I only stirred to check that Anna’s hood was fastened so she would not be too frightened, and then not a one of us moved. I saw that our Father had put his hand over mother’s mouth so that she would not make a sound and betray us. And though at first she wept and moaned, in time she grew quiet.

For hours it hung there. I could study every bared sinew in the moonlight. I could see how his skin had been peeled away, the muscles severed from tendons and separated strand by strand from one another. But I could not see how he lived, let alone cried out with such ferocity.

Near morning, as the moon sank, the wind rose and the clouds regathered, and a high breeze caught hold of the kite and moved it on. Both sight and sound of Ash faded away. Our Father took such a deep, shuddering breath that I could almost believe he had not breathed in hours. Then he said only, —They will pay for this in kind. The sky above the city will be full of kites!

Our Father took his hand away from mother’s mouth, then looked down and kissed her eyelids closed, and I saw how she had managed to lie so still through that terrible night as her firstborn hung flayed and screaming above her. Our Father’s hand had been firm inside his heavy glove; and though she must have wailed and wept, we remained undiscovered; and when I saw the blood and how the thick leather of the palm had been torn by teeth, I recalled her words when I woke in the night and saw the ax. I found new comfort in them now.

We had come to rocky country, where the land rose in shelves of tumbled stone. It was deep in one of these crevices that we laid our mother, covered in the brittle yellow leaves of bamboo, with rocks chinked in around her like a loose-fit wall. Olin would not speak, but he worked alongside our Father while I held Anna and watched. Olin carried Anna the rest of the day, and she did nothing but weep inside her hood, but my eyes were dry.

In the afternoon, we heard Ash again. This time our Father’s face grew dark, and he leant to his falcon and whispered something fierce that roused her. Then he cast her off.

We climbed farther then descended into a shallow valley, which was comforting for the shadows it held. I walked behind Anna and Olin and sometimes lifted her hood just enough to tickle her lips with a blade of grass, reminding her to smile. I felt the valley contained a magic that had cut us off from all unpleasantness, for all afternoon it was quiet. But then we heard something I had hoped we’d left behind: Ash’s screaming and pleading. The cries came on closer and faster than ever. Olin cried out and took off running with Anna, crashing deep into the jungle without looking back. But I clung to our Father’s hand, and he never trembled but stared at the broken sky through the trees as the sound grew louder and louder. Then down through the leaves came his falcon, with the sound of Ash’s torment circling round her, and I understood nothing—for how could a bird scream like a boy? She circled our Father’s head and dropped a ragged, bloody scrap from her talons to his hands. Then she settled on his wrist.

He held out his right hand so I could see the quarry. It was fleshy and clear, like yellowed glass with milky green shapes inside. It was veined and buzzing with botflies. And it screamed and screamed with my brother’s voice until our Father set it on a granite slab and crushed it under his heel.

We looked for Anna and Olin through the rest of the day and long after dark, not daring to call for them. Finally, our Father pulled me into a cave among the stones, very much like that in which we had left mother. He devised a perch for his bird inside the mouth of the cave, though I knew it pained him that she had no room to spread her wings, for several times I woke to hear him apologizing so deeply that he wept.

I woke to see distant light, jagged and raw, and heard the sound of voices, these not screaming but calling out with urgency, very brisk and efficient. Father crouched in the mouth of the cave, whispering to his falcon where she perched on his glove. Then he cast her off, and she was gone, with only the faintest sound of a bell. I wondered that he had not removed her bell, but I think the screams of Ash must have deafened him to many sounds. Then, still wearing his glove, father took my hand and tugged me quietly to the threshold, and as we looked over the broken stones we saw greenish fog creeping through the valley below. All sort of animals had struggled from their burrows to die there in the morning mist: marmots and rabbits and lizards, some still thrashing. A wind had begun to thin the shallow cloud, but it also pushed traces of the acrid mist uphill, and we hurried to climb faster than it could seep. His falcon charted our path from above, but although I sometimes saw her shadow or caught a silvery tinkling of her bell, she never came down to us again. And I wondered what my father could have told her to keep her away.

As we topped the crest and came down the other side of the ridge, we saw a farther valley where traces of the mist still lingered. And this time, among the small furry bodies, were two larger ones we knew on sight, flushed from their desperate burrow. It needed no closer inspection to know that Olin lay there, and many yards away lay Anna, just out of reach of our Father’s sheltering hand. I thought of how it must have been for Anna, wandering blindly without a guide, never thinking to lift the hood without father’s permission. That was the first moment I saw the hood as a hateful thing and knew it was only by chance that my childhood had not ended the same way; and I wondered if without it she might have escaped.

We kept to the ridge until we heard voices coming up from the valley to one side where a stream ran. Soon after that, I saw others moving far off among the bamboo staves, and the hue and flow of their garments reminded me of the three travelers, but there were many more of them.

To avoid being seen we went down from the ridge and sought a more choked passage, where sometimes we went on all fours and sometimes had to wriggle like snakes. From time to time our Father had to pull me over shelves of rock I could not climb myself; he had taken to using his gloved hand to help me, so I could not feel his fingers through it but only the thick, tough leather. It broke my heart, for it seemed he could not bear to touch me without the glove; as if he were already preparing to be apart. I felt almost relieved we were alone now, because my mother would have had no heart for this, and my sister not enough strength. Only I did miss Olin though.

In the afternoon, we stepped onto a spur of rock like a stone finger pointing straight out from the mountainside; and I saw more of the world in that one instant than I had seen in my whole life. The land fell away below us, sheer above a rocky slope that thickened into jungle down below. The jungle gave way to a wide plain, burned and bare and grey with the look of recent devastation. Beyond the plain, in a smoky haze, were unnatural shapes that could only be buildings, although the thing they most reminded me of was mountains. The stony finger pointed right at this place. When I asked my father if that was the city, he took his eyes away from it and said, —Yes, Jane.

And then he said, —I never showed you this. And I hadn’t meant to show any of you, although your mother knew, for we fled from there together. She carried Ash in her belly, while I brought nothing with me but my falcon.

I looked closer at the city, and in its jumbled center I saw something that puzzled me for seeming so familiar. It was a tall spire, the tallest of them. And at the very tip of that spire was a curved shape that looked like a crook or a question mark, though it ended in a barbed tip; and across it was a slash that seemed to cut through all the haze of distance so that I turned and stared at the emblem on our Father’s glove and saw they were the same.

—I have done all I can to keep you safe, our Father said. Almost all.

—Come to me, Jane. Do you understand what we must do? Come to me.

He stood at the edge of the rock and held out his gloved hand as he had all these days. His face was no longer hard, no longer the face of our Father. I could not see him in it anywhere. Yet I stepped up beside him, for I heard voices coming up among the rocks. I heard footsteps and scrabbling and harsh, panting breaths.

I hardly sensed his fingers through the thick leather; his hand felt insubstantial inside the heavy glove. Looking out at the city, I thought the air above it was full of dark vibrant motes, and I remembered what he’d said about a sky full of kites. I was not sure if they were present and real or a vision vouchsafed of the future. I only knew they depended on my eyes to see them, for my father’s eyes were lost and empty now, no matter what they had been the day before. It was as if he had pulled a hood over his own head and now expected me to guide him.

—Ah, Jane, he said.

And then we took a step together. But his was one step forward, and mine was one step back. I held fast to the glove when his hand went out of it. Then I knelt on the tip of the stone finger and watched him fall until green swallowed him.

Voices gathered in the air behind me and grew still. I heard footsteps settle at the edge of the rock. They came no closer.

A shadow brushed over me, and I heard my falcon’s bell. I slipped my hand into the glove and she settled on my wrist in a flurry.

I leant to put my cheek against her feathers, for she deserved my respect more than any of them. More even than he had.

When I had made them wait long enough, I left off whispering. I slowly turned to put the city at my back. In the slant evening light, I made sure they saw my face, and I held up the glove so they could all see the emblem upon it.

At the sight of that, they stared. Then they knelt and bowed their heads, and some lay face-down flat upon the rock.

—I am Jane, was all I said, and all I had to say.

* * *

“Jane” copyright 2005 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at SciFiction, February 16, 2005.

SWEETMEATS

At first little Hugh thought it was rats. Rats in the wall by his head, down low on the floor where his mattress lay. He had seen them often enough, darting down the hall to the kitchen, coming upon their nests in the narrow crawlspace where he sometimes went for privacy. He imagined their curved teeth gnawing away, almost the same stained yellow color as the crumbly plaster they chewed.

His sister had always feared they would come in at night and eat them, but she did not wake to see if her dream would come true. Hugh alone watched and watched the spot where the sound was coming from. He watched until the wall began to tremble, and a piece of it bent sideways and opened like a little door, hinged on the wallpaper.

Out came not a rat, but a little brown man. Very little, very brown. His head barely reached the lower ledge of the windowsill.

“Is this your house?” the little brown man said. “You live here?”

Hugh twisted and looked over his shoulder to make sure his sister was still sleeping. She was. The rest of the house was quiet as well; his parents often fell into a stupor long before Hugh could find his way to sleep. Some nights he never even closed his eyes, but lay awake with his head so empty that the darkness inside him and the darkness outside were exactly the same. That was very restful. But now, except for Hugh and this little intruder, everyone was asleep.

“Who are you?” Hugh whispered.

“I asked you a question.”

“I’m sleeping in it, aren’t I?”

“Right,” said the little man, and turned to peer back at the hole he’d made. “You won’t fit through this.”

“Why would I want to?”

“We need to get you out of here, under the house. Right away.”

“Keep your voice down,” Hugh said, “you’ll wake my sister. And I’m not going anywhere with you. Not… not unless you tell me who you are.”

“No names until we trust you.”

“You trust me? Why should I trust you?”

“Do you know Mbe’lmbe?”

“Umbaylumbay? Who’s he?”

“Foo. But it is not your fault you are such an ignorant child. If you knew the name, you would know that you can trust me. We have had secrecy forced upon us for so long, the world has forgotten us. Answer me this, boy. Is there another way under your house?”

“The crawlspace.”

“You get there how?”

“There’s a piece of screen under the porch. I peel it back.”

“Very well. Put on your shoes and go there. I will meet you and then we proceed.”

“I’m not that crazy.”

“You can wear your pajamas—it’s warm enough where we’re headed. But shoes you may need. Now hurry.”

Hugh plucked at the flannel pajamas that had been his solitary Christmas present, his solace on these bitter nights in the drafty little house. When he looked up again the flap of wallboard was swinging back into place. The little brown man was gone.

Hugh’s dilemma. For the moment, he was free to do as he chose. Surely such a little man couldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. It was up to Hugh himself whether he crawled into the cobwebby dark beneath the porch, or fell back into his pillow and tried to sleep.

A moment later, the pillow was cooling and the sheets lay thrown back. The bed was empty, Hugh’s decision made.

* * *

“Well done, little man,” the little man greeted him from darkness as he scraped through the wire mesh. Hugh kept a candle stub and book of matches in his crawlspace nest. As the light flared, the man’s pupils glared briefly golden like a cat’s. “Now make haste with me. Our time is short.”

In the middle of the crawlspace floor, the raw dirt had been pushed up in a gaping crater, a mole mound dug up from beneath. Into this, now, the little man lowered himself. One hand thrust up and beckoned back to Hugh. “It’s narrow here, but soon widens.”

It was also dark. Putting his face above the opening, he felt a breeze coming up, strong enough to make the flame flutter. He expected the subterranean wind to carry a tomb smell, something as musty as the suffocating damp beneath the house. Instead, the breeze was redolent of unexpected sweetness. Cinnamon. Mint. The rich, dark, intoxicating scents of coffee, vanilla, and above all else, chocolate. The passage was crudely hewn by pick and shovel, hardly fit for a grave-tunneling ghoul, but the smell disarmed him. He dropped down easily, rock shards digging into his knees and palms. The candle went out during the descent.

“This way,” said the voice in the dark, calling from the direction of the smells. “You won’t need the light. There is no false turn you can make. And soon you will see well enough.”

He followed the scrabbling sounds of toes and knees in earth. It was hard to breathe, with his head tucked low so that he wouldn’t bang his forehead on the ceiling. When he stopped to catch his breath, the vapors that filled his nose and lungs were intoxicating. An intense miasma of candyshop smells: Licorice and lemon, caramelized sugar, a marshmallowy sponginess to the air. It was growing more humid, rich with scents to drown out the raw smell of the earth they stirred up as they scrambled. At last he realized he could see the silhouette of the little man ahead of him. The light was very dim and sourceless, and it stayed that way for the longest time, like twilight in a dream where it is always twilight. Even when it brightened, it could hardly be called bright, being only barely lighter than the palest dusk. And in that subterrene glow, he realized the little man was standing upright now and urging him to do the same. With his hand on his head like a protective cap, Hugh raised himself to full height, and found that the ceiling was now higher than he could reach. Their journey through the narrow passage finished, he wondered what kind of place he’d come to.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Why have you brought me here?”

“We are home.”

“Whose home?”

“Are you not a lonely, lonely child?”

He sensed he was in some kind of sunken forest. As his eyes adjusted ever so slowly to the gloom, he saw looming shadows, blurred shapes like enormous trees that stirred not at all in the gentle sweet-scented wind. He reached out to touch a tall trunk, and his fingers sank into velvety softness until they reached something cold and hard as glass. He put his fingers to his nose, wondering if this was the source of sweetness, but the softness reeked of mildew, rot and mold, a trillion fetid spores disturbed by his questing fingers. He sneezed and stepped away. Was this the source of the velvety light that seemed to emanate from the very walls? Did mold blanket every surface? But what… what had lain beneath the mold before it grew? Why did the shapes cloaked in damp grey matter seem far too complex and convoluted to be explained away as the stalagmites and stalactites of even the most fantastical cavern?

Again, he asked, “What is this place?”

“Not yet, little man. Sad little mad little ignorant little man.”

He sighed, exasperated, ready to refuse to budge. But at that instant, something lurched from the grey folds of moldy dimness. A chuckling sound turned whining and insistent. Sudden puffs of upset spores, far off in the dark, came steaming closer, like the chuffing plume of a grey locomotive rushing at them. His guide let out a muffled shriek and seized his hand and first pulled, then rushed around behind and shoved him forward.

“Run!” the little man hissed. “Run, run, run, run, run!”

The thing behind them advanced almost soundlessly, but Hugh could hear a gathering of soft explosions like puffs from a huge mouth. A blast of mold dust robbed him of sight. He shut his stinging eyes and staggered forward, only to find himself falling. Thick tepid mud enveloped him, acrid and foul, and also riddled with mold. He came up gasping, as beside him his sputtering host insisted, “Swim and we’ll be safe! Push on! It has never yet dared to cross the great river!”

So he swam. Struggling through thickness, he came at last to a crusted slope where the mud had hardened into cracked plates, where he could fit his fingers into crevices and drag himself ashore. It was scarcely a relief when he heard, “We’re safe.”

In the grey distance behind them, that immense puffing came again and again, then settled down as if sobbing itself to sleep. He tried to imagine what could make such a sound: so soft and yet far-reaching; so full of disappointment and dismay.

Now he and the little brown man were exactly the same shade of muddy. The stuff was cold and sticky, as well as foul-flavored, obliterating whatever pleasure the sweet scented air might have brought him. His host, muttering something about making themselves presentable, pulled Hugh to his feet and dragged him on, casting worried glances back at the density of darkness behind them. He thought he heard something sigh, and gather itself. He felt his host’s urgency quicken.

Hugh had lost his shoes in the suction of the river. Now they trod a carpet of brittle grass that crunched and crumbled underfoot; he walked on splinters of broken crystal, but they did no damage, seeming to dissolve as his full weight came down upon them. Each step produced a range of icy tinkling notes.

“So this is your home,” he said, “but who are you?”

“I told you before, we are mbe’lmbe. The last of our kind, and I am our king, although such titles mean nothing in our slavery, for they mean nothing to him.”

“Him? Who is he?”

“The Successor. The Factor. Our Master. Now, in here, quickly.”

His host, the King, opened a door into a place that was slightly less grey and dim than the grim bank they had surmounted. Hugh stepped onto cold concrete and a shiver went through him. One yellow bulb burned blearily, far away down a corridor whose walls were spotted and stained with age and ooze and the salts of the earth, crusted and nitred and yet somehow still smelling sweetly. A corroded fan spun overhead, creaking in the sugary breeze. That sweetness poured from a vent near the corridor ceiling, and the vent was caked with dusty white grit like that which formed on the battery terminals of an old car.

The King tried closing the door behind them, but it was warped and Hugh could see that it was rarely used. Leaning against it with all his weight, the little King managed to slide the latch home, and left the crooked door straining against a darkness that seemed alive enough to ooze around its edges.

The King scurried down the passage, his bare feet slapping the stained cement. Tiles of white and black, chipped and broken, sometimes missing entirely, gave the sense of grander days—an immaculate past, when such things must have mattered to someone. They passed another vent, spilling forth such a richness that Hugh was caught short by it, and hung there gasping and gaping like a fish hooked on the wondrous vapors.

“What… what is that smell?” he asked. “Where is it coming from?”

“From the only part of this place that still functions as it should,” replied the King. “The Factor’s reactor.”

They had left the lone bulb far behind when another door, much smaller than the other, appeared on one side of the hall. The King opened it for Hugh and waved him through with some ceremony. For a moment, it was dark, and then a light sprang on.

This room was strangely prosaic, so ordinary that it struck him as completely out of place.

There was a bed pushed into one corner, a small bureau, and a porcelain sink with dripping taps. A few books sat piled on the bureau, all covered in dust, with gilded titles in Latin and French, some bound in leather, still others in yellowed horn. Above that was a mirror in which he saw himself, completely covered in the filth through which he’d swum.

The King pulled open the topmost drawer, and inside Hugh saw a plain white shirt, a pair of short pants, a rolled up pair of socks. A flattened cap sat neatly atop this pile. The King toed around beneath the bed and pulled out a pair of shoes that seemed as if they probably would fit.

“Whose room is this? Whose clothes?”

“All were his, at one time, but he has forgotten this place exists. Those clothes should fit you, since you are now his age when he came here. I will leave you alone to groom yourself, and then we must make haste.”

The King bowed and withdrew, leaving Hugh alone with the distinct impression that he had better not take a single moment to wonder what was happening to him.

He stripped out of his pajamas and ran water from both taps until they ran clear after twin bursts of rust. The soap was an antique yellow sliver, but he used it sparingly, and it almost lasted till the end. It was quite some time before he felt he was really clean. He sponged himself with a washcloth that hung from a rack by the sink, then dried with a towel hanging from a peg. A black plastic comb sat on the rim of the sink, and as he lifted it, he became transfixed by the sight of one golden hair tangled in its broken black teeth. He set it down, feeling that to run it through his hair would have been like brushing his teeth with a stranger’s toothbrush.

The clothes smelled of cinnamon and cloves, and were surprisingly soft, although ragged. As the King predicted, they all fit, though the pants were large in the waist. He used a coil of soft cotton rope, discovered in a drawer, to belt them. A jacket hung on the back of the door. Last of all, he settled the cap on his head to hide his bedraggled curls, and found that fit him too.

Curious about the room’s former occupant, he turned to the books on the bureau. Some were volumes of history, dictionaries, and medical tomes. The horn-bound books were written by hand, as if copied out by monks, yet appeared to be cookbooks of some sort. Flames and loaves of bread were represented there; minutely observed drawings of exotic herbs and berries. Other of the books proved to be journals. One of these sat by itself in the middle of the desk. He picked it up and opened it to a page marked with a slip of gold foil.

The penmanship was neat and disciplined, yet something about it told him it was a child’s handwriting.

—so much responsibility, thrust on me so fast, and I’m unsure I am worthy of it, tho He thinks I am. I mainly worry how I can continue once He’s gone, as He says He soon must be. He says I have much promise and will have many Helpers and will surely discover my own talent though it seems all hidden now. He says the hands and wisdom of all the Helpers are also mine to command, tho really that does not seem right. Why should anyone should have to do whatever I—

“Little Master, we must be off!”

The door stood open. The King waited expectantly. In the interim, he also had cleaned and groomed himself. Hugh, without a second thought, closed the small journal and slipped it into a pocket of his jacket, feeling as if it belonged there, as if the pocket were stretched in exactly that shape from constant carrying.

He was beginning to feel very odd indeed.

The King of the Mbe’lmbe nudged him sideways out of the passage. He tried looking back the way they had come, to the far off door by the muddy river, but it was all black down there now, and he couldn’t tell if lights had gone off or if the tunnel had simply filled up with darkness. A new light winked like a baleful subterrene Polaris from far off in the yet untravelled dark. It beckoned him. The complicated smells of rust and nitre had begun to exert a hold on his curiosity as strong as—and even stranger than—the syrupy fumes that were so much a part of the atmosphere.

They proceeded through what had been a sculpted arch, once no doubt quite ornate, now a sad affair of whitewashed beams and broken plaster that had mostly crumbled away. Dragging his fingers along the wall, he caught a few flecks of the stuff, and brought it reflexively to his mouth and then his tongue. Sweet. It was sweet as sugar yet stale as old pastry, like a sacrificial wafer from a mummy’s tomb.

And thinking mummy thoughts, he was wholly unsurprised when a boat emerged from the cavernous gloom, and he found himself at the shore of a rancid Styx. There was no oarsman, no one to take the helm of the high-prowed ship, and in fact they were not to board the weathered craft. It lay canted against a splintered wharf, tied to stanchions striped like faded barber poles, and so thickly furred with lint and dust that he believed they must be ancient candy canes. The oars lay piled within like broken bones.

“Once, but no more,” the King murmured with mixed regret and relief. “The very essence of efficiency, it took its toll.”

They hurried past the ruined ship and down the dark sweet throat from which the candyshop scents issued, the stagnant river lapping at their side. It was hard to imagine what stirred the river now. There was no wind, no current, yet thick little waves tracked them for a time, as if the boat were rocking to the motion of its hidden cargo, or as if something immense had lowered itself into the scum and begun to swim. Not far along, the little King caught sudden hold of Hugh’s wrist. Hugh wondered why this should be until he saw, in mounds of darkened earth, glittering white crosses running parallel to the river’s course, row upon row like sharks’ teeth layered back into the darkness. Some of the little graves were set with delicate candy skulls, and the crosses themselves must be sugar. So many… a holocaust down here in the darkness… the graves so small and close-set that at first he thought they must all be the graves of children, until he felt the King’s trembling and realized these were all his people. Not a single marker bore a name.

He counted a hundred paces along the river’s edge, with a grave for every pace; and that was only in the nearest row. He forced himself to stop counting, but the graves went on unnumbered. They grew more irregular, spaced farther apart, as if the things they held were increasingly large. The earth looked split and dried, like a cake that had baked too long, the doughy interior swelling up from beneath.

The King had closed his eyes and clung to him, his brow damp, his lips moving in feverish prayer.

Finally they were past that dreadful place, and Hugh thought he might ask a simple question, but the King’s eyes sprang open and stopped him from even considering it.

“Do not concern yourself with them,” he said firmly. “It is my burden alone—I, who brought them here. You are here for the sake of the living.”

“But…” The question he had been burning to ask. “Why me?”

“Why? It is the only way open to us now. Once there was another way, but in his madness he forsook it. Crazed and companionless, he has forgotten all goodness. He has forgotten life. Sugarbirds once sang here, but they have fallen silent. He has been too long without others. I did not show you all the graves.”

Hugh swallowed, assuming he should be grateful for this mercy. The King’s eyes were terrible.

“Now here,” he said, “say nothing. Do not show pity or contempt or anything untoward. Especially not fear! Keep your thoughts shut up close. There must be no commotion.”

They had arrived at another unexpected door, the appliqué letters pale and peeling. Once they had read SWETESHOPPE, though applied all askew with an unsure hand. The King clenched the knob and opened it into a smell such as Hugh had never imagined.

It was sweetness mingled with sweat, smells of toil and grief, vanilla and excrement, odors of violet and urine, butchershop blood and confectioner’s sugar. He caught himself at the threshold, unwilling to take a single step inside, until the King tugged at his wrist and he knew he must come. He started to put a hand to his mouth, but the King sensed his intent and slapped his hand down. He went forward smiling and bowing and beckoning at Hugh to stay beside him.

All about them towered piles of glazed cooking pots, spiraling copper coils, gauges with needles trembling, steam spouting from high pipes, cages. Everywhere cages. He could not quite see what was in them, apart from the eyes, but that was enough. Eyes like boiled sweets, rolling and watching them, disembodied orbs with bright candy centers that shook and rattled and stared as they passed. That was only for starters. The cages grew larger, the air more rank and humid, the sugary sweetness more cloying and more fetid. There were things in the cages, short and dark, which might have been people once, though now they were little more than enormous mouths with tubes going into them, and rich thick liquors bubbling through the tubes, and even greater richness straining the dark skins to bursting. In some places they had stretched until they split, and raspberry liquors oozed out between the cracks.

“Show respect,” the King whispered, bowing and turning to all sides as they advanced.

“But were they, are they, people?” Hugh whispered in return, although to do so meant he must inhale uncontrollably.

“No… not quite… never. Not these. Not alive, exactly. Without constant irrigation, they would expire immediately. But He… He has not the strength to end their misery. He starts but never finishes. The creator who cannot also understand the need for death should never have been given such power in the first place. Theirs is an endless suffering.”

“If they aren’t alive than how can they suffer?”

“Look at them. Look into their eyes and see if you can still ask such a question.”

But he could not. He couldn’t even be certain where to find their eyes without straining close into the dimness of the cage, which was not something he felt strong enough to do.

“Please,” he said, “I don’t like it here.”

“I’m not sure which are more to be pitied,” said the King. “These, or the ones that have achieved a kind of existence… the ones that have managed to escape.”

Hugh recalled the sound of the soft puffing mouth, the stirring of the stagnant river. He began to retch.

“Now, now. We are almost through.”

At the far end of the room, a door showed through a jumble of nut husks and toppled cages; the floor was deeply grooved and scratched where it had been hauled open countless times. As the King released him to haul on the door, Hugh looked back and saw the caged things watching him, desperately sad, as if waiting to be eaten, wanting it, fearing it, knowing it was never to be.

“Steel yourself,” said the King.

But as the door flew open in a warm waft of wind, it was hard to know how this could be worse than what he’d just seen—how it could be anything bad at all. The buttery smell of chocolate was so intense it obliterated all other odors. Instead of dimness, there was light; instead of cloying humidity, the warmth of a friendly kitchen; instead of screams and despondent sighs, the cheer of sputtering pots and hissing kettles. Blended scents of cinnamon, dark cherry and sweet cream, orange essence and pistachio, rosewater, lime and sugar on the edge of burning but not quite. All these and more wondrous odors came cutting through the chocolate, mixed with it, set his mouth watering. He realized he was ravenous. In the world above it must be morning now—breakfast time. Thinking perhaps the light and warmth had been decanted down through pipes and mirrored shafts from the world above, he squinted up toward the source of that golden radiance, but it was too brilliant to behold directly. He saw the mouth of an immense oven, a furnace that burned his eyes, forging vision into something simultaneously bright and dark.

“Look away,” the King urged him. “It will blind you! Look down low and you will see him.”

Afterimages of the furnace sizzling on his eyes, he scanned the wide expanse of the chamber, searching till he saw movement far out on a distant plain. A man, tall and thin, almost skeletal. Hugh saw a top hat, a long black coat with tattered tails, a face white as chalk with a sharp white beard and sunken eyes.

The face saw him and reeled him in… he felt himself drawn across the spotted, stained and sticky floor. The figure reared up to its full height.

The white face with its stiff goatee gazed severely at him with eyes mismatched, one crazed and cracked like a faded gumball, the other blue as a robin’s egg, bright and quite alert. It whipped swiftly down and sideways to aim a silent reproach at the King, then up it lashed toward Hugh.

“Huh-hullo,” he said.

Stained blueish lips peeled back from teeth so impossibly foul and decayed that Hugh’s jaws began to ache with sympathetic pain. They were broken stumps, ground down to nothing, splintered and eroded. Those that were not entirely grey were yellowed like antique ivory. It was an overly generous grin, most of it gum, and the gums even worse than the teeth because they were so clearly in distress.

“And you are?” said the reedy voice from that terrible, reeking mouth.

Hugh would have staggered back, but the King of the Mbe’lmbe put a shoulder hard to the back of his thigh and pushed him forward. But without abandoning him, for the King held hard to Hugh’s hand and thrust it up as if for that gumball eye’s consideration.

“He is your successor,” stated the King.

“I need none.”

“Master, your time has ended. All who know you know this for the truth. Pass on the work that was passed to you.”

“What I have learned, cannot be passed along. I need no apprentice, and I have no heir.”

“But this is he! There is none worthier! None so pure! None so sweet!”

“Sweet, you say?” The gumball eye, looking as if it had been worn by repeated sucking, spun toward him. “You… boy… you do look familiar.”

“As well he should.”

“Still, he means nothing to me. Why do you say I should know him, eh?”

The top-hatted figure of the old Master thrust forward to catch at Hugh’s collar and cuffs, muttering all the while: “…is sugar… is life…” The fingers, he noticed, were sticky with honey and butter and chocolate. The white beard was stained with chocolate; bright red dabs of jam gleamed at the corners of the awful mouth. Louder now, the muttering, and closer in his ear: “Life is sugar and sugar is life.” The fingers roamed his body, feeling his ribs, “You need fattening up. You need sweets. Nice sweets. You need this.”

Hugh blinked. Beneath his nose, a bar of chocolate appeared as if from the thin man’s sleeves. He started to take it, but the King hauled down his arm by the elbow, with a whispered, “No!”

The thin man laughed down at the little King. “What do you fear? That he will eat and never want to leave?”

“You know that is not what I fear!”

The white face leaned closer to Hugh again, bent down like a jack in the box on a wobbling spring. “Go ahead… take a bite…”

The chocolate so close, beneath his nose, smelled delectable. Only the King’s fear held him back. There was something here he did not understand. He clamped his jaws shut and shook his head.

“Well, then… save it for later…” The long white fingers drifted toward his pockets, pulling them open ever so slightly, dropping the chocolate bar in, patting the pocket to make sure it was safely ensconced.

And then, “What’s this?”

The hand retracted, sticky fingers pinching the bound journal he’d carried with him all this way. “What… where did you find this?”

The brown King looked mystified, as baffled as the old white man.

The old gent opened the book to the page with its golden marker, and his lips began to move. Hugh thought he was reading the journal entry there, but in fact his eyes were not upon the page. He plucked out the golden bookmark and his eyes grew watery and distant. He turned his gaze to the handwritten pages, and flicked his eyes over several lines. His lips trembled. He looked up at Hugh, then gazed with growing rage at the King of the Mbe’lmbe. His rotten teeth gnashed; flecks of spittle sprayed from his foaming mouth. He tore the top hat from his head and hurled it down upon the floor.

“Why show me this?” he began to scream. “Why cast me back upon that shore?”

“I… I… it was a mistake,” the King began. “Please, Master…”

“After all I have done for you? Wretched imp! Is this how you show gratitude? Sacre sucre! I have come too far to be tripped up here!”

“Master! Master, you are forgetting what you put in place! Let me help you remember!”

Hugh found his arm gripped ever more firmly by the King.

“Remember, Master? Remember?”

Looking down, he caught the glimmer of a knife in the King’s hand.

How quickly it had appeared! Where had it come from, and why?

He struggled to move away—so sharp! But the Mbe’lmbe held him tight.

“Do not be afraid,” said the little King soothingly. He found himself unable to resist. He wanted to trust the King. He saw his small white hand held almost tenderly in that much smaller brown one. He clenched his hand into a fist, but the King deftly uncurled his pinky finger and held it so it stuck straight out.

With a sharp swift slice, he lopped off Hugh’s fingertip.

Hugh bit his lip. He did not cry out, both because he feared to show fear before the hungry gumball eye, and because he felt no pain.

The King of the Mbe’lmbe stepped forward with Hugh’s fingertip extended. Hugh looked at that and not his hand. He saw a round pink stub with a soft moonshell of fingernail, still quivering, still unaware it was no longer part of him.

The old Master took the offering and held it up to the fierce oven light, regarding it from all sides, uncertain. He gave the little King a most curious questioning look, to which the King responded with a firm nod.

The old man licked his lips with a dry grey tongue, then popped Hugh’s fingertip into his mouth.

Hugh gasped as if feeling the old man’s rotten teeth in his flesh.

The old Master shut his eyes. He bit down once, and Hugh heard a brittle crunching. He bit down twice, and Hugh heard the juices squirting. The Master’s eyes opened, rapt and delirious, delighted, a broad smile spreading over his face, transforming it in an instant into the face of very old and wizened child.

“My God!” he crowed. He rolled his eyes.

“I tried to tell you, Master,” said the King.

The old man rushed toward Hugh and caught him up beneath his arms—caught him and threw him high into the air. He felt the furnace breathing over him, felt it might gape and swallow him whole.

“Yes, that taste, that wonderful taste… it comes back to me! Oh, sweet victory! Oh, ecstatic sweetness, sacre sucre! The taste of sunlight to the leaf! My boy, my dear boy, what a terrible misunderstanding! Oh happy day! Oh joy to you, joy to us all!”

He set Hugh down, and patted him tenderly on the head. “But… do you not see, my boy?”

He fluttered the golden bookmark, and on it Hugh saw scratches of writing, thin letters incised in the foil and glinting. The lines were short and broken, like lines of poetry, like something else. Like… like…

“The recipe!”

“For what?” Hugh asked.

“When I first drew you from the oven, ah, so small…” He held his fingers to show a mere pinch of boy. “So pink! Yes, yes! Dusted in pink sugar, my marzipan boy… so warm and fresh and sweet, with the raspberry coursing through you. Why, I could have eaten you whole!”

The old confectioner’s eyes gaped, bulged, oozed sugary tears, staring at something beyond.

“Come with me, my boy. Come now… this way… while the mood is upon me, while change is in the air, quickly now, quickly!”

Hugh realized, as the old man’s hands led him firmly along, that the glazed eye was fixed on the enormous oven. Above them burned an orange sun of flame, bright enough to have lit this and a hundred other underworlds; but that was the top of the chimney. At floor level, coming closer, was the door of the oven.

“This way! This way! Right along here! Your heritage, my boy… your birthright, and your birthing place. Exactly as intended, yes, I remember it now. Exactly! You were to take this burden from me when I was too weary to carry it. You were to be raised at my side to continue my work, taught from my books, fed from my fingers… And look what time it is! We must be quick, lad, quick!”

They paused at the gate of the immense furnace. Thick glass barely held back the volcanic fires within. Intense heat caused the oven door to bulge and blister toward them. The old confectioner reached out to twist a silver knob, and just like that the flames died down to nothing, and went out.

“Here, lad, have no fear! It’s completely cool! Put your hand upon it!”

Hugh put out his hand and touched the glass. The furnace roar was less than a whisper, and the heat had died down completely. The flame still burned somewhere in the heights, but down here it was cool.

“You will learn such secrets now, the mysteries of the oven will be yours… come up, come up!”

The oven door drew up like the portcullis of a castle. He reached unbelieving into the cool interior, black walls speckled with grey, long racks that seemed to continue for miles back into darkness, the mouth of a spotless cave…

And suddenly the hand in his back pushed firmly. He lost his balance, tipped and plunged. The King of the Mbe’lmbe shrieked and reached out for him, but they were both lost in that instant. Hugh fell hard on the spotless floor. As he felt the King’s hands on his arms, trying to pull him back, he heard the whirr of oiled hinges and the deafening boom of the oven door sealing shut.

He rose and turned. The King lay weeping on the ground, crumpled by failure and betrayal. Hugh could see the old confectioner, a shadow beyond the tinted glass, something made of smoke. The old man raised his hand to the silver knob by the side of the oven door. Then the glass began to fill with light. It felt to Hugh as if the sun were rising at his back.

He scarcely minded. It was a pleasant warmth, something familiar and almost comforting about it, as if he might melt away with a smile upon his face.

But it was otherwise for the King of the Mbe’lmbe. Hugh only slowly realized what he was hearing, and what it meant.

The little man was screaming.

He turned and hammered his fist on the glass, making a rhythmic pounding to which the twisted figure beyond the glass seemed to dance an antic jig. He was certain he saw the top-hat tossed high into the air and caught again. The old man was dancing out there.

“Please!” he cried. “Please help! Please, somebody, help him!”

His hands left sticky bubbles on the tempered glass. He could hear the sizzling of flesh behind him, then came a burning smell unlike any that oven had ever known or should have known. Flesh…

Beyond the glowing pane, something greater moved. A spot of darkness swiftly expanded and swelled, glistening, gleaming, becoming immense. Against it, the small shape of the old confectioner stiffened, grew tense, began to back away. The old man retreated until he was pressed against the glass of the oven door, separated only by that thin hot sheet from Hugh’s clawing fingertips. The old man turned to the glass, his face directly opposite Hugh’s, but all unseeing, blind with fear. Then the old face went awash in blackness, smothered in it. A gluey brown wave drenched the glass, washing over it like a thick and sticky tide that eventually, reluctantly, subsided. In drawing back, it flailed decisively at the silver knob, and the flames abruptly died.

The oven door hissed and opened slightly. Hugh stumbled forward, then stopped and turned back to find the King limping toward him, his hair singed and smoking, his skin a mass of developing blisters.

Together they stared across the sticky waste.

The floor was like the shore of a sea of molasses at low tide. A crumpled top hat floated in the middle of the flood. There was no other sign of the old confectioner.

The doorway to the Sweteshoppe swung ajar, and slowly came to rest.

The King croaked in an urgent hush: “My farewell to you, young master. The sugarbirds again will sing in the rafters, but I will not linger here to hear them. I will not allow myself to come to hate you as I grew to hate him. I have sung my death song already. I go to lay myself among my people.”

The sadness of the King’s words overwhelmed him and Hugh began to weep. Great sugary tears rolled down his cheeks and he flicked them aside with his tongue, trying to take no pleasure in so doing. The King of the Mbe’lmbe, last of his kind, clasped his hand with finality, then turned and walked over the Sweteshoppe threshold. Within, a great darkness gleamed as if welcoming the King. Then the door shut and Hugh was alone.

Absently, he put his severed finger in his mouth and began to suck.

And sucking, tasted sugary sweetness, raspberry jam, a touch of caramel, and the almond softness of marzipan.

Sugar.

The stuff of life.

The taste of sunlight to a leaf.

If a mere man, with all his indigestible impurities, had whipped up such sweet life as he from scratch, then what might he, a boy of sugar, dream of making? What radiant creatures of unsullied sweetness might issue from that titanic oven and soar out to dust the world with powder from their wings?

With visions overwhelming him almost to bursting, he realized he was nibbling the very slightest bit from his finger.

He forced himself to stop, although it was difficult.

No more! He must find other sources of nourishment. He must make himself last as long as possible.

It would be a struggle, a constant temptation.

After all, he was so incredibly sweet.

* * *

“Sweetmeats” copyright 2005 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2005.

EVALUATION OF THE HANNEMOUTH BEQUEST

(A.K.A. Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array)

CAVEAT RE ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE:

This report is provided for purposes of oral history only, as much of the evidence contained herein is purely anecdotal, and unverifiable at this point. Incomplete copies of insurance and expense reports relating to the loss of a company car were found in the files of IBM’s Northrop Account Liaison, dated mid-1970’s, however it is impossible ascertain whether the car might have been lost some ordinary way (either stolen or abandoned under awkward circumstances), or whether it came to harm as alleged in the documents. These notes were compiled from an informal oral history, namely the oft-recounted tales of Charles Messraunt, a colorful former employee of IBM who was eventually released from employment after increasingly common episodes of erratic behavior, poor mental health, and allegations of substance abuse. Messraunt’s official notes of the Hannemouth Bequest Self-Configurable Array are no longer to be found in any known record depository, if they were ever filed in the first place; and Messraunt himself faded from the historical record after several sightings as a street-person in the Northern California town of Garberville.

THE RECORD:

In approximately 1975, the Dean of a small private Northern California university made an informal request of Messraunt, who was temporarily stationed at the campus as an on-site contractor, training the staff in the use and maintenance of a new academic record-keeping system after having overseen its construction. The Dean requested Messraunt’s expertise in inspecting and evaluating a bequest that had been made to the university by a private donor, once a professor at the university, recently deceased. The bequeathed property was identified as the Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array, and Messraunt believed it to be some form of experimental computing device, undertaken at great expense by the late Professor Hannemouth, and developed entirely with private funding flowing from royalties from various of Hannemouth’s successful patents.

The Dean’s request was apparently greeted warmly, although it must have been kept an informal matter, judging from the lack of contemporary records to support Messraunt’s claim that he proceeded with IBM’s express authorization. When Messraunt asked to see the device, he was told that it was too large to transport, but that a short trip would soon bring them to it. This was by no means unexpected, considering that the university’s state of the art records system, considered to be the very height of compact efficiency at the time, had required construction of a three-story building adjacent to the Academic Affairs building. Hannemouth’s array being somewhat older, and probably dedicated to more complex computing operations, would no doubt occupy a sizeable footprint.

Several hours’ drive brought Messraunt to the gates of Hannemouth’s secluded estate in an old-growth redwood forest. A bulky keycard device gave him entry, and he soon found himself driving through what appeared to be an extensive if dilapidated campus, larger than the university itself. Hannemouth’s wealth and eccentricity were obvious at every turn, as was his apparently prolonged absence. For while the Dean had painted the old inventor as a solitary man, the grounds of his estate were lined with avenues of dormitories, as if this had once been a thriving community. An hour of driving about the complex left Messraunt feeling as if only a fraction of the place had been explored, but he was mindful of his duty, which was to give a cursory inspection of the device itself, and return with recommendations for further study, and in fact whether the university should accept the bequest or make other arrangements.

With the aid of a poorly labeled map, Messraunt parked his car in what appeared to be a small staff parking lot near one of the more formidable buildings at the center of the complex. Stepping out of the car for the first time, he discovered the abandoned complex had the nature of an unkempt park, with squirrels everywhere, and the rooflines festering with crows. Messraunt had been provided with keys to the main building, and he soon found himself in an equally shabby lobby, where the destructive activities of rats were much in evidence. Unpromisingly, there was no electricity, and the elevators proved unworkable, which did not bode well for his ability to judge the Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array except in its most superficial aspect. (Imagine evaluating the performance of a modern personal computer with nothing to go by but the blank metal case.) His instructions led him to believe the seventh, topmost floor was his destination, and he made his way through dark stairwells clogged with rat droppings and crow feathers. Everywhere was the rustling of vermin. Messraunt wondered how long ago Professor Hannemouth had abandoned the device.

The seventh floor, fortunately, was well-lit thanks to panoramic windows which gave a view of the entire campus complex. Several of the windows had been shattered by the elements, and a number of crows fled squawking from the room when he first entered. The carpets were stained from storm leakage, and Messraunt worried for the integrity of any sensitive device that had been stored under such conditions. But the view momentarily occupied him, and took his breath away, as he looked out on the campus held in its bowl of wooded hills. From here he was able to see the entire length of the avenues lined with the grey, almost featureless dormitory buildings—evocative of grim Soviet-style apartment blocks. In the distance, across a glittering river he had managed to miss in his cursory tour of the estate, he could see the cold smokestacks of a small physical plant which must have generated power and warmth for the campus and its erstwhile inhabitants. Messraunt faintly perceived some sort of pattern behind the layout of streets and buildings, but after the initial wonder at the sprawling vista faded, he found himself more concerned by the absence of anything he could identify as the Hannemouth Self-Configurable Combinatorial Array.

There was nothing in the room except a console of moderate size, being not much larger than a Steelcase office desk typical of the era, with several built-in keyboards and monitors. Messraunt’s initial impression was that if this was the device, it could have been easily relocated to the university by a professional moving crew, thus saving him the bother of the trip, which at this point was threatening to turn into an overnight venture, for he had misjudged the shortness of daylight in the northern part of the state, and now found it further exacerbated by the steep crowding peaks all around. He did not much wish to be caught here in darkness, and he promised himself he would be down those seven flights of stairs and out of the complex well before nightfall.

Despite the unpromising state of the console, which was only slightly less bulky than the card-punch machines in the academic records office, Messraunt seated himself in the spring-shot office chair and found the small operator’s key which the Dean had given him. With little hope of access, he nonetheless found the ring-shaped slot in the console control panel, inserted the key, turned it, and waited in resignation for nothing to happen.

And in fact, no sound came from the console, and nothing in the room gave any sign of responding to having been unlocked. It was not until several minutes later, when he rose from the still cold console and walked to the window to see if he could spot his car in the small lot below, that he noticed puffs of smoke drifting from the distant stacks of the physical plant. They were so infrequent that he wondered if they had always been there and he had simply not noticed them before; but after several minutes he convinced himself they were thickening, growing more constant. Within ten minutes, white plumes drifted steadily from the several stacks and showed no signs of tapering off. Somewhat more agitated now, Messraunt inspected the console and discovered that a single cursor had begun to throb on one of the monitors. He tapped a key on the keyboard but to no effect. Somewhere far away he thought he heard a dim whining sound, and then the lights came on.

Through the panoramic windows he saw the whole complex come to life. The huge dull dormitory buildings, with their slits almost too narrow to be windows, held a cold glow deep within. An unpleasant light to study by, he thought. The avenues and walkways between the dorms were cleverly lit by narrow strip-lamps embedded in the paths and walkways, as if to provide safe paths for students or workers hurrying home at night. But hurrying from where? And who exactly would inhabit this complex or campus? The narrow road that brought him here through the mountains was hardly up to the task of supporting a steady flow of student traffic; and in the entire complex, he had seen nothing but the one small lot where he had parked his own car. At any rate, this rush of light had the unwelcome side-effect of deepening the gloom around the valley, and he thought it was going to be harder than ever to judge exactly when it might be best to leave. This fearful premonition could not have been more wrong.

In the glare and gloom, Messraunt thought another transformation had come over the campus—one whose reality he found impossible to judge. To him it looked as if the streets themselves had begun to retract. The paths between the dormitories looked like deepening grooves. At first he attributed this to the raking light, which made small depressions look like black canyons, but then he received unexpected confirmation from his senses. A flurry of disturbed specks, the agitated black bodies of rats and squirrels, began to flood from the buildings and across the streets, rushing about in blind panic, the more survival-oriented or level-headed among them heading for the sheltering woods. The crows remained strangely silent, hunched and clinging to the rooftops without lifting a feather.

The console gave a bleep, calling Messraunt back from the window. There was now a command awaiting his attention:

USER NAME:

Messraunt sat. With trembling fingers, he entered: HANNEMOUTH

The machine accepted this, then offered up its challenge:

PASSWORD:

Slowly, Messraunt copied a long string of characters from a sheet the Dean had provided.

The car, he said later, was probably destroyed the instant he pressed the ENTER key, although he was not to verify this until his headlong flight down the seven sets of stairs had ended with him rushing out of the main building, treading on the tails of a swarm of terrified rats. His account of that mad descent is fragmentary at best, and made little sense even to those who had the patience to force him to repeat it. He spoke of the stairs themselves shifting, spinning, folding in and interlocking on themselves like bits of an Escherean puzzle. The central stairwells, he suggested, changed positions several times as he plunged between floors; and he felt himself fortunate not to have been crushed in the moments of vast change. He realized halfway down that the seventh floor might have remained stationary, an unaltered seat for its pilot or programmer, yet by that time there was no thought of return, no matter what might lie below.

What he saw from ground level was if anything even more harrowing than what he had seen from above, when the tower blocks had begun to slide along the grooved streets and clash together, then swing ominously toward his position. From ground level, those huge blocks he had mistaken for dormitories, had if anything begun to accelerate, crashing together, locking and unlocking, forming configurations he had not the leisure nor the desire to study at such close range. Such immensities should not move at such speeds! The sound of reconfiguration was like mountains crashing and calving. And the tall shapes, closing in, pulled the darkness even closer. All at once he recognized the wisdom of the embedded light paths, for between the colliding titans shapes it was impossible to tell which trails were safe to tread. They lit and darkened with a pattern that only seemed illogical or indiscriminate to a terrified mind, and gradually he realized that only reason would see him through this madness—that all this was, in fact, by design, and could he but comprehend it, he might drive out of here unharmed.

The sky was still luminous, traced with violet, as he turned to find his car and discovered instead a solid wall where it had been, and some occluded champing action taking place in the shadows there. Moments later, as the immensity retracted, he saw a wafer-thin glimmer of something where rubber and metal mingled, hugely compressed, and the humble imprint of a General Motors hood ornament was all that remained to identify his car.

At that point, a newly devout pedestrian, he ran.

The luminous trails were reliable only as long as they lasted, and Messraunt claimed that somehow he knew he was in a battle of wits with the Hannemouth Bequest. If there was any sense to them, it was something deeper than logic—something closer to an animal wit, more like the flashing luminosities by which cuttlefish communicate. It was as if he were watching neurons firing in a vast brain, synapses at macroscopic distances. He was running along ganglia, with dark and incomprehensible thoughts clashing above him, threatening at any moment to “forget” him altogether. He felt this battle of primal wits was all too evenly matched: One small brain (his) against the entire complex and its strange synthetic process. More worrisome than a battle of wits, however, was the thought that this brain might be diseased or even (he knew nothing of its maker) essentially mad. How long had the Hannemouth Bequest lain abandoned? Its ruination had rendered it unreliable. Consider the rats. Consider the squirrels and crows! Twigs, hair, feathers, fragments of eggshell, animal droppings, detritus—such organic matter had clogged the works and slowed the processes to such an extent that the machine could hardly be called efficient. And yet it could hardly be argued that it was doing… something. Grinding on, pursuing its processes, with a harsh new grating sound that reminded him of nothing so much as a grinding clutch, a gear that had somewhere slipped. He heard a spine-cringing sound that reminded him of metal being filed from a damaged brake-drum. Something, somewhere, was stuck; and pushing up against something larger. Two behemoths crunching and grinding against one another until one must give. His teeth almost shattered from the sound.

Messraunt felt the ground shake in a new way. He sensed a new color of light, and saw his shadow cast before him on the gate that had come up suddenly, with the shaggy woods beyond. Turning at the threshhold, he was in time to see a ghastly pall of explosive light flare up from the direction of the physical plant. That was bad enough, but silhouetted ahead of that light was something worse—an incomplete form which the massive structures had been shaping, like a half-formed thought, an incomplete gesture, loaded with intention but falling (barely) short of actual expression. He hid his eyes from that, and from the molten light that began to pour out of it, and ran out through the gate, into the mercy of the woods.

Somewhere down the road, dragging to a halt, he realized that he had been expecting the final punctuation of an explosion, yet none had come. It never crossed his mind to turn back. He was entirely done with the Hannemouth Bequest, and his recommendation to the Dean of the university would be brief.

Yet the Hannemouth Bequest was not yet done with Messraunt, nor apparently with us. For as he stumbled through the woods and reached a clearing where the last light of day still held some influence on the sky, he heard wings flushing out of the night, and looking up saw a flock of silent, purposeful crows winging between the trees, heading in the very direction in which he was headed. It was not their silence that always ended Messraunt’s account of his investigation. It was their formation. For bedraggled as they were, singed and smoking from whatever conflagration they had fled, they flew with sinister purpose, each holding a specific point as if positioned there by some inconceivable dot-matrix printer. Some were missing. There were gaps in the message. Messraunt often spelled it out precisely, for emphasis.

Here is a sample scrap of paper attributed directly to his hand.

HELL_ WOR_D

* * *

“Evaluation of the Hannemouth Bequest” copyright 2006 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Flurb #1 (Fall 2006), edited by Rudy Rucker.

AN EVENING’S HONEST PERIL

Sitting at the entrance to the Tomb of Abomnis, dangling her legs like tempting morsels over the dark and moaning stony mouth, Jinrae thought she saw the head of a black-haired man rise into view at the crest of the hilltop behind her. She leapt to her feet with her sword drawn and ready.

Echoing her startled cry, a raven swept up and over her, flapping twice and then gliding toward a distant tumble of faint brownish buildings in the middle distance.

Stop jumping at shadows! she told herself.

Settling back down, she watched the black fleck merging with the evening sky. The sun had just gone down beyond the town of Cowper’s Rest, pulling daylight after it, triggering lights in the villas. The ravenspeck circled and landed somewhere in a farmer’s field. Scattered red flowers nodded in unison, bowing to a breeze she couldn’t sense herself. In the far, far distance, an olive smudge gave little hint of the horrid marsh it heralded.

Groans came from the tomb, groans and the rattling of chains to greet the coming night, but they struck no answering note of fear in Jinrae. Once the sound would have chilled her, a weirdly welcome pang, but these days, even in the worst places, she rarely found anything strong enough to cut through the numbness that enwrapped her. Vague dreads wrestled in the back of her mind, ones she didn’t care to name. She felt she was seeing the seams of the world tonight.

Someone was coming. A silvery glint on polished mail faintly limned a figure stalking across the plain at a pace that would have maddened her if she’d had to tolerate it. Thankfully, they would not be travelling any great distance on foot tonight—although if it came to that, she had sufficient scrolls to quicken even the slowest feet. Aye, she carried boots of speed and hasty syrup and portalismans; besides which, numerous powerful friends would come to her summons, although she intended to rely on no resources besides her own at this point. It was hard, alone, but better in the long run. The last few days had taught her a great deal about her vulnerabilities, skills she had neglected through too much reliance on others. Or, at least, on one other. Hard lessons, late in coming, but not lost on her.

Now here was a fresh face, an adventurer in unblemished silver armor. It was Aynglin, just as she had seen him last, a bright orange plume bobbing from his helmet’s crest. He had not put by his violet trousers, nor the green slippers with curling toes; and she couldn’t fault him for it, since it lent him a quite distinctive (if not distinguished) appearance. She would be able to pick him out in almost any crowd.

His coat, however, was another matter: dark and oily, clearly stripped from a greater gullock, but with patches of long greenish fur still clinging to the seamed hide.

“Hi,” said Aynglin as he came to a stop at the entrance of the tomb. His eyes were the same shade of violet as his pants. “I mean, hail. Hope I’m not late. You said to meet you at twilight, right?”

“Well met,” said Jinrae. “You’re right on time. You’ll have to lose that gullock hide, though. It would only bog you down where we’re going.”

The ends of Aynglin’s mouth turned drastically downward. “Really? I heard this was the best.”

She couldn’t suppress a laugh. “I hope you didn’t pay a great deal for it.”

“No, I… I found it.”

“Well, that should tell you something of its value. Someone didn’t think enough of it to lug it along or even throw it on their mule. A perfect hide is well worth its weight, but that one’s imperfectly tanned. See the hunks of fur, never quite scraped away? It’s the work of a not particularly promising apprentice. In the hands of an expert, this would have made a coat I wouldn’t mind wearing myself.”

He mumbled a glum, “Oh.”

“Anyway, let’s see what I’ve got that you can use.”

She reached into a pack she’d dropped on the terraced hillside, and pulled out a cloak of sheer material, supple as silk but silvery as the scales of some freshwater fish swimming in light. She leapt down next to Aynglin, eliciting hungry moans from the lurkers in the tomb. Aynglin took a backwards step.

“Don’t fear,” she said. “They’re bound within. Now put this on. It’s meadowshark.”

“Really?”

“You can keep that. And I’ll give you matching pants later, if you accompany me back to Cowper’s Rest. They’re not violet, though. They won’t match your eyes.”

“That’s okay! I—these were just temporary till I found something better.”

“Everything’s temporary. Don’t get attached to anything. That way you won’t suffer when you lose it. Which you will.”

“Okay. I guess I’m ready.” The gullock coat lay in a heap on the gravel path. “Is this it? Just the two of us?”

“It’s for the best,” she said. “You’ll progress much faster.”

“But where’s your partner? Isn’t he…?”

“Not anymore. Let me see your sword.”

Aynglin unsheathed his blade and held it out to her.

For a moment Jinrae felt painfully disoriented.

The pommel held a faceted orange gem, inlaid with a rune of fire. The curved white blade was gnarlphin horn, lightly glimmering with imbued magic.

She knew this sword. It was, if not unique, then one of a very few.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“From a stranger,” he said.

“Masked? Anonymous?”

Aynglin nodded.

“May I touch it for a moment?”

Aynglin hesitated, and she couldn’t tell if it was indecision or merely ignorance that held him back.

“I only need to touch it in order to divine its properties,” she said. “You needn’t fear handing it over to me.”

“I trust you,” he said simply.

She put a gloved hand on the hilt, and turned so that the twilight gleamed along the blade. There was no inscription where she had feared to find one. But that meant nothing. Engravings melted away with the proper words muttered over them. Entire histories could be erased that way.

Still, it hinted of something more than chance, and she knew the mystery would haunt her until she solved it.

At that moment, the first star pierced the deepening twilight. A wolflike wind began to wail through the hills and the moaning in the tomb grew louder.

She nodded at Aynglin and took her hand from the sword. “Keep that out,” she said. “You’ll need it. I’ll enter first and make sure there’s nothing nastier than I expect.”

“Right behind you.”

She stepped through the tomb entrance, into darkness deeper than at first seemed possible. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the distant flicker of torches. Aynglin shouldered past her before she could stop him and kept going, blundering on without yet realizing that she had come to a halt. She hurried up behind him in the narrow passage, in time to see him hesitate before turning to look back for her.

“Oh, there you are.”

“Go on,” she said.

At that, he rushed forward. But there were already things rushing to meet him.

They came on in a cluster, sliding and jostling in the passage that seemed too small for them. Wicked yellow eyes abulge, catching the torchlight; flattened catlike faces with venomous fangs and exposed claws like hypodermic needles. Aynglin raised his sword and slashed, first at one, then another. He hardly seemed to feel the claws that tore into him. Jinrae knew that as yet he had no concept of his own frailty. After twenty seconds, he was on the edge of death. By twenty five he would be gone, unless she intervened.

With a quick word, she raised her hands and cast a sphere of healing and protection over him. A second incantation, and Aynglin’s sword flared with a sharp red light. He was like a mercurial spirit now, slashing his way through the denizens of the tomb as if they were wraiths without substance, offering scarcely any impediment to his progress. Jinrae followed in his wake, sidestepping littered limbs and dislodged eyes, continually hurling potent protective devices at her protégé’s silhouette. This close to the surface, they had little to dread. She tried to find a rhythm that would serve her well as the evening’s onslaught grew more dreadful.

It was in a chamber on the second level, where the ceiling was encrusted with encysted shapes of winged sleeping things, that Aynglin, in the midst of slicing through a hoary tomb spider, suddenly stiffened and flared, casting off brilliant showers and spirals of light. When the seething fires had subsided, he seemed to stand taller, fuller and brighter in every detail. He barely nicked the next spider and it curled up instantaneously into a ball of ash, hugging itself with its wiry crisping legs. The arachnid dissolved into ashes and crumbled away.

“Congratulations!” Jinrae called. Aynglin turned and raised his sword, victorious, thereby scraping the ember-colored chrysalis on the ceiling. His upturned face went green, flooded with the sickly radiance of unfolding wings. The hatchling dropped straight down onto him.

Jinrae leapt forward with her blade out, slashing through the larval demonid. It expired with a putrid belch, but not before its myriad kin had been roused from their hibernation.

“What now?” Aynglin asked, struggling up from beneath the crackling membranous corpse.

“This is good,” Jinrae said. “Keep your ground and I’ll watch over you. We’re lucky to have found such a chamber this early.”

“Are you sure?”

But there was no time to answer; the awakening was too swift. She barely had time to form her own shield of immiscibility, which would hold for as long as she remained immobile. From that vantage, she began to cast spells upon young Aynglin.

The first wave of demonids clattered against her hastily erected barrier with the scraping sound of chitinous iron-taloned wings. They swarmed the young swordsman, who stood waving his blade as if carving patterns in the air. In this case, the air was solid with wings and claws, and as he carved he could hardly help but open demonid veins. The room began to fill with a churning bloodcloud, as if he had tapped some atmospheric source of scarlet gore.

While the cries of the awakened demonids were deafening, and grew worse as their injuries increased, Jinrae gradually became aware of another sound. It was sharp and shrill, hysterical—and somehow, she felt, juvenile.

It took her several moments to recognize that a third human had entered the chamber; small and quick. In a manner reminiscent of the demonids themselves, it pounced on one of the flyers and bore it to the ground, tearing off the fanged head in one practiced twist. A gloved hand reached and caught a scaly wing, pulling another demonid from the swarm. And then another. Jinrae suppressed her irritation, trying to keep her concentration on her shield. Even so, her attention had become divided, and she feared that Aynglin would suffer for it if she did not deal with the interloper immediately.

“We thank you for your aid,” she called with forced politeness, “but it is completely unrequired.”

Naught but a feverish laugh was heard in reply.

The air was beginning to thin of the predators, and she sensed Aynglin beginning to falter. He had been close to another metamorphosis, but now he teetered on the brink, disrupted by the new arrival. He was just becoming aware of the newcomer.

“To repeat, we do not require your aid. I am assisting this young one, and I have things well in hand.”

This time, the intruder’s response was more direct.

“Fuck you!”

Unsurprised, Jinrae drew in her shield, exposing herself to talon-blow and wing scourge. She dipped her hand into the wallet at her belt, slipping on a ring she knew by touch. It was highly polished, twisted once along its band: a moebius ring.

She raised her hand and tightened her fist, as if grasping some invisible fabric and twisting it, wringing energy from raw aether.

A violet jolt shook the room, briefly illuminating all the demonid flyers from within. Skin, scale and chitin grew transparent; skeletons leapt out clearly, luridly aglow. The savage skeletal flock swerved and locked its knobbled ends into a single mass, moving with a collective will, a shifting puzzlebeast of bone and fang.

Their exclusive target was the foul-mouthed intruder.

In a shrieking cloud they congealed around him, cutting off the shrill and mocking laughter at a stroke. An instant later they thinned and dissipated, resuming their strident attack on Aynglin, albeit without their scaly hide this time. He dispatched the remainder of the bony flock with something less than his former verve, but before he was quite finished, another lightning bolt of transformation shuddered through him. Jinrae grinned with pleasure to see him climb another notch in stature and in heft. But Aynglin seemed disoriented, odd. Instead of rejoicing over his growth, he shuffled through the mass of demonid bones and corpses, and gazed down at the fallen stranger’s clean-picked skeleton.

“Harsh,” said Aynglin.

“I gave him fair warning,” she said. “I will not tolerate his kind.”

An engraved token lay among the bones of the uninvited guest. Aynglin bent and picked it up, scanned it, handed it to her.

“p00ter,” she read aloud. “Alas, I fear poor p00ter won’t be missed. And better him than you, I might add. I expected to perform a few resurrections tonight, but this would have been far too early. I don’t wish to tarnish my reputation as a teacher.”

“But… what did he want?”

“To sow discord. To disrupt your growth and steal what he could of your glory, little though he needed it. You could see how easily he took down the demonids. There are plenty of other chambers deeper down and in neighboring tombs, filled with horrors to keep him occupied… if he were looking for an evening’s honest peril instead of craven mischief, that is. Now, don’t trouble yourself. He’s inconsequential, and we’ve far to go.”

Her pupil shrugged and tossed the token back into the bone pile, then strode on deeper into the crypt. She stood watching him for a moment without following. Something about him reminded her of another swordsman, one not so young but just as eager. She had felt something like this when she’d watched him in the midst of the swarm, slicing scaly wings with an ease that seemed more than natural: practiced.

“Aynglin,” she called, catching up to him, “I never asked this before, but… are you new here? Have you traveled here before in other guises?”

He turned and faced her, his eyes shifting in the torchlight, but unreadable. She realized how little she knew of him. But that had not troubled her until now. Why was she suddenly wary?

“What makes you ask that?” he said.

“You seem too good to have just started out tonight.”

He allowed himself a smile. “Well, thanks, but… I am new here. I’ve had practice in other realms, maybe it carries over. I knew enough to seek you out, or someone like you, and ask for help. Thanks, by the way. I do appreciate it. I’m getting a lot of experience. I wouldn’t say we make a great team, because I’m nowhere near being useful to you, but… it would be nice to get that far eventually.”

She felt herself withdraw from him a little, and a chill set in. “Well, keep at it and I’m sure you can go as far as you want—as far as I have anyway. But you’ll soon reach a point where I’m not much use to you. You’ll want to pick other partners if you wish to keep advancing at speed.”

“Who says I want that? Isn’t it nice to just find a point that’s good enough and forget about forging ahead? Isn’t it good to find friends and journey with them, helping each other, even if it means you won’t get the full glory all to yourself? Didn’t you do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought you had a partner. I mean, I heard back in Cowper’s Rest, they said you were always with someone named Venix. Actually, I was expecting two of you tonight.”

Ah. The source of the chill.

“We formally disbanded,” she said. “I travel alone now, when I’m not in great need. And I have plenty of other friends I can call on when I am in need.”

“And the same goes for Venix, I suppose?”

“He no longer inhabits this realm.”

She realized that they had been standing a long time in an open chamber without attracting enemies. The dead time had lengthened beyond the usual bounds. Perhaps that was why she found herself wanting to end this conversation. Her eyes continually darted to the shadows among the splintered beams and stone pillars that seemed to support the uneven ceiling mined of greenish rock.

Suddenly Aynglin laughed. The sound nearly brought her back to herself.

“What is it?” she said.

“It just occurred to me… the reason you’re suspicious. I mean, if he left and then I suddenly showed up out of the blue, you might think….”

Grudgingly she said, “It’s not inconceivable.”

“I know, but…”

“And it doesn’t help that you’ve found yourself a sword the twin of his.”

“I told you, a stranger gave it to me.”

“After you announced your intention of joining me tonight?”

“No. Before. In fact… well, perhaps your suspicions aren’t so unfounded after all. It was the same man who told me to look you up when I was asking about a teacher.”

“Ah, Gods,” she said, and turned away from Aynglin. “Damn it all.”

She didn’t need his help, his patronage, or any more reminders of his presence. He had meant it as a farewell gesture, no doubt, and it ought to have comforted her, since it was a sure sign he had no intention of returning. He would never have given away the sword otherwise. But the end result of his farewell was that he might as well never have left. Because of his damned gift to this beginner, she was stuck with him after all. There could be no more blatant continual reminder.

She felt betrayed, and it didn’t help that her student wouldn’t have known he was being used to get at her. She could turn away Aynglin, but she’d contracted with him for the evening. She must keep her word or suffer harm to her reputation. She might be able to convince Aynglin to discard the sword, but he was unlikely to find a better one at any price, and she had nothing equivalent which he would be able to wield. And she wasn’t yet ready to plead and bargain for her peace of mind.

She was snarled in the possibility of duplicity. More vague suspicions. It was maddening. Nothing was overt enough for her to subdue with any certainty.

“Come on,” she said, shoving past Aynglin, wishing to immerse herself in action. Battle was the one thing over which she could still exert her mastery, a dynamic she completely understood, where nothing was hidden and all threats were in plain sight.

“I’m sorry if I—”

“Just come on.”

But as she forged on, she realized that somewhere along the way, in the last few minutes, she must have let Aynglin lead them around an unfamiliar turning. They had come into a wide chamber she did not recognize, one where the crypts themselves lay shattered, slab lids cracked or cast aside, the open vaults full of broken skulls and scattered bones, completely plundered. She had expected the tomb to be more densely defended; the quiet was ominous. Once again, the rhythms of danger felt strange tonight.

But action was what she needed, and there was nothing here that would take her mind off her troubles. A quick survey showed that of four passages heading out of the room, two led sharply down.

And it was a sure formula that danger always lay deeper.

“This way,” she said.

“Lead on!”

She reminded herself that it wasn’t his fault. He’d been played into this, just as she had. But his enthusiasm now threatened to become an annoyance.

At the bottom of the ramp, the passage forked. The path to the left was unlit, so she headed right. At the next fork, torches lit the left hand path. She chose that one, although she had a growing sense that this was too obvious and could be an attempt to lure them into a trap.

Before she could reconsider, or retrace her steps, she heard whispers and scrabbling, then a sharp squeal. She turned to see Aynglin with a large rat impaled on his sword. Several more were coming down the corridor behind him, gliding along as if impelled by wheels hidden beneath their shaggy flanks.

She didn’t believe the rats would give him much trouble, but it was impossible to be sure. They could harbor unexpected wickedness. She put a warding spell around him, flung some extra potency into his blade, and watched him dispatch them handily. They gave out muffled squeaks as they died.

As the fourth one collapsed with a high-pitched wheeze, something enormous and not very far away let out an answering squeal that was more like a bellow—like something a rat the size of a haywain might produce under duress. She cursed her poor perception. The unlit passages should have tipped her off earlier. Down the corridor, beyond the quivering rat corpses, the torches began to go out one by one, paired with the snuffling advance of a lumbering blackness whose only details were the even blacker gleams of liquid eyes that drank in the darkness as the torches expired.

“Back!” she cried. “Behind me!”

Aynglin barely made it; but once he was behind, he kept on going. She heard his slippered feet padding away down the passage behind her, while she stood fast to face the oncoming horror. She glanced back to see if he was safely out of range, and discovered that behind her the passage forked again. Both paths were pitch dark, hiding her protégé completely.

“Aynglin, stop!” she cried.

Then the rat mother struck her.

She turned to give it her full attention, spinning a swirling shield of stars around herself, and driving ice magic into her blade. The torches behind the monstrous rat were extinguished now. If it hadn’t been for the radiance of her aura, the darkness would have been total. Her blade clashed against bared teeth. A fang fell and hit the stone floor; blood streamed over black rubbery lips. She attempted a sideways slash across the whiskered muzzle, but the cramped passage shortened her stroke until it was a hacking blow more suited to an axe. Resorting to stabbing, she plunged her blade into one of the inky eyes, and this time the rat recoiled with a scream.

Less concerned about finishing off the rodent than with finding Aynglin before he lost himself completely, she turned and ran, leaving the rat hunkered in a pool of blood, shaking its head and wheezing.

“Where are you?” she called.

His reply came echoing from nowhere in particular. “…dark…”

The tomb proved an absolute honeycomb of passageways, dead-ends, claustrophobic cells. There was no point in trying to ask him to retrace his route, especially not in the blackness. She tried to recall if she was carrying anything that might help him—something which would allow her to reach out and pull him to her side. But she had left all such tokens back in Cowper’s Rest, along with her mule.

The horrid wheezing of the injured rat came closer, and she realized that although it posed very little hazard to her, it was potentially lethal to her student. She couldn’t tell at this moment if it was truly near by, or if the acoustics of the tombs created a false impression. She held very still to avoid attracting the rat’s attention, while trying to pinpoint its location.

“Jinrae!” came a panicked call.

“Quiet!” she called back. She wanted to communicate the importance of silence at this moment, but there was no way to explain in detail… not without risking further harm.

“Jin—” And then a scream.

It was horrible but it didn’t last long. Barely enough time to allow her to determine the rat’s location with certainty. She hurried down two short lengths of corridor and burst into a silk-shrouded vault in time to see the mammoth rat burying its bloody snout in the remains of her pupil.

While the rodent was distracted, she plunged her sword into the back of its neck beneath the skull. The creature slumped into an immense slack bag of bloodied fur.

As the creature died, the torches in the room came alight, replacing the faint glow of her aura. With a sigh, and a booted foot, she shoved the carcass aside and retrieved Aynglin’s copper wristband from the gnawed pile on the floor. Apart from his flesh, everything was intact. She held the band aloft and slipped a resurrection ring onto her right ring finger, speaking the words that went with it.

The air churned with diamond light. A shadowy shape thickened. An astral arm materialized inside the battered copper band, gaining density. Jinrae released the band as Aynglin reappeared, now fully fleshed and formed. Her young pupil, completely restored, although far more modestly dressed.

“Whew,” he said, with a dazed expression. “Thanks.”

“I apologize,” she said. “I should have been paying better attention.”

He stooped and reclaimed his gear and weapons. “I didn’t know rats came that big.”

“Oh, they come bigger, but not usually this near the surface.” Jinrae cleaned her sword on a dusty silken tatter that draped the stone wall. “This place seems strange tonight. I have a feeling changes have been made to this tomb since I last visited. I should have scouted a bit before bringing in a novice. Finding our way out again is going to be hit or miss, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I have most of the night. Unless you want to turn back now.”

“I think we’d better, at least until we get our bearings again. I’ll need to find something I remember from before… a landmark.”

Her doubts proved well founded. All the passages were fully lit again after the death of mother rat, and they were just as confusing as they would have been in total darkness. She fell back on following the left hand wall, and kept this up for quite some time without encountering any ascending passages. Every intersection led to downward tending passages. It was very strange. She was positive they had descended to this level, but she could find no steps leading up again. It was as if the place had altered since they entered it.

She didn’t think that physical alteration of the tomb was likely, but there were sorcerous ways of making a victim think the world had changed, which had the same effect. But that would require a mage of some power, and who would want to target the two of them with vexing spells?

Who indeed?

As if reading her thought and answering it, Aynglin said, “Uh oh. It’s him again.”

That shrill childish cry, like the laughter of a hyena, echoed around them. They walked forward into a vast room, its dimensions and its ceiling hid in shadow. Directly above the entryway was a broad stone balcony incised with a gruesome frieze. The laughter fell from above, and its maker capered and gestured obscenely in the heights, emoting malice and mischief.

“Looks like p00ter came back with some of his pals,” Aynglin said.

True enough. He was no longer alone. Four figures stood flanking him, wrapped in dark robes, their faces veiled in fog.

At first she saw no reason this should worry her. She took a few steps away from the wall, to get a better view of her adversaries, and at that moment she saw the archway vanish as if it had never been. She ran to the wall but hit solid rock. No seam, no keyhole, no latch, no sign that there had ever been an entrance.

Somewhere off in the shadows, she heard the sound of rusted iron grates and chains, and a ratcheting noise of gears. Skittering footsteps teetered on the edge of audibility, bony and chill. It could have been any sort of skeleton ambling toward them, but instinctively she suspected the worst.

“I’ll show you, bitch!” came the hissing voice above her. “You and your freshmeat are bonefood!”

p00ter’s face fairly glowed with gleeful evil, but his companions betrayed nothing. She assumed they were mages of some skill, judging by how easily she had been befuddled and led into this trap. Only potent mages could have summoned the undead legions now imminent. How p00ter’s ilk managed to gather powerful friends she had never quite understood, but it was not an uncommon alliance. From the fact that p00ter’s associates were unreadable, only barely visible at all, she had some glimmering sense of their power—and the trouble she was in.

As the first of the skeletal stalkers strode into the weak fringe of torchlight cast from the balcony, her worst fears were confirmed. It was a Foulmost Banebone, fully armored but with empty hands—which meant it would rely on magic only, hurling attacks all but impossible to anticipate.

Behind it, in rank and file, were more of its kind. And some similar number was coming upon them from the opposite end of the chamber.

She turned to Aynglin, grateful that she would have someone to watch her back, since she could wrap them both in a spell of deflection and add his power to her own. But it would require some quick study on his part.

“Now quickly,” she said, “you must do exactly as I say.”

But Aynglin wasn’t listening.

“Uh, sorry, I gotta go,” he said. “Later.”

Putting his hands together in a posture of prayer, he vanished.

p00ter’s laughter went up the scale, but she scarcely noticed.

Abandoned, betrayed… what next? She slipped a shortcut ring onto her finger and held it up to see if she could escape that way. It gave off a dull grey light, signalling its uselessness. They had sealed her in. Once she had fallen in battle, it might take hours to win back her remains, and she would need help to do it—especially with Banebones posted above her corpse.

With that thought, she realized what she had to do. As the foremost Foulmost Banebone rubbed its fleshless palms and began to mold a spiral of smutty light, she threw back her head and sent out a Clarion Call. Two answering Calls came almost instantaneously, and moments later she thought she heard a faint third response. But by then there could have been a sympony of Calls and she wouldn’t have noticed. She was too deeply caught up in battling for her life.

The first of the bony attackers sent its whipcord spiral swirling around her, a barbed line of wicked light that attempted to entangle and immobilize her. She stepped free of it, slicing the lines with her charmed blade.

Whiplight wasn’t a terrible spell in itself, and one Banebone was no more than an irritant. It was the sheer quantity and variety of attacks that would soon, inevitably, draw her down. For while the first Banebone followed its attack with another of the same, it was joined by its opposite, who had chosen a completely different attack.

Her motions slowed as the second wave of spells struck her from the opposite side of the hall. This spell was like green glue crawling over her, changing every powerful sword slash into a lazy swipe. She had one ring with which to counter the Viscous Flume, but she’d not had it charged in some time, and she had no idea how long it would hold out—especially if another skeleton flung a similar attack.

As the ring took effect, she tried to make the best of it. She lunged out at the source. Her blade bit deep into bone, but it was like hacking at metal. She managed to throw the Foulmost off its casting for a moment, by sending it staggering backward.

A toothed mesh of spiralwire looped down around her head and arms. As soon as she had freed herself of that, she turned to the second skeleton again, this time barking out a powercry as she hacked at a bare bit of vulnerable vertebrae below its gleaming helmet. Her laugh as the skull cracked against the floor for a moment rivalled that of p00ter, still howling from the ledge above.

This kill had an unexpected benefit, for as the scattered bones hit the floor, Jinrae flared with inner fires bright enough to cast the shadows of the oncoming Banebones onto distant walls of the cavern. The nearest skeletons were scorched by the glare of her new-claimed power. In the accompanying rush of energy, she clove the lead whipmaster through mid-torso, and continued to spin out into the midst of the legions like a raging top, her sword like a scythe slashing dry wheat. But not a single Bonebane actually fell, and those in the rear were beginning to cast healing spells on the advance guard.

The Banebones regrouped quickly. And her rush of gleeful energy had cost her dearly. She had forgotten the need for conservation. What she had just done in a moment she would have to do again ten times over if she wished to survive… and already she was nearly drained.

“Yeah, bitch, I know what you’re thinking. You hit me when I was alone… now how do you like it?”

She looked up toward the simpering figure on the balcony above, and suddenly she realized exactly who stood mocking her from among the safety of his sinister friends.

He had taken on a new name, to suit the regression in his personality.

He had revealed himself to be a vicious vengeful child, striking out in the only way he knew how.

What was worse, she had left herself open to be hurt. She had actually allowed this battle to matter to her.

She didn’t know whether to give up utterly, as Aynglin had done, or perform some explosive suicidal act in order to take him down with her. She had the ability to touch off an intense explosion that would obliterate every creature in the room in a single burst. But have done that, Jinrae as such could never return to the realm in this guise. It would be a truly final exit from this place.

She considered the ploy, then dismissed it.

She would not let him believe his victory mattered to her. She would play the game as if it were only that—a game.

Win or lose, she would not give him the satisfaction of thinking he had made her care.

Jinrae went back to her gory work with a will, counting each blow she gave and received, calculating exactly how long she could still hold out, watching the deadline loom.

In one hand she conjured orbs of buzzing flame and sent them streaming into the healers at the rear. The nearest ones she fended off with her blade. She put her back to the wall, which meant losing sight of the hateful form above her, but that was just as well. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She focused her attention on the skeleton army, and measured her way down the steepening slope to oblivion.

Suddenly she heard a ragged croak with some faint kinship to p00ter’s laugh.

The vile fighter’s form went hurtling from the balcony and crashed down hard in the midst of the Banebones.

Dazed, still holding her attackers at bay, Jinrae watched p00ter stagger to his feet. The fuddled form rushing in her direction, saw her sword swing toward him, then turned and tried the opposite tack. Several of the Foulmost reached lazily to snag him; there were many bony fingers already twisting in the hems of his fringed cloak.

p00ter fell quite still and bowed his head, realizing that there would be no escape by regular routes. He put his hands together in prayer, striving for a swift exit, but an instant before he could pale and vanish, his bowed head was torn from his shoulders. His body exploded in a cloud of smoke and gushing sparks that looked like burning motes of blood.

The token bearing his ridiculous name landed at Jinrae’s feet.

“Farewell, p00ter,” she told it, and kicked the tag across the floor, hoping it would fall into some dark chasm, forever irretrievable.

An instant after p00ter’s death, three figures leapt down to touch the floor where he had fallen. At first she thought them his wizardly allies, but they were not. These bore mace and massive axe and luminous staff. Their faces were bright and clear, well known to her, personas of shimmering power armed with magic weapons.

“Woohoo!” they cried.

With screams of glee they laid waste to the Banebones. Jinrae’s exertions were all but unnecessary in this final melee; which was just as well, since her resources were almost completely drained. Even if she had been fully rested, any one of the three could have bested her easily in single combat. They swung their blades and hurled devasting spells at the skeleton mages. The towering monsters toppled like tenpins, smouldered and melted, pooled into wailing puddles of dust.

In no more than three minutes, the chamber was cleared of even the Leastmost Banebone. As for the wizards on the balcony above, they figured not at all in the final sweep, and made no further appearance. She suspected they had departed the instant the tide began to turn. So much for the friends that p00ter’s sort could assemble.

When they had finished, the rescuers formed a triangle with Jinrae at the center.

“Let’s blow,” said the one other woman, a youthful amazon with tattooed markings that made her look like a feral cat, and pointed ears tipped with a lynx’s tuft. She stood lithe and strong, wearing scarcely any visible armor.

“Right,” said the man to her right. He was completely armored. In fact, there was not the least bit of skin visible anywhere. His entire form was silver metal chased with moving figures.

The third was a short and bearded dwarf, clad in a cloak that dragged on the stone flags. He raised his staff and from its tip emitted a transport field that engulfed them all.

The dark air of the catacombs gave way to luminosity. Deep purple light with green underfoot, and a swollen orange sun shimmering up from the edge of the world.

They were standing outside, at the crest of the hill the tomb. Red flowers bobbed in the dawn breeze. Lights were just shutting off in Cowper’s Rest, as the sun’s rays groped at the distant brown buildings.

“Well, that was fun,” said the young lynx woman, Nyryx. “Can’t we leave you alone for one night without having to bail you out?”

“I was doing just fine,” Jinrae said.

“Then why the Clarion Call?” said the staunch little dwarf, Bloafish by name.

“We have troubles of our own, you know,” said the completely armored man known as Sir Candham.

“Anyway,” Nyryx pressed, “when are you coming home? You’ve been out a lot longer than any of us.”

Jinrae ignored the insinuation. She had more a pressing matter to bring up with them.

“I hope you know who was behind all that.”

“What?” Nyryx bristled. “Who?”

“p00ter… Venix… whatever he’s calling himself now. Your father hit a new low tonight.”

“What?” cried Bloafish. “No way.”

“I know you don’t like to see him this way, but I’m telling you—it was him. He set up that ambush, and you saw for yourself how it almost finished me. I should have known something like this was coming.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself,” declared Sir Candham forcefully. “It’s totally impossible.”

“I know him well enough to recognize him in any costume.”

“And we’re telling you you’re wrong,” Sir Candham said.

“How do you know?”

“Because,” said Nyryx, “we’re with him right now. We’ve been over here all night. He’s making us grilled cheese sandwiches.”

“What?”

“Well… it’s not like you noticed or anything. It’s not like anyone’s been able to talk to you. What’d you expect us to do?”

“Come off it, Mom.”

“Really. It’s time.”

“We’re telling you, he’s completely out of it. You’re imagining things. Get real.”

Jinrae stood speechless, her mind on the edge of grinding to a halt. She saw the pattern of suspicion underlying everything she’d believed that night. It was like her pain, a constant background to everything she felt. An undertow that continually pulled her in.

But if she was wrong… if her suspicions were unfounded. That meant there was a bottom to the pain. Maybe she had finally found that place. The three of them had shown it to her.

“Come on,” Nyryx said again. “It’s time to get going. Don’t you remember you said you’d pick us up in your car?”

“Oh god,” she said. “I’m sorry. I feel so…”

Sir Candham put up an admonitory silver hand. “Hey. Don’t. Just get going.”

Jinrae sighed. Nodded.

“Cool,” said Bloafish. “See you soon.”

The four of them bowed their heads, put their hands together, and stood very still. The unfelt wind toyed with the bright red flowers of the plain, but there was no one left to notice, and no one to hear the cries of dawn echoing from the mouth of the tomb.

* * *

“An Evening’s Honest Peril” copyright 2007 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Flurb #3, Spring 2007, edited by Rudy Rucker.

THE VICAR OF R’LYEH

“Let anything be held as blessed, so that that be well cursed.”

– Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Glorious afternoon, warm and breezy among green hills dotted with sheep. Looking down from his sylvan lounging spot upon the village with its twin spires, Geoffrey heard a mournful bell coming from the towers of Barchester Cathedral, and almost immediately thereafter noted a small dark shape making its way across the dewy grass from the open doors of the church. A faint distortion followed the pedestrian, as if air and earth were curdling in its wake. He blinked away the illusion, but the feeling of oppression grew until he clearly saw that yes, ‘twas the vicar coming toward him with some message he suddenly felt he did not wish to hear. Meanwhile, the tolling of the bell had grown appalling. As the little man struggled up the hillside, he seemed to expand until his shadow encompassed the town itself. Abruptly the vicar stood before him, the pale features of the meek country parson tearing into soft and writhing strands like the points of a wormy beard. The vicar scowled, revealing five segmented ridges of bone, teeth akin to the beak of a sea urchin. Geoffrey did not wish to hear the vicar speak, but there was no stopping his ears.

“You up, Geoff?” The voice, its accent inappropriate, was first wheedling, then insistent. “R’lyeh’s rising!”

He forced his eyes open. Somehow the phone had lodged itself between his cheek and pillow. The voice of his boss went on.

“Geoff, are you there? Did I wake you? I know you were here late, but we’ve got an emergency.”

“Mm. Hi, Warren. No. I was… I was getting up.”

(7:43 by the clock.)

“Calculations were off. Fucking astrologers, right? Anyway, we’ve got to throw ourselves into it. Marketing’s in a tizzy, but let them be the bottleneck. I think if we dig in—”

“Give me…” Shower, skip breakfast, grab coffee at a drive-through, traffic. This was bad. “…forty-five minutes?” Very bad.

“You’re a pro, Geoff.”

Very bad. Cancel all plans. Forget about rest until this thing was done. Already resigning himself to it. Exactly how off were the calculations? He’d soon find out.

Forty-eight minutes later, panicking over his growing lateness, Geoff spiraled down through increasingly lower levels of the parking lot. He was late, but he was worrying more about the dream. What did it mean? That he was becoming polluted? That his pure visions had become contaminated by the foul effluents in which he labored daily? It seemed more urgent that he get away. Finish this job and get back to what he loved. Put all this crap behind him. If he could just get through it.

As he descended, the fluorescent lights grew dingier and more infrequent; fresh white paint gave way to bare, sooty concrete; the level markers were eroded runes. Even at this hour, he found not a single free parking space until he reached the lowest level. At the end of the farthest row, he found a retractable metal gate raised just over halfway. Beyond it, a promising emptiness, dark.

His car scraped under the gate with half an inch of clearance. He found himself in a cavernous lot he had never seen before, darkness stretching beyond the reach of his headlights. This lot was anything but crowded. A mere dozen or so cars parked companionably in the nearest row of spaces. He pulled in beside them and shut off his engine though not yet his lights. Stairs? Elevators? He saw no sign of either. The safest course would be to walk back under the gate to the main level.

Slamming the door killed the light from his car, but enough flowed from the gateway to show a layer of dust on the adjacent Volkswagen. Geoff peered through the passenger window, shuddering when he saw a row of tiny plastic figures perched on the dashboard, winged and faceless except for tentacles and the keyhole eyes of superintelligent cuttlefish. The toys were self-illuminated, in the manner of their kind, and pulsed with faint colors that signaled their intentions to those who could read them. Scattered over the seats were piles of sticks and matted weeds. Also a fallen stack of books, and a spiral notebook open to a page covered with scribbles he took for treasure maps. What kind of treasure seeker plundered the recesses of a not very ancient parking garage?

Fearing he might be mistaken for a prowler, he straightened up, tugging his backpack over his shoulders. On his way toward the gate, he glanced back and saw that the car bore an all too popular bumper sticker: HE IS RISEN.

The sudden grinding of the metal gate called up terrors of confinement, though in fact the gate was opening the rest of the way. Blue-tinged headlights came down the ramp, blinding him. He threw up a hand to shade his eyes, and saw a long black limo cruising through the entryway. It came to a stop, fixing him in its headlights, the engine thrumming so deeply that he felt the throbbing through his shoes.

“Come forward!” piped a voice, thin and irresistable.

Geoff walked around the side of the limo. One of the doors was open. Inside, a luxurious compartment of oxblood leather and recessed lights comfortably contained Warren and another man unknown to him.

“Geoff? What are you doing down here?”

“Who is this?” came the reedy voice that had bid him approach.

“Uh… this is Geoffrey Abbott, our lead designer.”

“Really? Come in, young man.”

Warren gave an uncomfortable smile, then waved him in. Geoff sat, balancing his backpack on his knees. As the car purred forward, Warren nodded toward the other man, a small fine-boned figure in a grey suit, dark of complexion, with curly black hair cropped close.

“Geoff, I’d like you to meet Emil Calamaro.”

Geoff held back his hand a moment. He had never heard Warren say the name in anything but scorn; yet he was obviously awed by the actual presence of the owner of Aeon Entertainment.

“So,” piped the small man, “you are tasked with R’lyeh’s rising, is that not so?”

“Only in the Commemorative Simulator,” Warren said.

There was a chitter of laughter. “As if it could be otherwise!” said Calamaro.

It was several seconds before Geoff realized what Calamaro was talking about. Everyone on the team had a slightly different pronunciation of “R’lyeh”–from Warren’s “It’s really, really, Real-yeah,” to the broad “Ruh-lay” to the completely lazy and obnoxious “Riley.” But Calamaro’s take on the name was especially odd: It seemed to come bubbling up from his gullet through a column of thick liquid, less a word than a digestive sound.

“Geoff’s got the job for now,” Warren said quickly, covering Geoff’s confusion.

“And you think him more suitable than the previous designer?”

“We’ve got a lot of faith in Geoff,” Warren said. “He created the Jane Austen Mysteries.”

Calamaro sank back in his seat, making a faint hissing sound and baring his teeth at Austen’s name. Out of Egypt, Geoff thought, and now owner of an extensive media empire. Not always a hands-on sort of owner, Calamaro took an active role in producing only a select few of the titles in the endless run of Cthulhuvian flicks and tie-in games that Aeon cranked out on a seasonal basis. Calamaro’s dark, slender fingers clenched the head of a walking stick that was somehow both leopard and crocodile. On the seat beside him sat a cylindrical box, tall and golden, fastened with a clasp.

“I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but the authenticity of those levels, and Geoff’s ability to make them lively and action-packed without sacrificing the integrity of the source material… well, we think it’s a great fit. No one originally thought you could set Jane Austen to work solving crimes in the world of her own books, but Geoff’s team did a fantastic job.”

“I designed the Bloody Trail of Lord Darcy,” Geoff said, compelled to rise to his own defense, knowing that Warren had not actually played any of the Austen thrillers. “I was looking forward to starting in on Pride and Extreme Prejudice when this came along. Eventually I think Thomas Hardy will be a fertile source of—”

“I would like to see the work so far.”

“Absolutely!” Warren said.

“Sure.” Geoff hoped none of his terror showed in his face.

The limo stopped. The driver opened the passenger door. Calamaro indicated that Geoff should go first.

He could no longer see the gated entrance. Ahead of the car, held in its headlights, was a doorway. Calamaro stepped into the beams, his shadow staggering out across the hard-packed floor and then the wall. He supported himself on his walking stick, hugging the golden cylinder close to his chest with the other arm. Warren hurried to open the door. Beyond was an elevator and a flight of stairs. The elevator waited, but when Geoff tried to enter, Warren held him back. “Why don’t you take the stairs, Geoff? We’ve got some business to discuss. We’ll catch up with you upstairs. Give you time to get the demo ready.”

“Uh… sure.” Geoff held back and watched the doors shut. Calamaro’s eyes glittered like obsidian lenses in the mask of a sarcophagus, refracting the overhead lights into a vision of endless night full of fractured stars.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there before he remembered to look for stairs.

* * *

By the time Geoff reached the office, everyone was buzzing determinedly through the halls as if they had some other purpose than to catch a glimpse of the man who had set them all in motion. Lars Magnusson, one of the programmers, intercepted Geoff en route to his cubby: “Guess who’s making the rounds this morning?”

“I know,” Geoff said. “Calamaro. I rode in his limo with Warren.”

“Calamaro?” said Lars. “Really? No, I’m talking about Petey Sandersen!”

If this news was meant to lift his spirits, it barely raised an eyebrow. More evidence (as if any were needed) that he did not fit in on the Simulator project; that in fact his loyalty to the whole Aeon Entertainment enterprise was suspect.

Petey Sandersen was a legendary figure – an idol to those who had grown up suckling on the thousand media paps of the Black Goat of the Woods. He had formulated (or packaged) the original rules and invocations, the diagrams and tokens that everyone had once taken for the arcane paraphernalia of an elaborate role playing game. But while Petey had become revered as the Opener of the Way, the Wedge by Which They Widened the Weft, Geoff had spent his adolescence trying to put as much distance as he possibly could between himself and the massively overhyped eldritch invaders.

With Sandersen and Calamaro on the premises, this was shaping up to be a day for high-powered executive reviews. Careers were made or casually ended on days like this. Nice of them to warn the peons in advance.

Geoff slung his backpack under his desk and fired up ABDUL, their proprietary level editor. It was hard not to panic, considering that Warren had volunteered him to show off work that was by no means ready for a demo. About all he had time to do now was check for obvious errors and send the map for a full compile. That, and pray that during the night no one had checked in changes that would break the work he’d done the previous day. Reviewing the morning’s round of check-in notices, he didn’t spot any midnight code changes that would affect his map, but that didn’t mean he was in the clear. Artists were notorious for quietly making an ill-advised change to one inconspicuous model, thereby wreaking havoc on the entire world. Most of them were contractors, prone to exceedingly short lifespans at Aeon, rarely in place long enough to be trained in the brutal realities of their resource management software, dubbed ALHAZMAT. Anyway, there was no way around it. He started his compile and prayed for deliverance.

There was certainly no shortage of divinities in attendance on his prayers. His cubicle was lined with figurines: a mottled green plastic Cthulhu hunched upon a pedestal with leathery wings peaked above its tentacled face; a translucent vinyl Faceless Idiot God containing a congeries of odd shapes that sparked and swarmed like luminous sealife when you squeezed it; a pewter Shub-Niggurath, a goodly number of whose thousand young had fallen behind the desk to be sucked up by the night janitor’s vacuum. The eldritch figures seemed to leap, leer and caper at the corner of his eyes while Geoff bent close to the monitor. On the long late nights when his tired eyes were burning, he thought they did worse things than that. These were not his Cthulhu-Kaiju figures, not his maddeningly cute Li’l Old Ones. They were a constant reminder of the indignity of his situation. They belonged to the previous occupant of the cubicle—a designer who could return at any moment, depending on the whims of upper management. Aeon shuffled and recombined its design teams as if they were packs of Pokemon cards—and not particularly rare ones at that.

Geoff bore no love of Elder Gods, but as much as he would have liked to, he couldn’t get rid of the vinyl monstrosities. He didn’t dare dump them in a drawer and set out his own beloved, hand-painted, resin-cast garage-kit models of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. As long as he sat here and accepted the paycheck that came with the keyboard, he must pretend a devotion to the Cthulhuvian pantheon in all its manifestations. Including Warren, who sprang up on the far side of his partition, waggling fingers for him to follow.

Entering the conference room on Warren’s heels, Geoff found the other managers enthralled by the spectacle of a portly cherubic man holding forth at the end of the monolithic onyx slab that was their conference table. He was in the midst of an anecdote that ended, “–so I said, I don’t think of Petey as a Ted Klein reference. I think of Ted Klein as a Petey reference!”

Warren waited for a hitch in the laughter and beckoned Geoff forward. “Petey, this is Geoffrey Abbot, our lead designer.”

Petey leaned forward and put out a hand. He was loud, aggressively jovial, with a gleam in his eyes that was pure evangelist: “Have you heard the good news?” The hand was chubby, somewhat clammy, but the grip was firm enough to take his measure. “He is risen!”

“Well… rising,” Warren said defensively. “We still have a little time, I hope.”

“Not little enough, if you ask me! What do you think, Geoff? I’ve heard splendid things about you. Are you ready for the rapture?”

“I… build maps,” Geoff replied.

“I’ve done a bit of that. A little bit of everything as needed. You look like a dreamer, Geoff, and that’s what we need right now. Good strong dreamers. How’re your dreams of R’lyeh lately? Have the Deep Ones been welcoming?”

“Well, I—”

“It’s kind of vague, isn’t it?” Petey said. “You could use a bit more focus, to be honest. We’ve been looking at your map, and frankly… well…”

“What? My map?”

He hadn’t noticed at first because the huge wall-mounted monitor at the far end of the room was trained on darkness. Suddenly the image lurched and they were looking out over a blue-grey sea, far from land, an ocean cold and desolate and surging with the promise of nightmares. It was his ocean, beneath his bleak sky. They were running R’lyeh Rising – A Commemorative Simulator.

Warren put a hand on his shoulder and with a forced smile said, “We pulled them off your share, Geoff. We were just running through them and—”

“Those are yesterday’s, they’re not even—”

“But they’re fabulous, Geoff!” Petey was in his face again. “The only problem we’ve seen, really, is something we can easily take care of. We don’t bring this out for everyone, you understand, but you’ve already shown you’re worth the extra investment. Emil, will you do the honors?”

Emil Calamaro rose from the end of the conference table with the cylindrical golden box in his hands. He set it in front of Geoff and threw the clasp. Petey Sandersen reached inside and lifted a glittering nightmare over Geoff’s head. Geoff ducked clear to get a better look.

It was something like a cross between a crown and a diving helmet, a rigid cap that rounded off like the narrow end of a squid. Pale, beaten gold, chased with obscene motifs, set with green stones that rippled like dark aquatic eyes.

“Am I supposed to wear that thing?”

“The Miter of Y’ha-nthlei is an honor and a privilege,” said Petey eagerly.

“And a grave responsibility,” said Emil Calamaro.

“Geoff will take good care of it, we’ll see to that,” Warren assured them, pushing Geoff forward to receive the miter.

It fastened to his head with a distinct sensation of suction. Petey stepped back, beaming. “Voila!”

He felt ridiculous.

And something else…

A cold, drawn-out tingling like needles probing his scalp. An intense pressure building within, as if he were developing a sinus infection. His head filled with phlegm.

“Let us study the map again,” said Emil Calamaro.

As the Egyptian spoke, Geoff found himself drifting forward to take control of the scene. He sat down and pulled a keyboard toward him. He began to type commands. He knew what they needed to see.

Out on the sea of pale beaten gold, the waves began to roil for no apparent reason.

Petey said, “I’ve been out there, Geoff, and it’s remarkable how well you’ve captured it.”

“I don’t know,” said Calamaro. “I’m not convinced.”

“Have you been to the spot?”

“You know I don’t care for open water.”

“Well, how can you criticize?”

“It’s not what I pictured.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Petey, leaning closer. “So far it’s perfect, it’s fine. There’s no problem at all until… well, you have to bring it closer to the surface. I mean, a melding of minds. You need to let yourself be dreamed. Let it come through you. That’s why we’re lending you the miter.”

Geoff brought them in over the area of greatest activity. He accelerated the Simulator, putting it through its paces well ahead of schedule.

The ocean appeared to be boiling. Even through the turbulence you could sense a massive darkness about to break through.

He typed “entity_trigger rlyeh_rise_01.”

R’lyeh breached the waters.

The dripping rocks were encrusted with monstrous tubeworms, their guts bursting out after the pressure shock of the tremendous ascent. Slick scaly bodies writhed in raw sunlight, suffocating in air, caught by the rising of the monolithic city and perishing now before their eyes. Up it rose, a place of eldritch angles, tilted towers, evil… wrong…

So utterly, terribly wrong.

Geoff took his hands from the keyboard and covered his eyes, trying to contain his despair. It was wrong and he knew it. Everything was fine until the full hideous glory of R’lyeh rose into view, and then the illusion collapsed. There was nothing majestic about it, nothing that conjured up the horror of its arrival. It was only tilted rocks and a few cheap, generic effects. His heart wasn’t in it, and it showed.

“It still needs work,” he said, aware that he had better show a pretense of caring for something more than his paycheck.

Without speaking or moving, Calamaro radiated near-lethal levels of distaste and disappointment. Warren had gone pale, afraid to speak either in defense or reproach of Geoff’s work. Only Petey Sandersen appeared untroubled. He slapped a hand on Geoff’s shoulder.

“It’s only to be expected,” he said. “It’s partly our fault. We’ve been remiss. In our defense, we wanted to make sure we had the right guy. I think, this time, we’ve got him.”

Petey gave a nod and a wink to Warren, who visibly relaxed. Color flooded his cheeks. Geoff suddenly remembered the unnamed designer he’d replaced. “…this time…”

“We’re going to leave you with the miter, Geoff. I think you’ll find you can remedy all deficiencies. You’ll get R’lyeh right this time. You’ll get on the Dreamer’s dark side, and all will be well.”

“We haven’t much time,” said Calamaro.

“With a dedicated designer like Geoff here, I’m not worried in the least. Are you worried, Warren?”

“Wha… no! Not at all. Geoff’ll burn both ends till we’re done with this guy. That’s why he makes the big bucks.”

The miter had begun to feel heavier. He must get back to his desk and plunge into his work. He hardly heard what the others were saying. Ideas were coming, strong and vivid. They must be captured. He must surrender to them, bring them to life.

The others must have sensed that he was no longer following the conversation. Warren stood up, signaling that it was Geoff’s turn to do the same. Petey squeezed his hand. Emil Calamaro merely bent slightly at the waist, gripping his cane.

Geoff found himself in the lobby.

Lulu, the receptionist, regarded the glittering headpiece in awe. “Wow…”

She must have seen something in his eyes that silenced her.

Geoff strode toward his cubby, the prickling sensation still strong, but turning to something cold and liquescent, an icy tendril that held his will and gave him marching orders.

What am I doing?

He dragged to a stop in the elevator lobby, determined not to surrender. This was a job, only a job. He shouldn’t have to compromise his inmost thoughts, his imagination, his dreams. He would finish the damn map because it was the only way to get back to his own project, but that was all. Beyond that, he would resist.

Elevator doors rumbled open and a small group of programmers, returning with coffee, stumbled off and stared at Geoff with a mixture of amazement and respect. He pushed past them, into the small car, just as the doors closed, and stabbed the button for the ground floor. At that moment, the watery tendrils turned to knives of ice. He put his hands on either side of the wretched miter and tried to twist it off, but it clung tight. The car plummeted past his chosen floor. The car slowed but did not stop. It had entered realms for which there were no markers. The miter had some power over the elevator, even as it fought for power over him. He half expected to step off into a cavern of watery light where Byakhee waited to wing him away to dismal festivities.

Instead, the doors opened on a concrete cell, familiar from that morning. There was the stairwell where Warren had dismissed him, and a door into the vast dark garage.

The miter tightened like a fist, as if sending a final warning, and then it relaxed its grip. He was free.

It took five minutes, at a limping run, to reach the huddled cars, his own seeming vulnerable at the edge of the row. He dug into his pocket for keys. Once he was clear of the building, he would find a way to shed the miter, using a crowbar if necessary. After that, his greatest fear was that Petey and Calamaro would find a way to blackball his career. All he wanted was to get free of this cursed project and back to something he cared about.

As he turned his key in the lock, he heard a sound that stopped him. He waited for it to repeat. It must have been an engine coughing to life on some floor far above. Nothing on this level stirred. The other cars were empty, as he proved to himself by peering through the window of the adjacent Volkswagen. The same clutter of papers on the seat; the same collection of tiny dashboard idols; the same pile of sod and sticks thrown about like yard waste interrupted on its way to the dump.

The sound, as if aware of his attention, played again.

He bent closer. Crumpled sketches littered the seat. Waves of tingling swept across his scalp. His pupils felt impossibly huge. Among the sketches he could make out a fragment of coastline, an ocean expanse, an X in the midst of the sea.

R’lyeh.

The other drawings suddenly made more sense. The tilting oblongs… a poor draftsman’s attempt at non-Euclidean geometry… a massive door… a model ship…

The miter caressed him warningly, as if an octopus could purr.

They were maps. Levels. Attempts to sketch out the very same areas he was building for the Simulator. Very poor designs, he had to admit, by a less than skilled designer.

Whose car was this?

Reluctantly, he recognized the kinship between the collection of dashboard dolls and the vinyl creatures that lined his desk.

And an even less welcome connection: The broken brown twigs were tangled with black rags that bore the Aeon Entertainment logo.

The sound came again. This time, unmistakably, it came from inside some car in this row. It sounded less like an engine noise and more like something clearing its throat.

He eased his door shut, slipped the keys into his pocket, and began to back slowly toward the distant elevator.

The miter, satisfied that he understood, regained its grip.

You haven’t won, he told it. I’ll get through this and move on.

It’s only a job.

* * *

He fought from the first, in his own way.

He fought from his desk, in front of his monitor, keyboarding until his eyelids trembled and the urge to sleep became all but impossible to resist. But all his other sleepless nights on the Austen project had given him the resources he needed to stay upright and conscious through the deathmarches of crunchmode. The Dreamer worked through him, but he fought back. Subverting the Dark Advent would not have been possible had he not already finely honed the ability to resist sleep; for a game designer it was second nature, a matter of instinct, ingrained.

The first line of defense was a visible act of defiance. Out came every last one of his vinyl Jane Austen figures. He set them to run lines of interference between the figures of eldritch power. The population of Casterbridge mingled incongruously among Whateleys and Peaslees and the entire Arkham establishment.

These small personal touches, injecting something of himself, were minor sorties in the main battle. But they brought a very real satisfaction and sense of resistance.

To resist outright was a doomed proposition. His sanity was at stake, after all. There were limits to how much he was willing to sacrifice just to make a point. Direct opposition would only lead to failure, madness, and the unemployment office. If he could just get through this, there would be other opportunities in store for him. With all the glory attendant on the Second Rising, he would be free again to pick his assignments. He could push his Trollope project. Or finally develop The Bronte Sisters Massacre.

Such thoughts did not sit well with the miter, which struck back by clenching down so hard that his brain felt like a raisin. Even through stifling pain, he clung hopelessly to his passion.

Warren dragged a cot into an empty office, dedicating it to Geoff for the duration. Yet to lie there, to sleep, would have been to surrender himself completely.

Beneath the waves, in the lightless depths of his map, the city took shape. Geoff modeled shapes in ABDUL, shapes unlike any he had created before. They were direct projections from the Dreamer; they prefigured the Dark Advent. Even as he built them, he knew they were true. Before this, he had merely imagined R’lyeh; he had improvised, glibly making shit up. This was utterly different. These creations were not of him; he was simply a conduit for the Dreamer’s own excretions. What that made of him, he felt all too keenly.

Yet, while his hands hewed R’lyeh from deformed terrain, his heart took shelter in a green imagined England. It was not mountains of madness that filled his mind, but hillocks of happiness. While fluorescent light throbbed down upon his mitered head, he imagined it was the sunlight of a hot August afternoon; he sought respite from the fields of baled hay, finding Tess the dairymaid (loosely of the D’Urbervilles) waiting for him in the sultry shade, her breasts white as the cream she churned to butter. This was a vision of loveliness no Elder God could threaten. It was not unknown Kadath that shimmered in the distance like a phantasmagoric tapestry, but a stolid grey manor house holding dominion above a manicured lawn. It was not distant witless piping in a cosmic void that filled his ears, but the silver peal of church bells ever ringing through a lilac-scented evening. The pastor walked out among his flock. Roses grew on old white lattices and nodded their heavy heads at the coming night, willing him to sleep… sleep… all would be well if only he would… sleep. Not surrender, merely… merely…

“Geoff? Geoff! Wake up, man, it’s coming! It’s time!”

Groggily aware that something was wrong, Geoff lurched into consciousness. When had he lapsed? What had he lost?

In sleep he had laid himself wide open to the Dreamer. He’d given up everything he valued. He had been party to atrocities. He must delete his work! It was the only way to keep the monster from leaking into the world.

Warren stopped his hand. “You’re done. Come on, we’re in the conference room.”

“Done? But—”

“Don’t worry. The map’s compiled, it’s built, it’s beautiful. Petey and Calamaro couldn’t be happier. Timing’s perfect. We’re not the bottleneck, Geoffrey. Retail can sweat the rest of it. We did our part and we’re done. Now come watch the Rising.”

Stepping into the conference room, he experienced double vision and disorientation. Twin monitors showed the same scene. It took him a moment to realize that one was the simulator and the other was a live broadcast from ships and news helicopters far out at sea. The similarity between the two scenes was uncanny.

Heads swiveled toward him; he tried to smile. Emil Calamaro and Petey Sandersen were plainly delighted to see him. Petey took his hands off the keyboard, where he had been tinkering with the R’lyeh simulation, and, supporting himself on the edge of the table, leaned toward Geoff with his hand out, shouting “He is Risen!” with evangelical fury.

Geoff mumbled his reply.

“We want to thank you and honor you. What you’ve done is beyond amazing!”

Calamaro was rising, his dark sneer full of satisfaction. He too pressed in close to Geoff. “Indeed, it is completely astonishing. You have greatly eased the Rising. We have watched the ascent again and again, and it is most pleasing. Those who did not witness this day firsthand will be able to witness it over and over again for ages to come. It will be as it was.”

On the live screen, the tossing sea had only just begun to tremble; but in the simulator that commemorated the occasion, the ocean had become a frothing stew of green slime belched from the depths. Dark angular towers began to thrust from the waters, black windows gaping, doors opening like the mouths of the abyss. To gaze upon the exhumed city was madness—even he, its author, could hardly bear to look. Then again, he felt he was no more its author than author of what the networks were transmitting.

Petey pulled over a keyboard and paused the simulation. It began to tick backward, then ran forward again at greater speed. R’lyeh was swallowed by the waves, vomited out, swallowed up again. Warren shook his shoulder. “Good work, Geoff. I mean it. Outstanding. You’ve really outdone yourself.”

Meanwhile, the actual rising would not be rushed; it could not be paused or reversed. If only!

The news cameras drifted over the open sea. Its gentleness filled him with dread.

“All right,” Petey said. “Plenty of time for this later.”

As he spoke, the simulated R’lyeh had just crested the false waters. The great stage door to the false dreamer’s lair, the tilted slab, had begun to gape. The shape within, waking, was caught by the stroke of a key. Paralyzed. Not dead. Not even sleeping. On hold.

Petey pushed the keyboard aside and picked up a remote. He pointed it at the live monitor and turned up the volume.

First you heard the thrum of helicopter blades. After a moment, seeping through, a deeper sound like the tolling of drowned bells vibrated out of the television and filled the listeners in the conference room with the solemnity of the moment. Geoff sank into a chair. He had seen all this before. He had dreamed it, lived it, fought it. Failed. His sense of defeat was complete.

Water slithered and eddied from the dark complexities beneath. Huge mounded shapes. Cruise ships and luxury liners had come close for the occasion, while keeping a respectful distance from the turbulence. The cameras showed their decks and rails thronged with wealthy golden worshipers. Several aircraft carriers waited on the horizon in case of international incidents. But only one incident mattered now, and it transcended all merely “international” concerns.

The bells tolled louder, and at a slowly rising pitch. Something in Geoff thrilled at the sound in spite of himself. He had dreamed this. He had been down there in the depths. He had met the Dreamer mind to mind and been utterly defeated, and yet… and yet…

The waters surged. The chopper pulled closer. From far down in the foul foam came something shining and angular, all points and slopes and corners, upthrusting towers and turrets, and still those bells, so wrong, so infinitely wrong.

Petey and Emil turned to one another, worried looks flitting.

Something gleaming, something of brilliant shining ivory whiteness, suddenly breached the surface. A gasp went through the room.

The helicopter lurched as if the pilot had lost control, caught by a vicious gust from below.

As the chopper recovered, the view stabilized. The distant television crew was shouting about the near disaster, distracted from the inevitable one. They were closer to the water now, closer to the immensity that continued rising into light and air. Gargantuan bluffs of black dripping stone, chiseled shapes covered with slime and ancient marine encrustations. And atop all this, the greatest monstrosity, the holiest of holies…

A church.

Exactly that. A small old-fashioned English country church with a single perfect spire. Sparkling white and dripping wet, it perched atop the squalid rocks as if it had been lifted whole from Geoff’s reveries and transplanted in this unlikeliest of spots.

Geoff himself could only stare as seawater flowed from the bell tower, as the pealing bells grew louder, clearer, cheerier.

They filled the room until Petey and Calamaro had to clamp their hands over their ears. The two men whirled on Geoff with their eyes bulging, mouths flapping but unable to speak.

Geoff backed away with both hands on the miter, trying desperately to pry it off, to throw it down and run, even though he knew they could not harm him now. He had given birth to this thing. He and it were one and the same. Minds had mingled in the depths, and now…

Onscreen, the TV screen, the doors of the church swung wide. The timbre of the bells deepened abruptly, sounding a sour and dismal note. Petey and Calamaro, pierced by sudden rapture, whirled to take in the sight.

The church was not empty—hardly that. The white outer shell, the churchlike carapace, had transfigured the softer thing inside, and decidedly not for the better.

It lashed out, and the helicopter went down in an instant. Green water closed over the lens. For a moment that monitor showed the bubbling surface of the sea from underneath. Sunlight flared across the screen, but shadows were spreading. Somewhere, the cruise ships were being pulled under one by one. You could hardly hear the screams above the bells, which tolled and tolled. They would stop for nothing and nothing could block out the sound.

Not even Warren: “You’ve done it, Geoff!”

Not even Emil Calamaro: “Big, big congrats!”

Not even Petey Sandersen, conveying the last words he heard or wanted to hear: “Don’t take the miter off! The job is yours! Forever!”

* * *

“The Vicar of R’lyeh” copyright 2007 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Flurb #4 (Fall-Winter 2007), edited by Rudy Rucker.

LENG

Expeditionary Notes of the Second Mycological Survey of the Leng Plateau Region

Aug. 3

No adventurer has ever followed lightly in the footsteps of a missing survey team, and today’s encounter in the Amari Café did little to relieve my anxiety. Having arrived in Thangyal in the midst of the Summer Grass Festival, which celebrates the harvest of Cordyceps sinensis, the prized caterpillar fungus, we first sought a reasonably hygienic hotel in which to stow our gear. Lodging accomplished, Phupten led me several blocks to the café—and what a walk it was! Sidewalks covered with cordyceps! Thousands of them laid out to dry on tarps and blankets, the withered little hyphae-riddled worms with their dark fungal stalks outthrust like black mono-antennae, capped with tiny spores (asci). Everywhere we stepped, an exotic specimen cried out for inspection. Never have I seen so many mushrooms in one place, let alone the rare cordyceps; never have I visited a culture where mushrooms were of such great ethnic and economic importance. It is no wonder the fungi are beloved and appreciated, and that the cheerful little urchins who incessantly spit in the street possess at their tongue-tips (along with sunflower hulls) the practical field lore of a trained mycologist; for these withered larvae and plump Tricholoma matsutake and aromatic Boletus edulis have brought revivifying amounts of income to the previously cash-starved locals. For myself, a mere mushroom enthusiast, it was an intoxicating stroll. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for my predecessors, treading these same cracked sidewalks ten months ago.

Phupten assured me that every Westerner in Thangyal ends up in the cramped café presided over by the rosy-cheeked Mr. Zhang, and this was the main reason for our choice of eatery. Mr. Zhang, formerly of Lhasa, proved to be a thin, jolly restaurateur in a shabby suit jacket, his cuffs protected from sputtering grease by colorful sleeve protectors cut from what appeared to be the legs of a child’s pajamas. At first, while we poured ourselves tea and ate various yak-fraught Tibetan versions of American standards, all was pleasant enough. Mr. Zhang required only occasional interpretive assistance from Phupten, and my comment on his excellent command of English naturally led him to the subject of his previous tutors—namely, the eponymous heads of the Schurr-Perry expedition.

Here, at a moment that could have been interpreted as inauspicious by those inclined to read supernatural meaning into random events, the lights dimmed and the power went out completely—a common event in Thangyal, Phupten stressed, as if he thought me susceptible to influence by such auspices. Although the cafe darkened, Mr. Zhang’s chapped cheeks burned brighter, kindling my own excitement as he lit into a firsthand account of the last known days of Danielle Schurr and her husband, Heinrich Perry.

According to Mr. Zhang, Danielle and Heinrich spent several weeks in Thangyal last October-November, preparing to penetrate the Plateau of Leng (so-called, in fanciful old accounts, the “Forbidden Plateau” (Journals of the Eldwythe Expedition (1903)) (which I mistakenly thought I had packed, damn it)). Thangyal still has no airstrip of its own, and like me they had relied on Land Rover and local drivers to reach it. Upon arrival, they encountered great difficulty in arranging for guides and packhorses to carry their belongings beyond vehicular routes, and had been obliged to wait while all manner of supplies were shipped in and travel arrangements made. During this wait, Heinrich had schooled our host in English, while Danielle had broadened his American cuisine repertoire. (I have her to thank for the banana pancakes that warm me even now.)

The jovial restaurateur tried many times to talk them out of their foray—and not merely because of winter’s onset. Were there political considerations? I asked. For while the Chinese government has relaxed travel restrictions through some border zones of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, stringent regulations are still in effect for Westerners who wish to press into the interior. Many of these stipulations (as I know firsthand) exist mainly to divert tourist lucre into the prefecture’s treasury by way of costly travel permits. But in the case of Leng, there seem to be less obvious motives for the restrictions. Despite assurances that I would never repeat his words to any official, Mr. Zhang refused to elaborate on what sort of benefit the Chinese government derived from restricting access. Leng is hardly a mineral rich region; there has been little or no military development there, which indicates it is strategically useless; and recent human rights reports declare it devoid of prisons or other political installations. It remains an area almost completely bypassed by civilizing influences, an astonishing anachronism as China pushes development into every last quarter of Tibet. As a zone set apart from the usual depredations, such resource conservation seems distinctly odd; but perhaps they have other plans for its exploitation. Mr. Zhang’s warnings were sufficiently vague that I could easily picture my predecessors brushing them aside. Once he realized that it was my intent to follow them, he directed the same warnings at me. Any request for permission to enter the plateau region would be met with refusal, he said; thus confirming my decision to file no such requests, but depend on the remoteness of the region to lend me anonymity.

When he saw it was my fixed purpose to follow the Schurr-Perry trail, Mr. Zhang got up and shuffled back into the kitchen—now lit solely by a gas stovetop. He returned with a dog-eared ledger and said something in Tibetan which Phupten interpreted as, “Guestbook.”

Mr. Zhang opened the ledger, spread it flat on the checkered tablecloth, and guided us backward through the entries—past colorful doodles and excitable notes from the Amari’s many international diners—notes in English and German and French. Here were mountaineers bragging of climbs they had just made or climbs just ahead of them, penniless wanderers hoping someone might forward a few million yuan, laments of narrowly missed rendezvous.

Mr. Zhang stopped flipping pages and directed our attention to a ragged strip where one sheet had been ripped from the book.

“Here,” he said. “Heinrich and Danielle? They write thank you Mr. Zhang. They say, we go Leng. Bu Gompa. Anyone follow, they read this note, say wait for them in spring. But… no come back.”

I speak no Tibetan, but I recognized a few words I have heard many times recently, albeit in different context. The locals are always making pilgrimages to their various gompas, by which they mean a temple or monastery. And bu I know from Yartse gunbu, the local name for the caterpillar fungus. Its precise meaning is “summer grass, winter worm,” which is a colorful (if backwards) way of describing the metamorphosis of the cordyceps-inoculated caterpillar, which overwinters as a worm, only to sprout a grasslike fungal stalk, the fruiting body or stroma, in early summer (once the fungus has entirely consumed it from within).

I clumsily translated the name as, “Templeof the Worm?”

Mr. Zhang said something urgently to Phupten, who listened, nodded, and turned to translate.

“Yes, monastery. Bu Gompa sits in the pass above Leng Plateau. Very old temple, from old religion, pre-Buddhist.”

“A Bon temple, you mean?”

“Not Bon-po. Very much older. Bu Gompa for all that time, gateway to Leng. Priests are now Buddhist, but they still guard plateau.”

Mr. Zhang was not done with his guest book. “This page, when my friends not return, two men come. Say they look for Heinrich and Danielle. Look for news of expedition.”

“This was when?”

“In… January? Before they supposed come back. No one worried yet. Tibetan men, say Heinrich friend, ask see guest book. I very busy, many people in restaurant. Think no problem, they look for friends. I go in kitchen, very busy. I come out, they gone. Oh well. Book still here. Later I see page gone!”

“The one Heinrich and Danielle wrote in, you mean? Saying where they were going?”

“Yes.”

“These men were Tibetan, you say?”

“Yes. I not see them in Thangyal before, but so many in town. Not only Yartse Festival. Many travelers. I worry they take page, get money from Heinrich and Danielle family.”

“Blackmail,” said Phupten.

I assured Mr. Zhang that we had heard of no such attempts. I explained that I had followed Heinrich and Danielle’s trail after reading a series of letters and articles published in the Journal of the Mycological Society in advance of their departure. But all of Mr. Zhang’s information was new to me; and that regarding the gompa was particularly interesting, as it suggested where I might next seek news of their whereabouts.

At about this time, the power was restored and a fresh flood of festival attendees pushed into the café. Thinking it right to clear the table for new customers, we bid farewell to Mr. Zhang, thanked him for his kindness, and stepped back out onto a sidewalk now almost completely covered with fungi. I stopped to watch some old gentlemen playing mahjongg on a table they’d set up on the sidewalk, and was hardly surprised to discover that in place of cash or poker chips, they were betting with Yartse gunbu.

Aug. 6

This morning, having finally reached the end of the tortuously stony road beyond Thangyal, we climbed from the Land Rovers and found an entire village sitting out in the sun to await our arrival. Our ponies should have been waiting for us, but apparently the drivers had expected us a week ago and turned them loose to graze in the high meadows. Even so, you might have thought the whole village had sat on the streetside, patiently waiting out the week, as if our arrival were the highpoint of the season and well worth any delay. To mark the moment with a bit of ceremony, I passed around biscuits and let the assemblage pore through my mushroom atlas, which was handed about with amazement and appreciation by the entire community. They pointed out various rare species, giving me the impression that many could be found in the region—however, Phupten was too busy remedying the horse situation to interpret, and I soon reached the limits of my ability to communicate with any subtlety.

Phupten eventually signaled me that immediate arrangements had been made, and that we could set off without further ado. The horses would follow once they had been retrieved and laden with supplies offloaded from the vehicles. With a camp-following of dogs and children, we plunged onto a muddy footpath among the houses. As we passed to the limits of the village, we encountered a number of mushroom hunters returning from their morning labors with plastic grocery bags, wicker baskets, or nylon backpacks bulging with shamu—the local term for mushrooms of all varieties. Phupten helped me interview the collectors, making quick inventories of local names, edibility, and market prices they earn from the buyers who scour these remote villages for delicacies. One cannot underestimate the value of mushrooms to these people. Species that grow abundantly here are prized in Japan and Korea, where they absolutely resist cultivation. Although the villagers receive a pittance compared to supermarket prices in Tokyo and Seoul, the influx of cash has completely transformed this previously impoverished land. The mud houses are freshly painted in bright acrylics; solar panels and satellite dishes spring up plentiful as sunflowers. The young men dash about on motorcycles as colorful as their temples. Since a study of mushroom economics had been the announced purpose of the Schurr-Perry expedition (although I suspected the unstated motive force was more likely a desire to discover and name some new species found only in Leng), I decided to see if this might be a path already taken. I showed each collector a photograph of Heinrich and Danielle, copied from the dust jacket of their landmark Fungi of Yunnan, to see what memories the image might jog loose. One group of giggling youths remembered them well; the adults were harder to pin down. I found reassurance, however, in the innocent recognition of the children, and now feel I am definitely on the right trail—although the chance of losing it remains tremendous in the narrow defiles of the only land route into Leng.

Beyond the village, we crossed a river by way of a swaying cable bridge. Keeping close to the west bank, working our way upriver, we spent the morning traversing damp meadows further dampened by frequent cloudbursts. Our gear, now swaying awkwardly on the backs of four ponies, caught up with us in the early afternoon. Not long after, we crossed back to the east bank, on a much older bridge that put me in mind of a stockade. The blackened timbers were topped with protective shapes that again served as reminders of the mushroom’s ancient significance. The more stylized carvings were clearly meant to represent shelf fungi, tree ears, king boletes. The bridge also marked the point at which I felt we had crossed a divide in time. I saw no more hazardous electric lines strung between fencepost and rooftop; no dish antennae were in evidence. The mudbrick walls were topped with mats of cut sod, which made them wide enough that small dogs could run along the heights, barking down at us. Children followed us through streets that ran like muddy streams. Eventually, at the edge of a walled field, we left them all behind, flashing peace signs and shouting after us, “Shamu-pa! Shamu-pa!” Phutpen laughed and said, “They call you ‘Mushroom Man,’” which sat very well with me. Our guides grinned and set the horses on at greater speed.

After that, all other habitations were simpler and more temporary affairs. Phupten brought us to the black felt tent of a yak herder, where an elderly nomad woman cut squeaking slices of a hard rubbery cheese and sprinkled it with brown sugar; I was grateful for the butter tea that washed it down. But it was the large basket of matsutake that held my interest, each little bud wrapped in an origami packet of rhododendron leaves.

Regretfully, as we ascend we are bound to leave such woodland curiosities behind. The higher elevations are more secretive with their treasures. Consider the elusive cordyceps–notoriously hard to spy, with its one thin filament lost among so many blades of real grass.

Late in the day, we came in sight of the massif that guards the pass into Leng. The late afternoon light made the barrier appear unnaturally close, sharp and serrated as a knife held to my eyes. Such was the clarity of the air that for a moment I felt a kind of horizontal vertigo. I imagined myself in danger of falling forward and stumbling over the rim of the mountains into a deep blue void. When a violet translucence flared above the range, it edged the snowy crests as if auroral lights were spilling up from the plateau hidden beyond them. I suppose this strange, brief atmospheric phenomenon may be akin to the green flash of the equatorial latitudes, but it also made me more aware than ever of the imminent onset of altitude sickness, and the ominous tinge of an incipient migraine. I was grateful when our guides, immediately after this, announced it was time to make camp.

We spread our tents in a wide meadow between two rivers. The rush of rapids was almost deafening. One of our guides, doubling as cook, filled pots and a kettle from one of the streams and soon had tea and soup underway. From a bloody plastic grocery bag, he produced rich chunks of yak and hacked them up along with fresh herbs and wild garlic he had gathered along the trail. I offered several prize boletes of my own finding. We ate and ate well in the shadow of a tall white stupa, also in the shape of a mushroom, adorned with a Buddha’s eyes, and I was reminded of another interest of Heinrich’s and Danielle’s. They had read conjecture in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that the words Amanita and Amrita had their nomenclatural similarity rooted in a single sacred practice. Amrita is the Buddhist equivalent of ambrosia, or the Sanskrit soma, a sacred foodstuff; and it has been suggested that certain Buddhist practices may have been inspired, or at least augmented, by visions following ingestion of the highly psychoactive Amanita muscaria. The Schurr-Perrys had stated a desire to be the discoverers (and namers) of Amanita lengensis, should such exist. In this way the mycological world resembles the quantum world, in being a realm so rich and various that simply searching for new forms seems to call them into creation; where labels may predate and even prophesy the things to which they are eventually applied; in which scientists now chart out the psychic territory known as Apprehension.

When I asked which species we might find beyond the pass, I was surprised to learn from Phupten that our guides had only visited Bu Gompa once or twice in their lifetimes, and had never actually set foot in Leng. Such pilgrimages are not undertaken lightly. Leng is held in such reverence and awe, as a place of supernal power, that they believe it unwise to venture there too often.

Sharing our interest in all things mycological, the horsemen related a tale of a stupa-shaped mushroom that had bloated to enormous size and died away to puddled slime in the course of one growing season. This had occurred in their childhoods, but pilgrims still visited the spot in hopes the Guru Shamu might reappear. With what in retrospect seems arrogant pedantry, I found myself explaining that the fruiting body they saw, impressive as it might have seemed, was still only a comparatively tiny eruption from a much vaster fungus, the real guru, growing unseen and unmeasured beneath the soil. They looked at me with disappointment, as if I had just declared them retarded. In other words, this was hardly news to them. I eventually succeeded, through Phupten, in apologizing. I explained that in the West, extensive knowledge of mushrooms is considered bizarre at worst, the mark of an enthusiast at best. We shared a good laugh. At last I am among kindred spirits. So much about our lives is different, but in our passion for mushrooms we are of one mind.

Aug. 8

A day of astonishment—of revelation. Almost too much to encompass as I sit here typing by the light of my laptop, wrapped up in my sleeping bag as if under the stars, but with my gear pitched instead in a chilly stone cell. I should sleep, I know. I am exhausted and the laptop battery needs charging; but I fear losing track of any detail. I must write while this is all fresh.

After yesterday’s slow progress and mounting disappointments, we were relieved to sight the Leng Pass by late morning. We had ascended to such an altitude that even now, in midsummer, snow comes down to the level of the trail in numerous places. Blue deer capered on the steep ragged scree above us, lammergeier were our constant observers, and once we startled a flock of white-eared pheasant, large as turkeys, that hopped rather than flew away through the boulders. The occasional stinkhorn, fancifully obscene, was still to be found among the thinly scattered pine needles, but my desire to forage had receded with the elevation. Grateful to have woken with a clear head, and not at all eager to trigger another migraine, I resolved to conserve my strength. But it was hard to slow down once I saw my view of the sky steadily broadening, with no further mountains moving into the notch above.

We passed cairns of engraved stones and desiccated offerings that seemed neither plant nor animal but something in between, and entered a long flat valley, sinuously curved to match the river flowing through it. The valley floor was high marshland, studded with the medicinal rhubarb we have seen everywhere. This was all picturesque enough, but above it on a slope of the pass, just at the highest point where snow laced the scree, was the most wonderful sight of the journey. Its prayer flags flying against the clouds seemed triumphant banners set out for our welcome. We had reached Bu Gompa, which straddles and guards the entrance to Leng.

Thunder rumbled; rain fell in grey ribbons. Phupten said the monks were bound to read this as an auspicious sign, coupled with our arrival. Our horsemen quickened their steps, and even the ponies hurried as if the object of their own private pilgrimage were in sight. The monastery loomed over us. Above it, among shelves of rock on the steeper slopes, I saw the pockmarks of clustered caves like the openings of beehives. Then we were through a painted gate and the place had consumed us. Happily lost among tall sod-draped walls, I breathed in the musty atmosphere of woodsmoke, rancid butter and human waste that I have come to associate with all such picturesque scenes in this country.

Several boys, young monks, were first to greet us, laughing and ducking out of sight, then running ahead to alert their elders. We climbed switchback streets, perpetually urged and beckoned to the height of the pass. At last we entered a walled courtyard. A wide flight of steps soared to a pair of immense doors, presumably the entrance to the main temple. As Phupten conversed with a small contingent of monks, I tried these doors and found them locked. It seemed propitious to leave an offering of ten dollars to show our good intentions and dispose the monks toward our cause. Meanwhile, our horsemen laid themselves repeatedly on the flags of the courtyard, in prayerful prostrations, aligned along some faded tracework of symbols so ancient I could detect no underlying pattern. Although the walls were bright with fresh paint, this monastery seemed remote enough to have escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution.

I retreated down the steps to find Phupten perplexed. The monks, he said, had been expecting us. They led us around the side of the building, skirting the huge locked doors, and entered the main hall by a small curtained passage.

We had seen many fantastically colorful temples along our route, lurid to the point of being day-glo. This one impressed by its warm burnished hues. Rich russets, silvery greys, pallid ivories. Everywhere were exquisite thangkas, hand-painted hangings in colors so subdued they evoked a world of perpetual dusk. There was light in these paintings that seemed to emanate from within and could hardly be fully explained by the shifting glow of the numerous butter lamps. Bodhisattvas floated among sharp mountains, hovering cross-legged above vast emerald seas from which radiated gilt filaments painted with such skill that they seemed to vibrate on the optic nerve, creating the illusion of swaying like strands of golden grass. Most of the traditional Buddhas and Bodhisattvas had grown familiar to me after so many recent temple visits but Phupten pointed out one figure new to me, and quite unusual, which made numerous appearances throughout the room. Pre-Buddhist, and predating even the ancient Bon-po religion of Tibet, Phupten thought this to be the patron of those original priests of Leng. Where Buddhist iconography was highly schematic, drawn according to regular geometric formulae, this figure harkened back to an older style, one unconcerned with distinct form and completely innocent of the rules of perspective: amorphous, eyeless, mouthless, but not completely faceless. Having noticed it once, I began to spy it everywhere, lurking within nearly all the thangkas, a ubiquitous shadow beneath every emerald expanse.

I noticed our horsemen moving about the room in clockwise fashion, lighting incense and butter lamps, leaving offerings of currency at several of the shrines. Having taken up this practice myself, as a matter of courtesy rather than devotion, I began to follow their example; but Phupten took my arm and for the first time in our journey, told me to hang back. When I asked why, he pulled me into a corner of the room and whispered, with curious urgency, “If you look, you see no pictures of His Holiness.”

It was true enough, and remarkable, given the common appearance of the Dalai Lama in every temple we had visited across the eastern fringe ofTibet.

“Not good. Old disagreement. They do practice here, very old, from Leng. His Holiness say very bad. Three years ago, the priests of Leng, they speak out against Dalai Lama, that he is suppressing their religion. He says, their protector deity is like a demon—“

“I thought all the old Bon spirits were demons once.”

“Yes, but this one never enlightened. False wisdom. So, a very big fight, and even a man who try to kill his Holiness in Dharamsala. They said it was Chinese assassin behind it, but many believe it was ordered by monks of Leng.”

“So… no offerings,” I finished.

“Yes.”

“But what about our guides? Don’t they know?”

Before he could answer, our inspection of the temple was interrupted by the arrival of several more monks. Two were elders, dignified men, strong but gentle seeming. The third was younger, with strongly Caucasian features. In his monastic garb, with head shaved, and given the fact I had only seen him as a lecturer, at a distance, at one or two mycological conferences, I suppose I can be forgiven for not having recognized him until he came up to me, put out his hand, and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you? Heinrich Perry!”

Ten minutes later, we were seated in the courtyard enjoying a sun break, sipping tea and chewing dumplings of tea-moistened tsampa. It seemed that all the monks of Bu Gompa had turned out to get a look at me. They laughed and posed for photographs, until their various duties took them off again, for meditation or debate. Heinrich said news of our coming had preceded us up the passes; he had been expecting us since our visit to Mr. Zhang, although he was surprised anyone would have followed in his footsteps. The Schurr-Perry expedition was anything but lost. He had already found more than he ever expected to find, without even crossing into Leng. His wife had ventured onto the plateau and made discoveries of her own, but Heinrich had not set foot across the threshold.

“And where is Ms. Schurr?” I asked.

Heinrich gestured airily in the direction of the surrounding slopes. “She is in retreat.” Leaving me to infer some transcendental meaning in this statement, he must have seen my glazed expression, for he laughed and elaborated: “Above the monastery are many old caves used for meditation. She has been there since her return from the plateau.” He leaned forward and said confidentially, “She has been recognized as a superior practitioner, while I scrub pots and chop wood!”

So our predecessors, far from lost, had simply gone native. And their mycological survey? Their dreams of discovering new species in Leng? It was hard to believe they had given up on their passion.

Heinrich said, “Not at all. I would say we have embraced it. The Leng Plateau is a treasure chest of rarities, previously unknown. Once you attain the plateau, it is impossible to describe the wealth of discovery that awaits. But… once I reached this spot, such things lost their importance. Danielle has never been one to hold back, but I… I feel fulfilled as a porter at the gate. All Leng lies before me, but I know myself not yet ready for what it has to offer.”

This seemed like a shame, and I said as much, for Perry’s reports had always been received eagerly by mycological society. In a profession which had yearly become more and more the domain of geneticists, more partitioned into microscopic domains, Perry and Schurr had been unafraid of bold strokes and sweeping statements. Their papers, while thoroughly grounded in empirical observation, never shied from leaning out over the thrilling edge of speculation. Their gift of synthesis was to couple personal reportage with ecological insight; their reports, while botanically rigorous, did not neglect the social and economic implications of their finds. Yet apparently the line between devout ethnomycology and monastic assimilation had been porous. I considered it a shame, but then felt awkward and ashamed of myself for harboring critical thoughts of this pair, whom I knew not at all. If they had found personal fulfillment in casting aside purely academic concerns and embracing the spiritual, then who was I to judge them? If anything, I felt a keen resolve to work even harder in order to compensate for the loss of Schurr-Perry’s ongoing contributions to the field. The success of my foray into Leng seems more crucial than ever.

By now it was early evening, and we walked out to stand on a temple balcony, looking out across the very threshold of Leng. The serried peaks opened before us like a curtain of violet ice pulled back to reveal a sea of rolling green that broke against the misty edges of infinity. The most evocative passages of the literature of Leng came rushing back to me—from the lush descriptions of Gallardo’s Folk and Lore of the Forbidden Plateaux (1860) to the spare journal entries of the tragic Eldwythe misadventure of 1903, made all the more macabre and ironic by its innocence of the repercussions it would inevitably have on British and Russian relations. “…lost land of unnameable mysteries… beauty beyond reach and beyond utterance… effulgent as the evenstar’s radiance alight on the breast of earth, enflaming the mind and senses…” Although I had always thought such descriptions must have been flights of fancy, my first sight of Leng simply made me sympathetic to the self-avowed descriptive failings of all previous writers.

It was no wonder Perry had stopped here, I thought, for to descend into that remote wilderness was to risk stripping it of the intense mystery that gave rise to its fantastic beauty. While I knew that on the morrow we would put one foot before the other and gradually make our way down to that strange green plain, I regretted the thought of taking any action that would lessen Leng’s magic while heightening its reality. It struck me as a dreamland, suspended in its own hallucination of itself, impervious to the senses. And yet such bubbles—how readily they burst. I feared this was a delusion of the evening, of the twilight air, doomed by the threat of morning. But there was nothing for it. I tried to hold on to a sense of anticipation, reminding myself of what Perry had hinted: That new discoveries awaited us below.

Horns resounded deep within the monastery, amid the clanging of cymbals and bells, and several boys came to fetch us back. Just before we turned away, the first stars appeared above the misty plains, and I sent up a fervent wish that I would never forget the feelings that had accompanied their arrival. Needless to say, these impressions will make no appearance in my published survey notes. In fact, I hope I can word my reports in such a way that none of my colleagues feel compelled to follow my trail and impinge upon this mystic land. It is such a strange feeling, as if I have been entrusted with a secret rare and exquisite, one that seems to blow up from the plateau on scented winds. I feel it would be wrong, shameful, to blunt it with too many perceivers. I am of course committed to sharing the knowledge I find here, and in no danger of falling into the trap that claimed the Schurr-Perry party. But I find myself certain that those Tibetans who visited Mr. Zhang and tore the entry from his guestbook must have been sent at Heinrich Perry’s request, in an understandable attempt to cover up his trail.

During dinner, we spoke only of plans for the journey ahead. Phupten dined with the drivers, so I relied on Perry for interpretation. It seemed strange to me that they would have embraced him as a lama when his only real expertise, to my knowledge, was in the area of mycology. Likewise, how had Danielle managed to distinguish herself so swiftly among this group of lifelong spiritual practitioners? It was one thing to rush ahead fearlessly, as Heinrich had suggested was her wont—and quite another to convert that mortal zeal into an act of transcendence.

These questions were hard to frame while my hosts plied me with such a remarkable meal. Knowing my interest in local mushrooms, the monk chefs contrived a meal of savories that grew within range of the temple, prime among them a delectable red fly agaric, or chicken egg mushroom—Amanita hemibapha (once incorrectly known as Caesar’s mushroom (or, I would imagine, ‘Gesar’s mushroom’ in these lands), viz., Amanita caesarea, but delightful whatever its name). In my tea I found a special additive—a wrinkled grub, perhaps three inches long, like a sodden medicinal root. Heinrich confirmed my suspicion that it was nothing less than cordyceps, and a most prized variety, being collected along the edges of the grasslands that blanket the plateau. Like the worm in a bottle of tequila, it bobbed against my lips as I drank. In tropical climes, where insects are rife, the invasive cordyceps comes in many forms, to encompass the wild variety of insect hosts; but in these high cold climes, its hosts are few and unprepossessing. Whatever traits might have distinguished Cordyceps lengensis from the more common variety were not at all obvious to my eye; in fact, soaked and swimming in tea, it looked more like a shred of ginseng than anything else. Heinrich said the monks called it phowa bu, which I hesitate to translate. “Death Worm” gives the wrong impression altogether and “Transcendence Worm” is not much better. Phowa is a ritual done at the moment of death, intended to launch its practitioner cleanly into the Pure Lands through his crown—to be more precise, through the fontanelle at the top of the skull. Heinrich claims that in true practitioners of phowa, a blood blister forms at the top of one’s head, and a hole opens there. This channel is just wide and deep enough to hold a single stalk of grass—and in fact, this is the traditional test used by lamas to gauge an initiate’s readiness. With its single grasslike stalk, the shriveled cordyceps serves as a humble reminder of the sacred practice.

I asked Heinrich if I might see fresh specimens of Cordyceps lengensis before my departure, but he demurred—and there I caught a glimpse of the old academic, cagey and wary with his findings. “Of course,” I quipped, “you have yet to publish!” And was gratified to hear him laugh. I’d struck truth! For all his monastic garb, he is still a mushroom hunter through and through–protective of his private foraging grounds!

Although the sun had barely set, I found the cumulative exertions of the last few days, and the effects of the altitude, had overcome me. The cordyceps infusion seems to have some medicinal properties, for tonight as I lay down to make these entries, I found my breathing easy. Normally these past few nights, I have felt a crushing weight on my chest, exaggerated when I recline, and I wake many times before dawn, gasping for breath. Something tells me that tonight I will sleep well.

Stray thought—Heinrich’s research re Amanita/Amrita. Must ask in the morning. Where that led him; what he found, if anything. Cordyceps aplenty, but no sign of Amanita lengensis. I’d like to charge the laptop before I go, but I couldn’t ask them to run the generator all night. Low on power.

Undated Entry

Phupten is dead. Or worse.

I believe our guides may have met a similar fate—I cannot call it an end, although it might be that. I will do my best to explain while I still have power, in hopes this laptop may be found by someone who may benefit by my warnings. I cannot flee back across the pass. The only other path is a trackless one, forward across the plateau. Leng. There are good reasons not know it any better than I do already.

Two nights ago? Three? Phupten woke me in the dark monastic cell, with a flashlight in my eyes and fear in his voice. He said we were at risk of losing our guides to the gompa. Whether they had planned it from the start, or merely found themselves seduced by the monastic order upon arrival, he was unsure. They had mentioned childhood vows that needed renewing, but apparently things had gone too far.

I was already dressed inside my sleeping bag, so I scrambled out and followed him along dark halls, taking nothing but the few valuables in my backpack. We passed under timbered passages and starry gaps, and eventually came to the side door of the great hall. Inside, the monks sat chanting in row upon row with our guides now among them. Phupten held me back, as if I would have plunged among them—but I was not inclined to interrupt that ceremony.

Both guides stood at the head of the temple, close to the central altar. Incense fumes shrouded them, as if they were being fumigated, purified in sacred smoke. The smoke rose from a fat grey mass, as large as a man’s torso, that smoldered but did not seem to burn. A lama stood near the men, his face hidden behind a richly embroidered veil of yellow cloth shot through with gold and red. He held a long wooden wand, possibly a yarrow stalk, which he used to softly prod and poke at the lump, stirring up thick billowing clouds of the odorless incense with each touch. I realized I was seeing a tangible version of the icon featured in so many thangkas—the local protector deity made manifest, squatting in the place that should have been occupied by a Buddha or Bodhisattva.

Sensing our arrival, the lama laid down his wand and walked toward us, stripping off his veil as if it were a surgeon’s mask. I was much surprised to find Heinrich leading a ceremony of such obvious importance. Without a word, he took me by the arm and steered me toward the side door. I looked around and discovered that Phupten had already crept away.

“Your guides have elected to stay,” he said.

“If they wish to take monastic vows it’s no business of mine,” I said. “But they should first fulfill their obligation to the survey. You know the importance of our work, Heinrich. Once you were as devoted to mycology as anyone on earth. Can’t you ask them to postpone this sudden bout of spirituality for a few weeks? I’ll be happy to leave them with you on my return from the plateau.”

Rather than argue, Heinrich led me away with a gentleness that later seemed more forceful than sympathetic.

“I understand your point of view, but there is another,” he said patiently. “When Dani and I first arrived here, our survey seemed more pressing than anything on earth. I remember my eagerness to catalog the contents of Leng. But there is a faster way to that knowledge. A richer and deeper kind of knowing.”

We were moving up the mountainside along a rough path. The hollow eye sockets of caves peered down without seeing us. The cloistered buildings fell below.

“Speak with Danielle,” Heinrich said. “She can explain better than I.”

Starshine through the frayed clouds was all the light we had, but on the snowy flanks of the mountains it was almost dazzling. Heinrich brought me to a black throat of darkness. Small icons sculpted of butter and barley flour were arranged at its mouth; there were shapes like spindles, bulbs, ears. We stepped inside. My first impression was of choking dryness and dust. I saw a grey knot, far back in the cave, bobbing in the guttering light of a single butter lamp that burned on the ground before it. I could make out a figure wrapped in robes, with head bowed slightly forward. All was grey—the face, the long hair cleanly parted down the middle. I supposed it was a woman, but she did not speak, nor stir to greet us.

“This is Danielle,” Heinrich said. “She has answers to all your questions.”

I was not sure what to ask, but I swore I heard her answering already. Deeper into the cave I went, stooping as the ceiling lowered, until my ears were very near her mouth. The sound of speech was louder now but still indecipherable, like mumbles inside which something was gnawing. Thinking it might help to match mouth to syllable, I watched her face until I was certain her mouth never moved. When I stepped back, a faint grey filament stirred in the breeze I’d made. It jutted from her scalp like a stalk of straw. The mark of the phowa adept. It seemed incredible she could have attained such a transcendent state in so little time. Was this why they had decided to remain? Could the monks of Bu Gompa offer a short path to enlightenment? Was there something about Leng itself, something in the rarified air, in the snowy mountains and the rolling misty grasslands, that provoked insight? I thought of how I had felt looking out over the fields—as if perpetually on the verge of understanding, of merging with a mystery that underlay all existence. But I had hesitated then and I hesitated now, even as I teetered on the brink. Doubt assailed me, and I have been trained to rely on doubt. Was enlightenment invariably good and wise? Was it possible that some forms of enlightenment, more abrupt than others, might be more than a weak mind could encompass? Were there not perhaps monks who, at the moment of insight, simply went mad? Or in a sense shattered?

Heinrich had been joined by others. Dark shapes clustered outside the cave, with the stars beyond them looking infinitely farther than stars had ever looked to me before. There was some aspect of menace in the silent arrival of the monks, and I suddenly felt myself the victim of a fraud. Doubt drove me entirely now. In a last bid to assert my rationality, to make all this as real as I felt it needed to be, I turned back to Danielle Schurr. It was time to end all deception. My fingers closed on the blade that jutted from her crown. Far from a dry grassy stalk, it proved to be pliable, rubbery, tough. I thought of the lure of a benthic anglerfish—something that belonged far deeper than this cave extended. As I pulled it from her scalp, or tried to, the top half of her head tore away in my hand, hanging from the end of the stalk in shreds, like a wet paper bag. The rest of her, what was left of her, exploded like a damp tissue balloon packed with grey dust. If you have ever kicked a puffball fungus, you might have some idea of the swirling clouds of spores that poured like scentless incense from the soft grey body—in such quantity that the dry husk was instantly emptied and lay slumped across the floor, inseparable from its robes.

I knew I must not breathe till I was far from the cave, but of course I already had gasped. Thus the shock of terror plays a critical role in the inoculation. I backed away, expecting to be caught by Heinrich and his cohorts. But no one stopped me. All stood aside.

My descent was a desperate and precarious one, especially once I abandoned the trail and cut off along the only available route—the pass leading down into Leng. The thought that I might accidentally blunder back into the monastery filled me with terror. By starlight, and some miracle, I found my way off the treacherous rocks and onto a stable path. An enormous clanking shape lurched toward me, matching my wild imaginings of some shaggy supernatural guardian that had descended to track me down. It proved to be one of the pack horses, bearing an ungainly bundle quickly assembled from our belongings, and led by none other than Phupten. He was as startled to see me as I was to meet him, for he had understandably thought only of saving himself. He said the path in the other direction had been gated off, the far side of the monastery impassable; so he’d had no choice but to flee toward Leng.

Behind us came the drone of horns, and I half expected the baying of hounds in pursuit. But though cymbals clashed and bells clanged and chanting rose up to the stars, nothing but sound pursued us down through the pass toward the unknown plateau of Leng, which became less unknown with each step. We fled through icy mountain fogs so luminous that I thought several times the sun must be rising, but each time found myself deceived.

At last, in exhaustion, Phupten pegged the ponies and dragged down blankets, and built a fire among the roots of a tree to give us some shelter against a miserable rain. We made plans for the morning, plans that have since evaporated. We debated whether we should wait till the following night to try and sneak back the way we had come. I dreaded the thought of returning to the monastery; it seemed impossible that we could ever creep unseen through the narrow maze of lanes; and who knew what the monks would do if they apprehended us? But Phupten insisted this was the only way back. For ages, it had been the one route into and out of Leng. There in the cold night, knowing that Leng was close, I regretted ever seeking it out. I wanted nothing more than to have remained ignorant of its mystery.

We slept there fitfully, shivering, and I dreamt fearful dreams of something wary and watchful toward which we fled. Small white buds were stirring among the roots of the tree, growing swiftly like plasmodium in a stop-motion film; they bulged from the soil and then opened, staring at me, a cluster of bloodshot eyes.

I jerked awake in a frozen dawn, hearing Phupten calling my name. But he was nowhere to be seen. The ponies waited where he had tethered them, so I thought he must have gone off for water or more wood.

I waited there all morning.

The mist veiled the mountains as if urging me to forget them. In the other direction, endless rolling hills of grass emerged. Alluring terrain, yet the notion of venturing there seemed madder than going to sea without a compass or the slightest knowledge of celestial navigation. I clung to the misty margin and watched the grasslands through much of the day, noting the way the light shifted and phantom sprites sometimes moved through the air above the rippling strands, auroral presences like the vaporous dreams of things hidden below the soil. I wondered if the Chinese suspected what dreamed there—if they hoped to harness it somehow, to tame or oppress it. Or had it managed to hide itself from them—from all controlling powers? Was it not itself an agent of utter control? Maddening insights flowered perpetually within me, the merest of them impervious to transcription. I wondered if there were degrees of immersion… or infection. Danielle had rushed out to meet the powers of the plateau… I continued to hold back… I felt on the verge of exploding with insight; as my mind quickened, I felt it ever more incumbent upon me to hold very still. A horrid wisdom took hold. These thoughts were only technically my own. Something else had planted them. In me, they would come to fruit.

I realized my eyes had closed, rolling back in my skull to point at a hidden horizon. With an effort of recall that felt like lurching disappointment, I disgorged a memory of Danielle Schurr’s final, meditative posture. This drove me to my feet. I stamped about, remembering how to walk. I felt emptied out. Cored. I foraged among the packs for food, hoping nourishment would abate my unaccustomed sense of lightness. Altitude still explained a great deal, I told myself. But something else was wrong. Almost everything.

In the afternoon I finally saw Phupten, far out on the sea of grass. He would not come close enough for me to read his features, nor did I dare walk out to greet him. Maybe he had been there all along. He stood with his face turned in my direction, and I began to hear mumbling like that which had filled the space in Danielle’s cave. I could not resolve words. The tone was plaintive, pleading, then insistent. Phupten walked off some distance, sat down, and grew very still. I believe night came again, although it might have been a different kind of darkness falling. My head swarmed—swarms—with dreams not my own. Leng stretches out forever, and beneath its thin skin of grass and soil waits a presence vast and ancient but hardly unconscious. It watches with Phupten’s eyes, while he still has them. I dreamt it spoke to me, promising I would understand all. It would hold back nothing. I would become the mystery—the far-off allure of things just beyond the horizon. The twilight hour, the gate of dreams. All these would be all that is left of me, for all these things are Leng of the violet light. I felt myself spread to great immensity. Only the smallest leap was needed—only the softest touch and form would no longer contain me.

I woke to find myself walking out onto the plateau. Onto the endless green where Phupten waited. I crossed the threshold. The veil parted. I beheld Leng.

The plateau spread to infinity before me, but it was bare and horrible, a squirming ocean beneath a gravelled skin, with splintered bones that tore up through the hide, rending the fleshy softness that heaved in a semblance of life. A trillion tendrils stirred upon its surface, antennae generating the illusion that protected it, configuring the veil. This was Leng. Is! A name and a place and a thing. Leng is what dreams at the roof of the world and sends its relentless imaginings to cover the planet. The light that shines here is not the violet and orange of twilight or dusk. It is the grey of a suffocating mist, a cloud of obscuring putrefaction, full of blind motes that cannot be called living yet swarm like flies and infest every pore with grasping hunger. A vastness starving and all-consuming that throws up ragged shadows like clots of tar to flap overhead in the form of the faceless winged creatures that wheel away from the plateau to snatch whatever hapless souls they find beyond the gates of nightmare and carry them back here, toward a pale grey haze of shriveled peaks so lofty that even though they rise at an infinite distance, still they dwarf everything. And having glimpsed the impossible temple upon those improbable peaks, I know I can never return. Even though I took but the one step across the threshold and then fell back, I cannot unsee what I have seen. There is no unknowing. The veil is forever rent. I cannot wake. And though I write these words because I am compelled, because Leng’s spell is such that others will read this and be drawn to it, I pray for an end to wakefulness and sleep. I cannot stop my ears or eyes or mind from knowing what waits. Leng’s vision for Earth is a blind and senseless cloud that spreads and infects and feeds only to spread, infect and feed. And its unearthly beauty—we are drawn to it like any lure. I pray you have not touched me. I pray the power has

* * *

“Leng” copyright 2009 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Lovecraft Unbound (2009), edited by Ellen Datlow.

BEYOND 2010: OVER THE INFLUENCE

Several years ago, contrary to the evidence of most of the stories in this section, I made a conscious decision to stop imitating other writers. I swore off Lovecraft; I gave up Philip K. Dick as a guide to reality-based plot-twists; I kicked my thousand volume set of Jack Vance novels out of bed. (Just kidding, I cradled them to me tenderly.) I set out blindly, or mutely, to find my own voice.

Imitation has always been part of my method. I unconsciously mimic voices, as a defense mechanism or a way of empathizing with others, or perhaps a bit of both. Like many writers, I hear voices in my head when I am writing, a professional hazard that helps me write dialog and create characters, but also makes it substantially harder to tell when my loved ones are asking for help with the housework. But while I am a sucker for stylists, and forever trying to write like my idols, this has come at the cost of rarely paying attention to my own voice.

I have tried to accept the fact that to some extent my voice is a misshapen melange of everything I’ve loved. Perhaps no distinct, unmistakable style will ever emerge from the mishmash I call me; I remain as unsure as ever of exactly how this process of being a writer is supposed to work (aside from the writing part).

The fact is, when I swore off mimicry, I did it in a terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger voice.

Maybe I shouldn’t listen to myself after all.

The rest of you definitely shouldn’t.

POKKY MAN

A Film by Vernor Hertzwig

VERNOR HERTZWIG

FILMMAKER

In 2004 I was contacted by Digito of America to review some film footage they had acquired in litigation with the estate of a young Pokkypet Master named Hemlock Pyne. While I have occasionally played boardgames such as Parchesi, and various pen and paper role playing games involving dwarves and wizards, in vain hopes of escaping the nightmare ordeals that infest my soul, I was hardly the target audience for the global phenomenon of Pokkypets. I knew only the bare lineaments of the young man’s story—namely that he had been at one time considered the greatest captor of Pokkypets the world had ever known. Few of these rare yet paradoxically ubiquitous creatures had escaped being added to his collection. But he had turned against his fellow trainers, who now hurled at him the sort of venom and resentment usually reserved for race traitors. The childish, even cartoonish aspects of the story, were far from appealing to me, especially as spending time on a hundred or so hours of Pokkypet footage would mean delaying my then-unfunded cinematic paean to those dedicated paleoanthropologists who study human coprolites or fossil feces. But there was an element of treachery and tragedy that lured me to look more carefully at the life and last days of Hemlock Pyne, as well as the amount of money Digito was offering. I found the combination irresistible.

HEMLOCK PYNE

POKKY MASTER

To be a Pokky Captor was for me the highest calling—the highest calling! I never dreamed of wanting anything else. All through my childhood, I trained for it. It was a kind of warrior celebration… a pokkybration, you might say, of the warrior spirit. I lived, ate, breathed, drank, even pooped the Pokky spirit. Yes, pooped. Because there is dignity in everything they do. When it comes to Pokkypets, there is no room for shame—not even in pooping. In a sense, I was no different from many, many other children who dream of being Pokky Captors. The only difference between me and you, children like you who might be watching this, is that I didn’t give up on my dream. Maybe it’s because I was such a loser in every other part of my life–yeah, imagine that, I know it’s difficult, right?–but I managed to pull myself free of all those other bonds and throw myself completely into the world of Pokkypets. And I don’t care who you are or where you are, but that is still possible today.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

Hemlock Pyne’s natural enthusiasm connected him ineluctably with the childish world of Pokkypets—the world he never really escaped. The more I studied his footage, the more I saw a boy trapped inside a gawky man-child’s body. It was no wonder to me that he had such difficulty relating to the demands of the adult world. In cleaving to his prejuvenile addictions, it was clear that Pyne hoped to escape his own decay, and for this reason threw himself completely into a world that seems on its face eternal and unchanging. The irony is that in pursuing a childish wonderland, he penetrated the barrier that protects our fragile grasp on sanity by keeping us from seeing too much of the void that underlines the lurid cartoons of corporate consumer culture, as they caper in a crazed dumbshow above the abyss.

PITER YALP

ACTOR

I think we knew, and assumed Hemlock knew, where was this was probably heading. And it’s hard to see a person you care for, a friend of many years, make the sorts of decisions he made that put him ever deeper into danger. It didn’t really help to know that it was all he cared for, that all this danger was justified in a way by passion, by love. And when you saw him light up from talking about it, it was hard to argue. He’d never had anything like that in his life. I mean, he’d been through a lot. Coming back to Pokkypets, sure it seemed childish at first, but he was so disconnected from everything anyway, we had to root for him, you know? But we still feared for him. He never did anything halfway, you know? Whenever he started anything, you always knew he was going to push it past any extreme you could imagine. So it was only sort of… sort of a shock, but more of a dreaded confirmation, when we heard the news. I remember I was in the kitchen nuking some popcorn for dinner, and the kids were watching Pokkypets on, you know, the Pokkypets network… and then our youngest said, “Look, it’s Uncle Hemlock!” Which seemed weird at first because why would he be on their cartoon? But then I saw it was the Pokkypets Evening News, and even though the sound was turned up full, I found I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying. I just stared at the picture of Hemlock they’d put up there… the most famous shot of him, crouched in the Pokkymaze, letting an injured Chickapork out of a Poachyball… and from the way the camera slowly zoomed back from the photo, I knew right then… he wouldn’t be coming back to us this time.

AUGUSTINE “GUST” MASTERS

SEAPLANE PILOT

I was friends with Hem for years and years, used to fly him out here to the Pokkymaze in midsummer, come and collect him before fall settled in; I’d check in from time to time to see how he was doing, and drop off the occasional supply. He was a special sort of guy, and there won’t never be another like him. For one thing, he was fearless, as you can imagine you’d have to be to try living right here like he did. From where we’re standing, you can watch the migratory routes of about 150 different types of Pokkypets; everything from the super common Pecksniffs, to the Gold-n-Silver Specials, to the uniques like Abyssoid, who comes up out of this here lake once a year for about thirty seconds at 8:37 a.m. on September 9, and only if the 9th happens to fall on a Tuesday. Really it’s a Captor’s dream, or would be if it wasn’t a preserve. Hem came out here every year, and never once tried to capture or collect a single one of the Pokkys… in fact they were more likely to collect him. He got adopted by Chickapork to the extent you couldn’t tell who belonged to who. Anyway… he made it a point of pride that he never carried a Poachyball, that he was here to protect the Pokkypets, to prevent them from being collected. When he was young he was a heck of a Captor, but once he put that aside, that was it. He didn’t try charming them with flutes or putting them to sleep; he didn’t freeze or paralyze them with any of Professor Sequoia’s Dust Infusion, or Thunderwhack a single one. He came out empty handed, and tried to make a Pokky out of himself, I guess. If I had to pick one thing, I guess I’d say that right there was his undoing. That and Surlymon.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

What others saw as evidence of everything from low self image to schizophrenia, was to Hemlock Pyne nothing more than a kind of dramatic stage lighting, necessary to cast an imposing shadow over a world that considered him but a smalltime actor in a community theater production. It did not matter to the rest of the world that in this tawdry play, Hemlock Pyne had the leading role; but to Pyne himself, nothing else mattered. He had cast himself in the part of the renegade Captor who would give himself completely to his beloved Pets. That it was to be a tragic role, I suspect would not have stopped him. And while he seems to have had premonitions of his fate, he could have asked any number of those who spent their lives working in and around the Pokky Range, and have heard many predictions that would end up remarkably close to the eventual outcome.

AUGUSTINE “GUST” MASTERS

Right here is where I came in for my usual rendezvous, at the appointed time, ready to take him out of here. At first I thought maybe I had the day wrong, because usually I’d expect to see him with all his gear packed up and waiting here on the shore. It was later in the year than he’d ever stayed, not our usual date, so I thought it was my mistake, and I went hollering up the hillside trail here toward his camp, figuring maybe he could use a hand packing up his stuff. But halfway up the trail here I got a really funny feeling… not a nice feeling at all. I never travel here without a few extra Poachyballs, and some Coma Flakes—I mean, I’m no Hemlock, I come prepared for anything. And I was just freeing up a Poachyball in case I had to make an emergency capture, when I heard this grumbling in the brush off to the side of the trail, and very clearly I could hear a big old Pokkypet crawling around in there, just saying its name over and over again so there was no mistaking what I was up against. Going, “Surly… Surly…” Like that. Just a nasty old Pokky, saying its name like a warning… that one bad note over and over again.

Well, I don’t mind saying it scared me, and forgot about trying to catch it, since that’s a tough one to collect even if you’re fully prepared. I didn’t have any Pokkypets of my own to back me up. So I hightailed it back to the plane, and took off, just cold and sweatin, my guts full of icewater, you know. I tried to get Hemlock on his radio a couple times, but no answer there, and I was starting to believe we weren’t going to get anymore answers at all. I brought the plane in low over the maze, low as I could, and the way Hem would hide his tent in the trees I knew it would be hard to get a clear picture of what was going on there—but as I was flying over, the wind swept over pretty hard. Banked me a bit just as it was parting the trees around his campsite, and I got one clear look that I’ll never forget. Right below me, the tent had been flattened so that the poles were sticking up out of it. Gear was scattered everywhere—clothes, camera equipment, pots and pans. And Hemlock was scattered everywhere too, in and around the tent. I hardly knew what I was seeing. His head staring up at me, on the other side of the site from his chest; an arm here, a leg there. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open, but I didn’t see how they could be. I figured he had to be sleeping after an attack like that. I knew I’d need help getting him out of there, so I banked into the wind and headed back to town.

HEMLOCK PYNE

10 DAYS BEFORE THE END

This is Surlymon. He’s a very old Pokkypet, and we’re just getting to know each other. I’m not usually here in the Pokkymaze this late in the year, but I had a little upset at the airport and decided I was not ready to leave my Pokky friends just yet to return to all the… all the bullpoop and the hassle of… of poopy humans back in the so-called real world. Just wasn’t ready. So here I am, and some of my old friends seem to have moved on, and some new Pokkys have moved in. It’s the migratory time, you see… all a completely natural part of the Pokkypet cycle, and pretty exciting to see it in action. Not to say that there isn’t danger here—there’s plenty of it. But that’s what keeps me going. Nobody else could do what I do… give themselves to the protection of the Pokkypets the way I do. And they respect me for it. They know that I have the best of intentions… that I’d be one of them if I could. But in the meantime, I’m getting to know Surlymon here… getting to earn his trust. Isn’t that right, Surlymon? We’re getting to know each other. Yes we are! Yes we are! Now… hey… HEY! Watch it! Back off! That is not cool, Surlymon. Not cool. Good, Pokky. Okay, good old Pokky. Yes, you’re a good old boy, I know, I know. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry I had to snap at you like that. I’m Hemlock, okay? Hemlock! Hemlock! Hemlock! I love you. Hemlock loves you. Hemlock. Hemlock…. Hemlock.

AUGUSTUS “JUSTICE” PEACE

HELICOPTER PILOT

I’ve known Gust for years, and through him I knew Hemlock Pyne, though we weren’t what you’d call close. That day he came back with news about Hemlock’s troubles, I could tell he’d seen something that nobody should see. Well we called the Pokky Park Service, which is basically every other person around here, and we got three Captors together and I took us out in the chopper. We landed on Baldymon Hill, which overlooks the Pokkymaze, and they went on down there while I kept an eye on the chopper, ready to light out at a moment’s notice. I could hear them when they caught up with the Surlymon. They had some pretty tough pets with em, but that sonofabitch was tough. It took all three Captors in full Pokkybattle, and each one of them used at least three Poachyballs, setting their own pets on the Surlymon. It took eight—eight!–Pokkypets to wear down that Surlymon. I think the final attack was a full-on Typhon-Crash-Mastery move, and then the Surlymon finally went into slumber. It was only then that the thing was vulnerable and they could poach it. I heard all this, mind, I didn’t see any of it… but I’ll tell you, every time I heard that thing giving out its call, my blood ran cold. “Surly! Surly!” Well, I can’t do it. It was a horrible sound though. When they finally came crashing through the underbrush dragging the Poachyball, with their own poor little pets limping along behind, the Captors looked like they’d been involved in the struggle themselves… and I don’t mean psychically.

But then it was over to me and Gust. He led me back down the hill and into the maze, to the campsite, and there was Hemlock Pyne in a dozen pieces. It was weird and awful. Gust called his name a few times, trying to wake him up, because we didn’t really realize the extent of it yet… It was a sleep like nothing we’d ever seen. I had some Sudden Stir powder with me and I sprinkled it in his eyes, but it didn’t do a thing. And I’ve never seen a Pokkypet or Captor yet who could sleep through that stuff. After a while we decided we’d best get him into town to the Pokky Clinic, so we gathered up the pieces. Filled four Poachyballs with the parts. That was all we had to carry him in.

MADRONA SEQUOIA

FRIEND, POKKYCOLOGIST

What Hemlock wanted was a way to mutate into a Pokkypet himself. He was very, very uncomfortable being in his own skin, especially when it meant he was a Captor or Master of Pokkypets. He wanted to merge with the Pokkys… become one of them, share in their alchemic process. Hemlock sensed a transformative power in them, and he wanted this for himself. When he was studying with me, we went through the triadic life cycle of the typical healthy Pokkypet, following its course in many, many creatures. When he first went out into the Pokky Range with the idea of studying and protecting the pets, you know, he placed himself in the habitat of the Pigletta. It was a good fit for him, since they are such friendly creatures, but his ulterior motive was to bond so closely with one that it would allow him to stay with it through all its transformations. Of course everyone who adopts a Pigletta feels that theirs is special, and that they have a unique friendship… but in Hemlock’s case I think there is a real argument for this. After all, he had stopped collecting at that point; he never stunned his Pokkypet or trapped it even briefly in a Poachyball to subdue it. He made friends with it as if he were another of its kind, and in his second summer back there, he was witness to its first transition into Chickapork. I know how much Hemlock wanted to see the final change to Boarax… which, sadly, took place in the autumn immediately after Surlymon, so he missed it. This, as I say, was a spiritual quest for him, and he welcomed its transformative intensity from the first, even though in the eyes of other Pokkypet Captors he immediately went from role model to traitor. This was when people started saying he was crazy, sending nasty letters, even making threats. This is when the Missile Kids stepped up their attacks on his character. It got harder and harder for me to bear, but Hemlock said to pay it no mind. It didn’t bother him. The only thing that bothered him anymore was any sort of threat to his beloved Pokkypets.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

At the same time that Hemlock Pyne was alienating his former worshippers, he was winning for himself a new audience that would one day be captivated by his insights and his breathtaking cinematic records of his life among the Pokkypets… a life that few have ever attempted, let alone accomplished. Going through his films, I found him to have possessed an innate genius—not only for capturing Pokkypets, but for capturing moments of pure cinema. Here, we see Pyne in his early summer campsite, a spot he pitched between the dens of burrowing Chickaporks, so that he could live among the frolicking Piglettas.

HEMLOCK PYNE

This is Chickapork. My Chickapork. We’re long time buddies, aren’t we, yes we are. Chickapork is my most beloved Pokkypet, and it’s really important to understand that we are mutual friends. I do not own him. I did not capture him. I have never imprisoned him in a Poachyball. So you see, it is possible for us to have a harmonious relationship with these beautiful creatures without have to… Hey! This… this is Pigletta… this is one of Chickapork’s offspring or little sibs, I’m not sure exactly—hey, where are you going with my cap? Come back with that cap, Pigletta! That is a very important cap! That was a gift from Professor Manzanita! Oh… oh god, oh no… A lot depends on that cap, Pigletta! Get… give me back my cap! WHERE’S MY FUCKING POKKYMASTER CAP?

PROFESSOR MANZANITA

POKKYPET EXPERT

In the field, it was obvious that he wanted nothing more than to be a Pokkypet. He would act just like them. The simple continual act of stating his identity with such clarity, this thing the Pokkypets do incessantly, Hemlock adopted this behavior. If you want out to visit him in the field, or if you were an unsuspecting Captor who came across him, Hem would act as if human language and human behavior were completely unknown to him. He would just say his name at you, over and over, like a Pokkypet. His mantra, his act of affirmation: Hemlock. Hemlock. Hemlock. He saw the Pokky world as a rare and simplified place, everything streamlined and stripped down to this one act of self-naming. That world had a siren’s allure for him. But that world… simply did not exist. The truth was far more complex.

TAIGA MOSS

CURATOR, POKKY NATIONAL WILDERNESS MUSEUM

Well, I’m afraid although Hemlock Pyne might be a hero to some people, to us he seems simply deluded. Our relationship with the Pokkypets goes back tens of thousands of years, to when we believe the Pokkys and people shared this land. We treated each other with respect, and we have done so throughout our history. We created the original Poachyballs, and we captured and collected the first Pokkypets to be captured and collected. We held the first Pokky battles; those rituals are very ancient, the result of the relationship between man and Pokkypet. So there is a very long tradition of understanding between our people and the Pokky people. I would say that what Hemlock did, was the ultimate disrespect. In living among the Pokky, in treating them as cute cartoon characters, he crossed a boundary and paid the price. The ultimate price. There is a reason he will not wake up, and honestly, we don’t expect him to. I think a lot of people are in denial about the sort of trouble he caused for himself… and really for all of us, because I don’t know if it will stop with Hemlock. There has always been this barrier from time long past… and he damaged it. Irretrievably. It’s plain to see if you’ll just look at him. Truly look at him for once.

JASPER CHRYSOLITE

POKKY CLINIC

We are here, in cold storage, at the Pokky Clinic, because quite simply this is the only place we have been able to arrest the very strange and terrible processes that have Hemlock Pyne in their grip. In those steel drawers behind me, if I were to open them, you would see Hemlock Pyne much as he was when they brought him in to me for revival. As you already know, I was unable to wake him, even with the finest waking compounds at my disposal. I say “much as he was” because Hemlock did not stay as he was in those first hours. The separate parts of him lost their normal color… some began to swell, others to wither… and there was a terrible odor associated with him, which I would rather not go into. Whatever this process is, some sort of Pokky contagion he caught from Surlymon or elsewhere in the Pokkymaze, I had a sort of hunch that extreme cold might arrest it; and so we arranged for some cold storage, which has indeed seemed to do the trick. We will of course keep trying to wake him as time permits; and if we can devise some other approach to his condition. We also have that Surlymon captive and under observation, in hopes of understanding better what happened… but for all we can tell, it is simply a Surlymon like every other Surlymon. There is nothing special about it. Which makes us think that whatever strange thing happened to Hemlock Pyne, it was purely a result of his peculiar make-up, his particular situation. It behooves us therefore to try and understand Hemlock himself a little better. Really, what else can we do?

CRYSTAL BURL

Would I say I was his girlfriend? Why yes, yes I would. I mean, not always, but… but we were always friends. We founded Pokky People together. We were inseparable. We met when we were both working at Mistress Masham’s in the Mall, and Hem was in charge of the Pokky performance. They had a little routine they did where the Pokkys would come out and dance on your table—I mean, various small Pokkys. Nothing large or unhygienic. All the food at Mistress Mashams was served under silver covers, and the Pokkpets would whisk these away with a big flourish. Hem would come out with a half dozen Poachyballs, open them up, and set the Pokkys going. I thought it was pathetic, and I told him so… and he confided in me that he was only in there as a saboteur. I thought he was kidding, trying to impress me, but no… one night right after we really got to talking, he went into his usual routine, but everything was different this time. He’d packed a bunch of wild Pokkys into the balls, and he let them loose in the middle of a little kid’s birthday party. The Pokkys went crazy—eating up the food, tearing into presents, getting underfoot. And out of nowhere Hem kept producing more and more Poachyballs, opening them up, setting them free. He was laughing, we were both howling, and the more freaked out everybody got, the more delighted Hem was. It seemed to feed the Pokkys’ frenzy. They were swinging from the light fixtures, smashing windows, breaking out into the streets… oh, it was on the news that night and for days, and it was really the beginning of Hem’s mystery… because right after that he disappeared. I didn’t see him myself for months and months. It turned out he had made his first visit to the Pokky Range.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

Alone in the wild, Hemlock began to craft his own legend—fashioning himself into a creature as strange and colorful as the Pokkypets he adored. Against a backdrop of untouched wilderness, he portrayed himself an uncivilized man, fearless and ferocious yet as sweet as the creatures he refused to capture. It was as if in liberating the Pokkypets wherever he found them, he was setting free some caged part of himself.

HEMLOCK PYNE

I used to just dabble in Pokkypets. I captured and trained them like everyone else. I saw nothing but what was right in front of me. I never looked any deeper. And I was troubled. Our world, the world of people, is so shallow… it’s just a thin coat of paint, right on the surface, and that’s enough for most people. The Pokkys are colorful and cute and uncomplicated, and that’s all they need to know. But this wasn’t the truth, and without truth I just… I wasn’t making it. I needed the truth that was under all that. I did drugs. I drank. I lived a crazy, crazy life. Nobody knew me. I didn’t know myself. I was drinking so much, doing so many drugs, it was destroying my mind. All the colors started to blur together. I couldn’t tell Chickapork from Leomonk from Swirlet. It was like when you mix all the colors of paint together and you just get a greyish brownish gunk. And then one day a Flutterflute, I was drinking on the beach, out of my skull, and a Flutterflute landed on the bottle just as I was about to take a swallow. Who knows… it might have been my last swallow. I might have drainked that bottle and thrown it aside and walked out into the waves and that would have been the end. But I watched that Flutterflute there, getting in the way of my drink, and it looked at me and said, “Flutterflute!” That’s all, that’s what they do. So simple. Just that beautiful simple statement: “Flutterflute.” And something in me… I felt something emerge, as if from a chrysalis, bright and clear and strong, and I said, “Hemlock Pyne.” Everything in my life was as simple as that. “Hemlock Pyne.” That is what I was, and it was enough. It was deep. And what that meant was everything else was deep. Bottomless. And everything changed for me right then, right that very moment, saying myself back to that Flutterflute. I say it a lot now. It saves me every day: “Hemlock Pyne.”

VERNOR HERTZWIG WITH CRYSTAL BURL

VH: Now please explain to the viewers, Crystal, what it is you have here.

CB: What I have here, Vernor, is Hemlock’s last recording… recovered from his campsite… the recording of the Surlymon.

VH: Now I understand there is some uncertainty whether the recorder was running already or whether it was turned on during the Surlymon’s attack, and if so whether it was Hemlock himself or the Surlymon that switched it on. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is the contents of the tape, which you I believe have never listened to is that correct?

CB: That is correct. Dr. Chrysolite said I had probably better not.

VH: Dr. Chrysolite is a wise man and you do well to listen to him, but his prohibition does not apply to me, so I am going to listen to the recording now, the lens cap was never removed during the battle, I am just going to listen to the recording if I have your permission to do so.

CB: I give it, yes.

VH: If you will please to start the… there now, I hear wind, very loud, and something like a ripping sound… perhaps the tent’s zipper. Actually, yes, it sounds as if the Surlymon is coming in range. I can hear it quite clearly saying its name over and over again: Surlymon… Surlymon… And now clearly I hear Hemlock, much closer. Of course we know he had no Poachyballs, and no other Pokkys with him at the time. He is really alone against this creature. The Surlymon is saying again, “Surlymon. Surlymon.” And occasionally just “Surly,” as if it is too excited to say its full name.

CB: They do that sometimes when they’re excited… even add extra syllables…

VH: And now Pyne is… he seems to have hit on a desperate strategy… he is saying his own name several times to the creature. It is almost as if they are having a conversation, like so: Surly… Surlymon… and Hemlock says Hemlock. Hemlock Pyne. Hemlock. He’s saying it again. And the Surlymon seems to be having none of it. Surlymon. Hemock Pyne. Surlymon. Surlymon. Hemlock Pyne. Hemlock Pyne. Hemlock. Surlymon. And now a terrible, terrible sound. You… you must never listen to this recording Crystal.

CB: That’s what Dr. Chrysolite recommended as well, Vernor.

VH: Hemlock Pyne. Hemlock Pyne. Hemlock… Surlymon. And now I hear nothing but Surlymon. You must destroy this tape, Crystal. I think that is the only course of action.

CB: I will, Vernor. I will.

VH: Surly. Surlymon. Surlymon. Surly.

HEMLOCK PYNE

We are here at the edge of the Pokkypet Arena, deep in the Pokkymaze. The Pokkys have never allowed me this close before, but I think it is a sign of their acceptance—a sign of how far I’ve come–that they are allowing me to set up my camera here overlooking the arena and film their battles in progress. Remember, these are entirely natural and unstaged… these are not like the Coliseum battles that human captors arrange, which go against the will and the inherent nature of the Pokkypets. What you are seeing here is the source of humanity’s watered-down commercially driven arena battles. This my friends is the real shit.

Now it looks like a Scanary is going into the arena, setting the first challenge… Scanaries have three attacks: Wing Blast, Chirplosion, and Tauntalon. This is a fairly good combination unless your Pokkynemesis happens to have natural resistance to more than one of these. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. And now… it looks like… yes, it’s a Pyrovulp. Oh, this is going to be intense! Pyrovulps are extremely vulnerable to Tauntalon—extremely. But if the little guy can get past the Scanary’s first attack, then things could get interesting. And it looks like… Scanary is rearing back, puffing up a little bit… just look at those gorgeous chest feathers… could be Tauntalon coming in first… But no! Wings going out, we’ve got a blast coming in, and Pyrovulp has got its head flame forward. This was a very bad move on Scanary’s part, and I think it’s going to regret… Would you look at that! Wing Blast has fed Pyrovulp’s headflame. The whole Pokky is on fire, just burning up… this lets Pyrovulp bypass an entire part of its normal attack and go straight to Auraflame! The only risk, and I’m not sure he knows it, is that Auraflame can easily feed into Scanary’s own… oh my god oh my god… Auraflame, incredibly powerful and hot, has triggered Scanary’s innate Chirplosion. I am moving away from the Arena, friends, because when this happens, the blast can spread far outside the –WHOA!

VERNOR HERTZWIG

In his records, Hemlock speaks less and less of the human world; civilization and its pleasures recede into the distant past, remembered only for its discontents. At the same time, the brilliant, colorful struggles of the Pokkypets, seeming so much simpler, become more and more a symbol for the conflict of his soul. Deeply torn, it is as if he battled himself in an arena of his own devising. But no longer a Captor or a Trainer, without Pokkypets to do his fighting for him, every injury cut deep into his psyche.

LARCHMONT AND GLADIOLUS PYNE

HEMLOCK’S PARENTS

LP: This is Hem’s Pokkypet collection, much as he left it when he moved away from home. I’m afraid we encouraged him more than we should have, since he was a somewhat lonely boy, and he got such pleasure from them. His first Pokkypet was a gift from my mother, who had an affinity herself with the little things—

GP: I thought he won it at a state fair, throwing dimes in Collymoddle bowls; or a prize he won at school

LP: —no, it was from my mother, I think he’s still got the card in his room somewhere pinned up on a bulletin board. We knew there wasn’t much of a future in it, but that’s not the sort of thing you can worry about when you just want your boy to be happy… but as he got older and we saw he wasn’t moving on to other things, wasn’t progressing if you will, then we started to get a bit worried. But somehow Hemlock found a way to make a living at it early on, doing his shows and trainings and whatnot; and although we were disappointed that he felt he had to move all the way to the other side of the country to pursue his interests, we did support him in it. It seemed like his Pokky career was really taking him somewhere. Then, well, I don’t know how much truth there is in this, but he tried out for the part of Burny, the Pokky trainer in Chirrs, and according to him he was first in line for the part, but then Woody Harrelson tried out for the role and they gave it to him. Well, really, that was the beginning of the end for our boy.

GP: He just sort of spiralled out of control.

LP: I held it against Woody for a long time, but… well…

GP: It’s hard to keep a grudge against Woody Harrelson. He’s a fine young man.

CRYSTAL BURL

We used to go to the Pokkypet stores in the mall, and Hem would get really upset looking at them in captivity, and he always talked about starting a Pokkypet Liberation Front—but that’s not what Pokky People is about or ever was about. Pokky People allowed him to channel his frustration into something positive. You have to understand, the frustration turned so easily into anger. He could be the happiest most joyful person you’d ever met, but the flipside of that was… was also there. He could be very dark at times. I know he felt that if he didn’t have Pokkys, he’d have gone to some very bad places with some very bad people. The Missile Kids, for instance—they tried to recruit him for a while, and I think he was attracted. They could be very seductive. You know, Minny was a real minx, and Sal was sarcastic and cutting but I know Hem respected them as trainers… and then that weird Pokky they had with them all the time, Feelion. In the way that Hem could almost convince the Pokkys that he was one of them, Feelion had a bunch of us convinced that he was one of us. But though Hem flirted with the Missile Kids, he eventually came to believe they were on a bad path—I mean, certainly in terms of drugs they were doing crazy things… I think even their Pokky was on amphetamines.

HEMLOCK PYNE

If people knew, truly knew what wonderful creatures these Pokkypets are… they would consider, as I do, that to capture them, to try and train them, to force them through their tri-stage transformations at an accelerated pace—that all this goes against nature. Look at little Chickapork here… just look at her. She is my hero. So sweet, so loving, so intelligent… truly a hero. And to think that people want to put her in a ball and give her performance drugs and and and just dump her out in the coliseum to battle against other Pokkys that humans—fucking humans!–have declared her enemies… it’s just sick! And it makes me so angry. Because she’s perfect. The lifestyle they live out here in the wild, it’s perfect. I have learned so much from these creatures, but it’s hardly the beginning of what we could all be learning from them. Our lives… there’s something missing from them that these Pokkys have mastered effortlessly. We need that thing. We don’t even know what we’re missing… but I’ll tell you… it’s something fucking huge. And without it, we’re so far short of perfection it’s not funny. That’s why nobody’s laughing, isn’t that right, little Chickapork?

VERNOR HERTZWIG

As his differences with reality widened into a schism, Hemlock Pyne fought reality with tooth and claw. If it did not fit his idealized view of nature, it was reality that must be bent and even broken to fit. His insistence that Pokkypets held a deeper meaning does not stand up to scrutiny. Where Hemlock looked at the colorful characters and saw inscrutable depths, I see only crisp lines, primary colors, two-dimensional expressions. Even in this Rhinophantom, which Pyne in his writings calls a juggernaut of disaster, evokes in me no such premonition. It is just a cute, cuddly pet, that has undergone completely ordinary metamorphoses into a brute that is dumb and awkward, yes, but completely without malice.

HEMLOCK PYNE

…What I found in the bushes here, by the side of the river, is something new to the Pokkymaze. I would like you to study it with me. This is something we have to understand, but I’m not convinced we can. We are so good at missing the point! I discovered this earlier today, just after dawn, and I haven’t touched the scene… I’ve just been waiting for it to get light enough to record. Now in the night there was the sound of a Pokkybattle. This is rare enough, but not unheard of in midsummer. What is unusual is that it took place far from the Arena, and quite near my tent. Just a very weird sound of two Pokkys calling back and forth to one another in solitary combat. I couldn’t hear them clearly, but you can see now that they both cast exhausting spells on one another, and, well, here they are. They show no signs of waking or getting along with their day. You can see the Porphyrops has been trampled down into the mud, and the Glumster is just lying with its eyes open, which is a strange position for an incapacitated Pokky. I don’t want to intrude in their natural cycle, but I’ve made some very gentle sounds and I’ve been getting progressively louder, trying to see if I can wake them gradually. But so far no luck. I have to say, I feel very privileged to see this. To my knowledge no Pokky Captor or trainer has ever observed this sort of behavior. I am the first. These are the sort of secret revelations the Pokkys have granted me now that I have become such a part of their pattern of life. And these are exactly the things that I need to protect from the rest of the world.

AUGUSTUS “JUSTICE” PEACE

There were really no poachers in this area. The one exception might be the Missile Kids, Sal and Minny, and their Pokky mascot Feelion. But I don’t believe they went up there to poach anyhow. The couple times we were concerned and apprehended them, there was no sign they’d been up to any actual Pokkypoaching. What they did do, I’m pretty certain, was show up to bother Hemlock Pyne. Tease him. They made a lot out of being his rivals, you know. And I’m sure it drove him nuts.

HEMLOCK PYNE

I’m here at the shore, this is so upsetting, here at the shore watching those fuckers… those goddamn poachers… Sal and Minny. I know what they’re up to. They’re rubbing my nose in it, that’s what they’re doing. They’ve come in to poach—look at that boat full of Poachyballs! There’s just no question… they know I’m watching even though I’m well hidden here. What kills me, fucking KILLS me, is that they have the full support of the Pokky Park Service. It’s criminal. It’s so corrupt! You just… the lesson here is that you just pay off the right people and you can come in and capture all the Pokkypets you want. Well, I’m not letting them get away with it. They think they can… what’s that?

“Feeeeee-lion!”

Do you you hear that? They’ve turned their Feelion loose.

“FEEEEE-LION!”

This is just sick, it’s perverted. They’ve trained their Pokkypet to turn against its kind. This poor Feelion doesn’t realize they’re using it to lure in unsuspecting Pokkypets… to pull them in where the Missile Kids can capture them. Well, we’re not going to let them get away with that. No fucking way.

“Can you Feeeeel me, Pyne? Can you Feeeeeeeelion me?”

Did you hear that? So much for them calling me paranoid. There’s no mistaking that for… for a threat!

“Feeeeee-lion!”

The cruel thing is, I can’t even report them. Because I know they are here with the full knowledge of the Park Service. I can’t believe I get grief for coming out here to protect these poor creatures, while Minny and Sal just waltz in, pack their Poachyballs full of innocent, defenseless Pokkys… To think the rangers would actually try to stop me from getting close to the pets, while these guys… I’m sorry, I can’t talk. This is making me too upset. I’m in tears over this!

VERNOR HERTZWIG

Pyne’s disgruntlement became so great that he finally turned against the people who had given him the opportunity to work in the Pokkymaze in the first place. His associates became, in his mind, implacable enemies. There is a sense in his final days of rage that he no longer saw anything beyond the picket of Pokkys, among whom he counted himself, except an homogenous foe.

HEMLOCK PYNE

Oh I know who they are, all right… I know they set me up for this those… those goddamn fucking motherfuckers. You know who you are, you fucking shithead mothercockingfucksuckfuckers! I’m out here trying to help these beautiful creatures, while you’re just swimming in corruption… you don’t care a thing about preserving their environment. You people who have sworn to protect it, you’ve become the thing we have to protect it against! Motherfuck! This… it’s just not right. It’s fucked. So very, very, very, very fucked.

CRYSTAL BURL, GUST MASTERS, PITER YALP

We’ve come here today to honor Hem, and to pray for him to wake up real soon. We don’t understand what happened to him—what was different this time that he refuses to wake up. We were thinking that maybe if we came out here, to a place that was dear to him, we’d have some insight… we’d get a glimpse of Hem’s thinking.

This right here is his favorite camping spot, where he’d come and spend the first part of the summer at the foot of the Pokky Range before heading north into the Maze. He chose this spot because it was right between two Chickapork dens. There’s footage of him playing with the Piglettas, and then of course when one of them made its second stage transformation into Chickapork, Hem and that Pokky bonded real hard. It’s been a year now, and those original Pokkys have gone on and become Peccanaries and Boaraxes; the ones grazing out there in the meadow, one of them might have been Hem’s own Chickapork.

I wonder if they miss him. I sure do.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

The irony of Hemlock’s last trip is not lost on anyone who looked at his life. As the days of fall grew shorter, he left the maze as he always did, with no desire to return to civilization, but knowing he could not make himself comfortable among the hibernating and overwintering Pokkys. However, an encounter with an airport Pokkypet vending machine, in which Hemlock tried to buy the freedom of every captive Pokkypet but soon ran out of quarters, sent him rebounding from the crass commercial exploitation of his beloved Pokkys, straight back into the wilderness. Returning to the maze later than ever before, he found his familiar environment had been altered by advancing chill; and his familiar Pokky friends had moved on their migratory routes, while new creatures moved into the maze to overwinter there. Creatures such as the Surlymon.

HEMLOCK PYNE

I am back, friends. I didn’t know I would be doing this, obviously, and I would not recommend it to anyone else… but frankly, I find it exhilarating. I am overjoyed to be back here. The longer I can put off dealing with the fucking human world, the happier I’ll be. And you know what? This is a part of the Pokky life cycle I have never seen. This is a learning moment! I have never been here in the winter… and though I won’t be staying for the whole season, I will certainly see more of it than any person ever has. Because no other person, trainer, captor or civilian, has stayed even this long. Who knows what I’ll learn, what wonders await?

VERNOR HERTZWIG

Toward the end of the process of compiling this account, we received access to Pyne’s final recordings. Here we see him with a large grouchy Pokkypet that almost certainly is the Surlymon that finished him off. Of most interest in these studies is that this Pokky appears to have changed radically sometime between the date this footage was taken, and the time of its capture by the Pokky Rangers. Experience gained in a battle is the usual mode by which Pokkys gain sufficient energy to transform into their morpheme. And it is hard not to conclude that it was the battle with Hemlock Pyne that caused this Surlymon to undergo its third transformation. Most confusing to Pokkyologists is that while its form changed dramatically, its name and its song remained the same: Surlymon….

Here, Hemlock records the untransformed Surlymon stalking the maze in an endless search for amusement. He seems to be searching this simple creature for a deeper meaning; but whatever it is eludes him, as it eludes us.

HEMLOCK PYNE

I don’t know what this Pokky wants. Superficially, it seems to be looking for food and interested in nothing else. But there is something the Pokkys have, something innate in them, which draws me. I feel sometimes so close to them, I almost have a name for it—one I could express to myself, but which might be impossible to communicate to others. There is something… something there.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

But here I must disagree with Hemlock Pyne. The cute cartoon features, so simplistic and round and bright, need evoke nothing beyond the simplest emotional connotations associated with their coloration. He looks for depth where none exists. The Pokkys have no secrets, and nothing to teach us. If anything, this is their entire lesson: They mean nothing, and nothing about their relationship with us is real.

JASPER CHRYSOLITE

If I open this door and pull out the tray, you can see the desperate effort we have undertaken to keep Hemlock comfortable in spite of the bizarre process that seems to be having its way with him. Here you see his head, the eyes still closed in an attitude of sleep that for all intents and purposes seems permanent; Here, his hand, somewhat distressed after its short stay in Surlymon’s mouth. The torso, on which the head hardly fits at this point. Part of a leg. The other parts, all gathered from the maze, do not quite add up completely. But this still seems the sort of risk Hemlock stated repeatedly he was willing to take to be one with these creatures, to learn the lessons they carried with them. Lessons, perhaps, that may one day apply to us, as we share their natural world?

HEMLOCK PYNE

I know I have felt something like this before, but the shortness of the season sharpens this sense of giving. I have the words now. They have given them to me. I owe the Pokkypets everything I have. Everything. And I owe them completely. I would die for these creatures. I would die for these creatures. I would die for these creatures.

VERNOR HERTZWIG

We still have no idea what he means.

Property of Digito of America

* * *

“Pokky Man” copyright 2010 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Classics Mutilated, edited by Jeff Connor, IDW Publishing (2010).

THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED LOVECRAFT

“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”

—“The Outsider,” H.P. Lovecraft

Douglas sits alone at the side of the house, waiting for the Aunts to call him in, alert to the slightest creak of the front door or to one of their hard-toed shoes sounding upon the porch. They cannot see him from inside the house, so he always has time to hide the magazine, shoving it into the crawlspace along with the rest of his collection. There is a trace of autumn in the Sunday evening air, and the summer-blanched leaves of the old sycamores send a rustling shade over the crumbling pages he turns so slowly and savoringly. The paper feels soft and rough as a kind of leafy bark, not dissimilar to the earth where he crouches and thumbs through his issues of Weird Tales again and again.

The date on the magazine is April 1929. This is only September, yet he has read the copy cover to cover so many times that the magazine appears as worn as one twenty years old, its bright reds faded to vermilion, the fearsome masked priest now a colorful faceless smudge. The other issues are in worse shape, what’s left of them. Hard to imagine that once they had been bright and crisp—as bright as the quarters or the stacks of pennies he’d shoved across the newsstand counter. Some, found in downtown secondhand shops, were old when he’d bought them for a fraction of their cover price. But they are no less precious for it. His only regret is that the oldest ones suffer more from his constant rereading, and he has been forced to stop carrying them around with him, away from the house and the watchful Aunts, to the parks and libraries and quiet private places where a boy might hide and read in peace, and seek the strange thrills these stories provide.

Douglas hides the magazines from the Aunts because they have already shown they do not understand. They have forbidden him to spend his allowance on such things; forbidden them in the house; forbidden him from reading such horrors. “Nightmares, trash and madness,” they had called the tales; and that word alone had ensured his disobedience, for it was madness he sought to understand. Madness was the reason he lived here, after all; it was the reason the old women had brought him in as a foster child: “A kind of madness took them,” was all they ever said when he asked about his parents. More than that, and the nature of madness, he was left to investigate on his own; and it came to him in these tales which spoke openly of unreason, of madness caused by fear. And as he read, he became enwrapped in a kind of beauty, borne by the words. Madness became a key, opening the door to new worlds where he could lose himself while feeling that he could go beyond himself…

Hinges squeal. “Douglas? Douglas, child, where are you?” Aunt Melissa steps onto the porch and comes quickly toward the corner. Douglas shoves the magazine into the dark opening and slips back around the side of the house until he stands in the back yard. He makes her call again, louder, and then responds. “I’m back here, ma’am!”

She cranes around the side of the porch, looking exasperated. He strides toward her, passing the crawlspace, and hurries up the front steps to stand at her side.

“Well, I promise you, I looked back there and didn’t see a thing. Come in now and have your supper. Aunt Opal and I have things to do—we can’t be waiting past dark while you dig your holes or arrange your soldiers, or whatever it is you get up to back there. School tomorrow, so early to bed tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s a good child. Come and eat then. Oh, and before I forget.”

She produces from one deep pocket a bright silver quarter. His heart leaps at the thought of what it will buy him. He hides not his smile but only its meaning. “Thank you, Aunt.”

“Remember now, it’s more than many have these days. Spend it wisely, as I’m sure you will. God bless you, child, you’re a good boy.”

* * *

The school day drags. Douglas sits alone, as ever, in the back of the sweltering classroom, writing slowly, scarcely seeing the columns of numbers he must add and manipulate, the dull rote words he must read. At recess he remains inside with his treasured April issue, gazing at the jumbled, nightmarish illustration that accompanies “The Dunwich Horror.” Miss Marsh leaves him to his solitude. She has long since stopped trying to convince him to go out with the other children. She frowns, he thinks, whenever he produces one of his magazines; but she has never tried to confiscate one, never questioned what he reads. In this sense, the classroom is safe—perhaps the safest place he knows. Certainly safer than the schoolyard.

Today, a shadow falls over his desk. Miss Marsh hovers over him. “Douglas?”

Feeling his cheeks flush, he looks up at her, closing the magazine, pushing it under the desk.

“That’s all right, dear. I was just wondering… I believe you might have just enough time to make it to the newsstand and back before lunch is over. Unless I’m very much mistaken about what day it is.”

Her smile is knowing. He starts to speak, but whatever he might blurt, as he rises from his desk, banging his knees, nearly knocking his papers to the floor, remains unsaid.

“Don’t be long now, Douglas.”

He runs.

Out the schoolhouse, out the gate, and down the busy street. A streetcar jangles past; as he waits on the curb, he digs into his pocket, fails to find the quarter, and experiences a moment’s terror—until his fingers brush the warm disk, and he pinches it, brings it out to reassure himself of its presence. He rubs it like a good luck charm. The streetcar passes and he darts across the street to the row of shops across the way, the newsstand at the corner.

For a moment the racks confuse him, and he seizes up with dread. What if it isn’t here yet? There are piles of periodicals wrapped in twine, still to be unpacked and set out. Another thrill of disappointment, as when he thought his quarter lost, grips him. Then he spies the bright lettering, in an unaccustomed spot, peering out above the top of a mystery magazine: Weird Tales, The Unique Magazine.

He pulls it from the rack, slaps his quarter on the counter, cutting off the newsdealer’s nasty snarl, and rushes away with hardly a glimpse at the cover: An enormous ape carries off a woman in a gauzy pink slip. More than that, he won’t allow himself to see until he has time to truly savor it.

He slips back into the classroom with a few minutes of recess remaining. Miss Marsh gives him a smile, and as he lays the issue reverently on the desk, she comes a few steps closer. For the first time, he refrains from hiding the magazine. Although it pains him to hold still, he looks up and sees her gazing at the cover. Her eyebrows arch; she laughs. “Oh, my,” she says. “That looks like a very exciting story. Who wrote that one, do you think? Are these the authors?” She reads down the names listed on the cover: “Sophie Wenzel Ellis. Seabury Quinn. H.P. Lovecraft…”

His heart leaps at the name. Lovecraft! A new story! Douglas almost opens the issue right then, but Miss Marsh’s expression gives him pause.

“H.P.,” she says again. “I wonder if that could be the same… Howard Phillips… of Providence itself. Do you know his stories, Douglas? You do? I believe he is a local man. In fact, I think he lives not far from you on College Hill. Perhaps he’d like to know he has a bright young reader right here in Providence.”

Miss Marsh suddenly catches sight of the clock, and gives a little gasp. Rushing to the door, she leans outside and bangs the triangle. The clanging blends into the shouts of children, and the room fills up again with the greater noise of students. Miss Marsh catches and holds his gaze through the crowd, but what she has promised seems too great to acknowledge. He looks away, rolling up the magazine and shoving it under his desk. What else does she know about him, he wonders? Does she understand how madness haunts him? Would the writer, H.P. Lovecraft, understand? It all seems too secret, too personal, to discuss with anyone. But if anyone might understand, it would be a man like the one who writes such stories.

He hardly notices the passage of the afternoon, wondering if what she said could be true. At home, the Aunts have gone off on some errand, leaving him free to surround himself with his collection. He sorts through the magazines and pulls out everything by Lovecraft.

Combing through the issues, he sees how many of these stories are by one man—by this same Lovecraft of Providence. He had not recognized the pattern until Miss Marsh pointed it out. The thought that a living person could have written these stories had never occurred to him. He had not required that of them. They existed, that was enough. They carried him away to other lands, other places exotic and faraway—with names like Celephais and Sarnath, Ulthar and Ilek-Vad—all so different from the names he saw around him: College Hill and Federal Hill, worlds, he saw now, which were locked away in the stories of Lovecraft. From one mind, then, so many of Douglas’s own dreams had sprung. The knowledge is a key turning in a lock, revealing a new dimension to what he had already known. Indeed, Lovecraft had written “The Silver Key,” in which Randolph Carter found a secret path into a land of dream; he had written “The White Ship” and “The Cats of Ulthar,” and other tales of dream. But he had also written “The Rats in the Walls,” a tale of madness that had chilled and fascinated Douglas in equal measure; “The Festival,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Outsider,” “Pickman’s Model”… and these truly are tales of madness. They hold secrets dark as the ones that haunt Douglas, the nightmares that torment him when he tries to think beyond his own memories, to a time before the Aunts had taken him in, a muddled dream which tells him nothing, a dream which remains impenetrable, approachable only, perhaps, through a deeper understanding of what madness itself might mean.

He crouches by the house in the deepening gloom, reading and rereading, searching for clues. The latest issue holds a story of Lovecraft’s called “The Hound,” a tale of grave robbers who pilfer a cursed amulet and are pursued relentlessly by its winged guardian. Douglas has read the story before, in one of his older issues of Weird Tales, but it takes him some time to recognize it. Everything seems altered by the fact that it was written here in Providence. He pictures the story taking place somewhere nearby—the graveyard might be Swan Point; the baying hound pursues the robbers through familiar neighborhoods rendered strange and mysterious, filtered through the light of Lovecraft’s words. His whole world feels changed in much the same way as the story. Providence itself has acquired a twilight tinge, a mysterious beauty he had never noticed until now. It took Lovecraft to make him see it.

Lovecraft…

His Aunts would know how to find the man. They have lived here all their lives; they know everyone, from the oldest families to the newest residents of the neighborhood. They had grown up in Providence when it was a much smaller town, and they still treat it as their own village. But how is he to question their knowledge without letting them know what he’s asking? For Douglas is quite certain they would not approve.

He decides on a sacrifice. He will pose a riddle and watch them attempt to answer it, and in the attempt learn much.

Douglas sorts his tattered magazines, looking for a cover that features Lovecraft’s name in suitably large letters. There are few appearances, and most are in small characters, rubbed illegible by constant use. Cringing inwardly, he returns to the latest, September, issue. With a pair of Aunt Opal’s sewing scissors, he slices into the brand-new cover, painstakingly cutting around Lovecraft’s name, removing the block of bright text. The wounded magazine he carefully replaces in the crawlspace, then slips onto the porch and puts the slip of colorful writing under the brass knocker, just at eye level. Then he lets himself into the house and busies himself with homework until he hears a clatter at the door: the Aunts are home. Muffled exclamations. They enter the house in a state of heightened excitement, their voices high chirps of curiosity.

“That’s Lillian Clark’s nephew, isn’t it?”

“I know who it is, and I certainly don’t intend to encourage him.”

“Missy, whatever do you mean? He’s no harm, that one. The poor fellow.”

“He’s not right and never has been. The hours he keeps. I hear he is an Atheist, did you know that?”

“Let’s be charitable, now.”

“The fact remains… whatever does he mean by this? Leaving it as some sort of calling card. Keep your distance from that one.”

“I was only thinking I might ask Miss Lillian.”

“No!”

“Come now, it’s only a short walk, what could it hurt? If her nephew is becoming more erratic, she should know. Before he harms himself, the poor man. You remember that time he collapsed on the street during a cold spell?”

“The only reason to speak to Lillian Clark is to ensure that she keeps her nephew away from us. If you wish to speak to her on that account, then I will accompany you.”

“I will do no such thing. Let’s just keep this to ourselves for now. If there’s another event, then… then we’ll discuss further steps. Now where is that boy?”

As Douglas listens, he cannot help but feel a kinship growing—affinity for a stranger. If the Aunts knew his secrets, would they speak of him in similar tones? Doesn’t muttering follow him about—on the schoolyard, in the streets, haunting him, setting him apart? In this he feels a kinship to all outcasts. It sharpens his resolve.

He finds Lillian Clark’s house the very next day, simply by greeting the postman on the walk to the Aunts’ front door. The postman is happy to provide the street number and even a description. Douglas stops short of asking if he knows the name of Lovecraft. He does not want the great, the wonderful man to be warned of his existence. Douglas’s admiration, his hopes, are too sensitive and secret. The deep sense of kinship he feels dare not name itself. It must be nourished in darkness. But he knows that if he can get close, he can touch the man directly—let him know that he understands, that they are kindred, that they share the same visions. But caution is engrained in his nature. Douglas prepares slowly.

In the shortening days, he devotes a measure of each afternoon before dusk to walking repetitively past the Clark residence, which proves to be not a house at all but an apartment building. Eyes glower at him from houses all around, and once he crosses the street to avoid a neighbor who clearly means to apprehend him. Of course he must return home before dark each night, and take great care not to arouse the Aunts’ suspicions. Once he creeps out long after bedtime, down the dark streets, and takes up a post only to find a light burning still at this hour in one window of the apartment building. He imagines H.P. Lovecraft at work even now, hunched above a writing desk, pouring out his visions of otherworldly places. Imagine, setting pen to paper, and the paper carrying one away like a magic carpet, an enchanted scroll, to the River Skai… the wilds of Arkham… imagine…

Within a week, his pilgrimages acquire an air of desperation. On Saturday, he finds an excuse to tell the Aunts he will be out all day—he suggests he’s hunting for a job in town, perhaps at the newsstand, or delivering papers. They remark on his initiative, pack him a lunch and watch him go. But it is straight to Lovecraft’s building he heads, and although he cannot stay in one spot or cross the same path too many times without attracting suspicion, he manages to cover enough adjacent streets that he can keep the house in view every few minutes without himself being viewed by the neighbors. He consumes his lunch during the course of the day—crackers and cheese and wedges of bread spread with butter and sugar. He despairs. Eventually he tells himself that he will make one more circuit, and then return to pretend to the Aunts that his attempts to find work have all ended in discouragement.

From the side of Lovecraft’s house, a man appears. It could be any one of the building’s tenants, or even a visitor, but Douglas has a feeling about this man. There is an air of solitude about him. He stops in front of the building, tall and gaunt and wearing a dark suit that makes him hard to see against the lengthening shadows. Douglas slows his pace and tries not to show any interest. From half a block away there is little chance of drawing attention to himself, except by staring too hard. The man’s face—it must be Mr. Lovecraft!—is partly hidden, in shadow itself, beneath the brim of his hat. He hesitates at the end of the drive and turns back to the house, then suddenly stoops and puts out his hand as if summoning with a magical gesture… what?

A cat appears, as if out of nowhere, a speckled calico that sniffs his fingers then rubs itself against his cuffs. Here comes a second, and a third, and now Douglas sees that they have emerged from under a hedge. A black cat walking stiffly, as if crippled by age; and a small kitten that bites the elder’s tail, then throws itself against Mr. Lovecraft’s foot and meows until he picks it up caressingly. Even in the shadow of the hat, Mr. Lovecraft’s smile is clear. He whispers to the creatures, then sets the kitten down and sends it running back toward the hedge. Bidding them a soft farewell, he turns and heads off down the sidewalk, toward town. The calico follows him a short way, then rounds back toward the house, encountering Douglas following in Mr. Lovecraft’s path. Douglas looks for the kitten but it has hidden itself. He would like to pet the creature that his idol has just touched.

The spires of Providence show themselves through the trees as the street tips downhill toward the town. Douglas keeps the dark-suited man in his sight at all times, never letting the gap between them grow too narrow, lest he be spotted. And Mr. Lovecraft stops repeatedly—at first constantly accosted by cats that seem to know him and anticipate his passing. To each one that will let him he gives an affectionate stroking. Douglas feels a pang; such kindness!

Then the houses with their sun-touched lawns fall away, and the city lies ahead. The absence of constant feline interruption should quicken Mr. Lovecraft’s pace, but it seems to have the opposite effect. He walks with his eyes to the sky now, taking in the buildings, the sky, the sights of Providence. For Douglas, it is almost like having a silent guide, opening his eyes to beauties he had taken for granted.

On Thomas Street, heading west into the city, Mr. Lovecraft stands for several minutes staring up at an old colonial church—one Douglas knows from the Aunts to be a Baptist institution. Mr. Lovecraft adjusts his hat as if tipping it to the tall white steeple, and moves on. Where his eyes catch, where he pauses to take in the sights, Douglas also pauses. A visible shudder passes through Mr. Lovecraft as he passes the weirdly paneled Fleur-de-Lys Studio, a building that has always amused Douglas but today seems somehow repulsive. Is this something he has absorbed from Mr. Lovecraft’s fascination? Certainly the building does not seem to belong among the others. Mr. Lovecraft turns left, heading south again on North Main, now barely glancing at the bulk of the Cheapside Block; then slowing again as he nears Market Square and the brick Market House. In the crowds here, Douglas knows he can come nearer without being seen. As Mr. Lovecraft heads west toward Westminster, Douglas darts nearer so as not to lose him. He comes so close that for a moment he can almost reach out and touch the object of his pursuit—and sees at this close range something that surprises him.

The suit, this close, looks shabby and worn. It reminds Douglas of clothes worn by some children at his school: the grubby ones, the ones his Aunts might speak of as “unfortunates.” In these difficult times, Mr. Lovecraft’s suit is not so different from many others in the crowd, but it sets Douglas back for a moment. He had assumed that writing stories would have made his hero rich. There is no evidence of that. Even the hat’s brim is frayed. He hangs back a bit, not wanting more details to intrude on his vision of the man, preferring the slightly distant, somewhat blurry version—but knowing there can be no reclaiming it. For better or worse, this is H.P. Lovecraft the man.

Past the grimy granite pillars and portico of the darkening Arcade, Mr. Lovecraft turns abruptly into a shop. Douglas approaches slowly, staring into a brightly lit interior. Dusk is deepening in the street, but inside the shop it’s all shining brilliant tile and glass cases, and Mr. Lovecraft looks like a spectral silhouette leaning forward. A uniformed attendant greets him with great familiarity, and then extends a small wooden paddle heaped with a creamy brown blob. Ice cream! Douglas realizes how long it’s been since he finished his lunch. His mouth waters. Mr. Lovecraft scrapes the ice cream from the spoon against his teeth, then nods. A minute later he emerges from the shop with a hugely scooped cone, forced to tilt his head to one side lest it smear his hat brim. Douglas recognizes the scoop. The Aunts never let him so much as sample the flavor, stating it unsuitable for children, but he has bought himself a cone or two surreptitiously. Coffee ice cream is a Providence specialty.

His pace becomes more leisurely in the throng. The streets are full of citizens seeking an evening’s entertainment, a meal, a stroll. Mr. Lovecraft savors his ice cream, and vicariously Douglas takes enjoyment from the older man’s pleasure. All these sights and flavors, yes, they are part of Mr. Lovecraft’s world—somehow they feed his fantasies, they stoke the visions that he then crafts into stories and passes on to Douglas. Douglas feels an almost unbearable pang of affection—for the shabby gentleman, clearly impoverished, spending his spare dimes on sweets, petting cats, strolling in the colonial byways like one in a dream. This—yes, this! Douglas feels the beginnings of a deep kinship, but really it is not the beginning—it is the culmination. It had begun with the stories… it had begun in Kadath and Sarnath, in Dunwich and in Celephais. Douglas understands him perfectly, the lonely man walking alone, so apart from and indifferent to the crowds that swarm around him. In this they are the same. In so many ways the same. Past banks and churches, the clanging of streetcars, the lights coming on around them, neon signs garish and alluring. At Mathewson Street, an immense church (another of the Aunts’ landmarks, Episcopalian, said with faint dismissal), Douglas sees like a glowing shrine the marquee of the Loew’s State Theatre. For a moment Mr. Lovecraft stares at it almost wistfully, he thinks; but then he turns and walks down another avenue, down streets less grand, darker. It’s easy to remain unseen here. Mr. Lovecraft finishes the last of his cone, stops before a small alcove, brushes his hands together fastidiously, then steps in off the street, out of sight.

Douglas slowly approaches the alcove himself, and sees a small glass booth before double doors—a theatre, far less majestic than the Loew’s, and almost unattended. In fact there is no one in the booth to sell tickets—until a figure swims up inside the glass, and Douglas stumbles away before he can be spotted.

Mr. Lovecraft!

He removes his suit jacket and hangs it from a hook at the back of the booth, then settles himself in a chair at the ticket window. There he waits, staring out at the night, while Douglas sinks back into shadow to watch.

To see a movie is a rare event for Douglas; he saves his quarters for his magazines and the Aunts have no use for films, much less now that they have begun to talk. Thus there is little meaning for Douglas in the titles that appear on the booth’s placard: Hallelujah! sounds like something his Aunts might approve, but The Mysterious Island very much does not. The thought of such an island, wrapped in mystery, with Mr. Lovecraft presiding as keeper of the gateway, fills him with excitement and anticipation. He digs into his pockets in case some coins might have miraculously appeared.

Of Mr. Lovecraft he can see nothing now but his head and shoulders, with a harsh light thrown down onto him from above. A few patrons close around the booth, and Mr. Lovecraft dispenses tickets in a perfunctory manner, as if anxious for the customers to be gone. As the flurry of purchases subsides, Mr. Lovecraft turns to the coat on its hook and from an inner pocket removes a cylinder of paper. He uncurls it, flattens it on the counter, and produces from some hidden place a bottle of ink and a pen.

Is he… writing? In the lull between customers, composing? Is it possible that H.P. Lovecraft’s miraculous tales are penned here, under such circumstances?

Douglas cannot contain himself. He wants to see the words trailing from the tip of the pen. He carefully creeps from the shadows, drawing closer to the glass, trying to see if he recognizes any especially magical syllables. He stays close to the doors, where the darkness is dense and he can stay hidden—but suddenly the doors fly open, and out comes a small group of women, laughing and chattering. Their appearance jostles Douglas close to the booth, and Mr. Lovecraft looks up. Their eyes lock. Douglas feels his eyes go wide, a shock almost physical in its intensity. Mr. Lovecraft’s jaw is set. As he straightens in the chair, he drops his pen and the papers curl up instantly. He is about to say something but Douglas cannot bear it. It’s too much all at once. In a panic, he bolts past the booth and into the street, and throws himself around a corner.

Breathless, he runs along the side of the building until another door nearly opens in his face, another explosion of laughter and voices, and he finds himself caught in a stream of filmgoers leaving the theatre. He holds the door for several ladies, out of habit, as the Aunts have taught him; and as they pour past, he finds himself gazing into the dark interior of the theatre. Thinking of the Mysterious Island, which might easily be an image out of Lovecraft’s stories, he seizes an edge of the curtains that drape the exit; he rushes through the velvety portico and finds himself inside.

Most of the seats are empty, though a tide of newcomers continues to trickle in from the top of the aisles. Trying to calm himself, hoping not to attract notice, he sinks into the front row seat and tips his face toward the vast curtained screen, and closes his eyes to take stock of his thoughts.

He wonders how to make his way back to Mr. Lovecraft. He has accepted the challenge he felt the man offered, but he must prove himself worthy. Once the movie has started, if he can return to the booth, he might find both the courage and the words to explain that he too has dreamt of R’lyeh, that he has heard the hound that chases the bearer of the talisman, that he has felt the evil wind that blows through the hidden chambers of the Nameless City. But as the lights of the theatre dim, as the curtains draw back from the screen and the first newsreel begins to play, he wonders if perhaps there is something else he is meant to see. Surely there is a deeper reason H.P. Lovecraft himself sits and sells tickets to this particular house. Perhaps what awaits are not ordinary serials and newsreels, staid dramas and inane musicals. The projectionist could be an emissary of Lovecraft; the projector a beam straight from that burning imagination, the magic lantern of his feverish mind.

As the screen begins to quiver with light, Douglas chants the names beneath his breath: Nyarlathotep! Azathoth! The names ring him in the darkness.

And then the darkness is no more. An explosion of light in his eyes.

Blinded, he gapes and hears a high nasal voice. He gapes and sees Mr. Lovecraft glaring at him, holding him fast in the beam of an electric torch, trained on Douglas like a searchlight. The man’s sharp pale features, caught in the beam for a moment, loom out of the theatrical dark, dwarfing the screen, and he says, “You!”

The word an uncontainable portent.

And then he leans closer, thrusting the torch like the barrel of a gun into Douglas’s face, and says the words that send the boy reeling out into the night, as bereft as the blind worlds that spin in the void to the tune of a mindless idiot god.

Douglas flees, pitching down the dark Providence streets, his mind in shards, his dreams tattered, shedding magic and mystery as if they are coins in a pocket full of holes. Innsmouth, R’lyeh, Ulthar, all crumbling into ruins. Fast he plunges from the halls of dream, never to know Y’ha-nthlei, never to be carried on black wings. The streets of Providence hateful again, no solace in their antiquity, the churchyards simply full of bones, the hounds nothing more or less than the hounds that always hunted men. And as he flees toward the rest of his life, the words still ring and circle as they always will when he casts his mind back to this night, this theatre of despair. They will echo every day and far into the night, far into the years; they will echo even after Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s death, an occasion of obscure satisfaction only capped by the unmarked grave that Douglas never bothers to seek out.

Echoing, yes, but never more terribly than that first night of horror, when he realized he could never escape into a weird dream of eldritch magic and mystery, from a truth too plain and too insistent.

Lovecraft’s final words, ringing sharp and cutting, the words that send him flying, feeling faceless as a night gaunt, into the dark:

“Get out before I call the police, you dirty little nigger!”

* * *

“The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft” copyright 2011 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online in Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2011.

FORGET YOU

She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap. One day he was alone, had been alone for years, his life and his home empty of anyone but himself and a few friends who didn’t visit all that often anyway. And then at some point he realized she had been there for a while, in his house, in his bed, in every part of his life, having accomplished the transition so subtly that he could never say exactly when or how it had occurred.

He ran his hand along her cheek in a swift caress, brushing the line of her jaw as he tucked the one stray lock behind her left ear as he often did, and said, “How did we find each other?”

“Oh, you,” she said, with that look, as if the question were another of their habitual endearments. “You’re sweet.”

He traced her other cheek, looked deep into her right eye, then her left, having memorized the stained glass kaleidoscope pattern of her irises so clearly from this practice that he could see them easily when he closed his own eyes.

“No,” he said, “I’m serious. How?”

She laughed without a sound, just an exhalation, and mirrored the movement his hands were making, cupping his face in her own palms.

“Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “Me, I mean.”

“Of course, me too, I just…”

She kissed him, and he thought, Well, that’s one difference between her and the cats.

He asked his friends, when he thought of it, in the very infrequent moments when she was not with him. “How did we meet?” he asked. And they laughed because it was such an odd question that they knew he was setting them up for some kind of joke. And when he said, “No, I’m serious,” they grew serious too, and took on a puzzled, questioning tone. “Uh… you’re asking us? You guys have been together longer than we’ve been friends.”

He went through his photographs, the digital images first, looking farther and farther back through the files, and she was in them all, and he could remember now how she had been there at the time. Beyond a certain point there were no more photos, but that was because of a huge lightning storm, when they’d gone a week without power and his computer had been fried, with everything on it lost. So of course there were no digital photographs from the years before that. He found a box in the closet full of older prints and negatives, in envelopes date-stamped by the pharmacies and photobooths where he had dropped them off to be developed. And it was something of a relief to see that she was not in any of these. He could clearly recall how alone he had been then, but he still could not remember how she’d come into his life. One thing was becoming clear though: It was getting harder to remember life without her. Soon he feared that he would not be able to remember a time when she had not been with him.

He dug out a photograph of himself alone and put it in his pocket to keep with him as a reminder. It was a self-portrait he had taken, just a solitary photo of himself alone in the kitchen looking out the window as if at the emptiness of his life, which had been very empty then. This image had always seemed to him to capture the essence of his loneliness, and looking at it now made him wistful and sad, even nostalgic. He kept taking it out and looking at it, trying to remember how it had ended. Her arrival must have come about sometime in the age of deleted images when everything was uncertain. But when he asked his friends about it, to try and zero in on a date, he couldn’t convince them that he wasn’t teasing them somehow. And when he started asking her, she began to take offense.

“Why are you always asking me this?” she asked. “What’s your problem? It’s like you’re obsessed. Do you want me out of your life or something? Do you want things back the way they were before we met? Is that it?”

“No, I… I just want to remember,” he said.

These conversations changed things between them. Or things were changing anyway, and the conversations were a symptom. There was no telling. But he felt he had started something and there was no going back. Just by noticing it, he had started it unraveling. It was as if, once she knew he had noticed the oddness, she started covering up the truth—as if she was afraid he might discover her secret. As long as he accepted the situation and went about his life without questioning it, everything was just fine. But he could no longer pretend to remember. It was driving him crazy. He was convinced she had done something, manipulated reality somehow, folded it around and inserted herself there in his life. Who was she, anyway? What was she? What sort of being had this ability to unravel and reweave the material of existence, working her way into it as if she had always been there?

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “I don’t appreciate it.”

“I just want to know how you did it,” he said. “I just want to know what you are.”

“God!” she said.

It occurred to him that what they were heading toward was the unmaking of what she had made in the first place. Past a certain point, it was inevitable. She would remove herself from his life. She would vanish as if she had never existed. First from the daily routine—she’d be gone from their home, gone from their bed, gone from the parties they had with their friends. Then she would absent herself from the photographs—first from whatever new ones he took, obviously, but then from the older ones as well. If he ever thought to go back through his files, he’d see nothing but photos of himself. When he asked his friends about her, they would look glum to see him filling the emptiness of his life with imaginary partners, and they’d say, “Who?”

Eventually he would have forgotten her completely, and all the evidence in the universe would indicate that she had never existed, and there would be no one to question it because he himself would have forgotten.

This was the way things were heading, and all because he had noticed. He wasn’t supposed to, he decided. He was supposed to have been oblivious, and just accept it. She must have done this before, but he was the first to have seen through it. Otherwise she would have done something different to make sure he remained unaware. She would have learned from prior mistakes, which meant he must be the first mistake. He was probably the only one who would see through her, because after this she would know what to do to remain undiscovered. In this way he felt privileged, special. He should feel fortunate that she had come to him, because it had allowed him to learn a very important truth about himself. From now on, even in his solitude, even when the memory of her had removed itself, he would own this bit of self-knowledge. He wouldn’t know how he had come by it, but he would cleave to it nonetheless. She had made him more whole, more truly himself. So there was a purpose to her being here after all.

Such were his thoughts on the last morning, as dawn crept into their bedroom, as the air grew bright and she grew dim, as the place where she was lying grew unlaid-in and the cats stretched out to fill it. But the thoughts were fleeting for he was already forgetting her, and he almost didn’t notice when, in the final moment, she woke and opened her eyes and turned and looked, but not at him, and said to no one but herself, “Why is this always happening to me?”

* * *

“Forget You” copyright 2012 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Lightspeed Magazine, April 2012.

BONFIRES

The shore was dark when we showed up, but it would soon be blazing, and that thought was all I needed to warm me while we built the bonfires. The waves slopped in and sucked out again like black tar, and I went along the waterline with the others, pulling broken boards and snags of swollen wood out of the bubbling froth and foam, hauling it across the sand and up to the gravel where the road edge ran.

Piles from previous scavenging were heaped up high and drying there. It didn’t take us long to figure out which ones were dry enough to burn. Some of the piles already had little combs of bluish light flickering along the splintered edges, as if they couldn’t wait to burst into flame. These were the ones we pulled from first, dragging pieces down toward the sound of waves and standing them on end, so they stood there tilted and crazy, like drunken skeletons leaning on each other so they wouldn’t fall down.

I had matches and lighters, pockets full of strikers and flints and everything we’d need to start a fire. While I was standing there looking at the pile of drift, seeking the best place to set a flame, she came up next to me with a can of fuel, uncapped already, so volatile that she seemed to swim and melt in the fumes like a vision on a hot road.

“You want it here?” she asked.

“Let’s get it burning,” I said. And she tipped the can, dousing the pile so it would make a proper pyre. The stuff was tinder dry already; the touch of gas was nearly friction enough to set it off. But it waited almost respectfully, the pyre wanting me to give it life. I’ve always been obliging.

As the flames exploded, she threw the can into the fire, and you could hear it crumple like a metal lung collapsing. I turned to her and she was laughing, and then I was on her, mouth on mouth, sucking on the metal in her tongue, pierced by it. She tasted like gasoline.

We weren’t the only ones around the bonfire, far from it. Many hands had been pitching on wood and paper and broken furniture, ripped-up books and matted newspapers, dolls stuffed with sawdust, figures made of straw. We were shadows with bright glinting eyes, orange and vibrant in the light from the flames, all of us ageless and infinitely experienced in our innocence. We danced around our pyre as if it was the center of the universe; we were part of the ring of light that held off the encircling dark. I squeezed her hand and couldn’t tell, when our knuckles ground together, whether it was her bones or mine I felt. I sucked on her tongue and she chewed on my lips; we could devour each other and never run out of other to devour. We were sweating from the fire, even though the wind from the black sea had turned cold as the flames got hotter, and now you could hear the screaming it carried.

“Have I met you before?” I asked, because it seemed like I must have. But she shook her head. “I’d have remembered you.” Which must have been true because I could never have felt this way about someone I already knew. It was her strangeness that made it so easy to be with her. This was just for tonight: the guzzling fuel; the single, unique and isolated spark; the bonfire that had never blazed like this before, never lifting these exact flames. Nothing ever happened twice—even though the fire was eternally the same.

Her eyes were so deep that I couldn’t pull myself out of them. I put my hands all over her, and she was on me as if she wanted to crawl inside. As we grappled, my vision went past her down the beach, along the shore, to all the other bonfires blazing like this one. Silhouettes dancing around them, figures like stick-people, hardly more than tinder themselves. The smoke rose up and blotted out the starless dark, making it churn and billow so the cast-off firelight had a place to gather and glow back down at us. It was like a scene of invasion, all of us massed at the waterline, waiting—but not to repel the invaders, hardly that.

“Coming,” she said, breathless, urgent, and pushed away from me. “They’re coming.”

As I sprawled back on the sand I knew she was right, our time was over, and I could only be grateful we had had it. The screams were louder than the waves now, and out in the black water, just at the limits of light, the boats were coming in. One to each pyre, they surged forward, sucked in by the tide, but mainly poled in by the boatmen. As they grounded on the sand, we moved in a mob from the warm glee of the bonfires and tried to make ourselves solemn or terrifying as we pulled the passengers from the boats.

It was the usual thing: some never stopped screaming, others were far past that point. A few stumbled and otherwise came along without resisting, but others had to be taken hand and foot and dragged across the sand and all the way up to the gravel. One or two always broke and ran until they saw that there was nowhere to go, and then they collapsed or staggered off into the dark or wandered back into the surf. Some had to be coaxed out of the boats again so the craft could return, empty.

Tonight there was some unexpected entertainment, though. I saw my lover whispering to one of her charges, grinning as she spoke. The girl she was talking to looked so familiar; it might have been herself long before, on the night of her own arrival. Whatever she whispered, it must have been persuasive, because as soon as she finished, the girl from the boat made a shocked face, then ran and threw herself headlong into the fire. She burned there, burned and burned, screaming. While from that mouth I’d been kissing a little while before, visible fumes of laughter poured. The taste of gas on my tongue turned flat and musty. I felt sick but I couldn’t say what had done it to me. There were too many possibilities.

I went over to the bonfire. She tried to stop me when she saw what I was doing, but I shoved her away and waded into the fire and grabbed hold of the burning girl and dragged her out again. Her hair was gone, her skin had charred and fallen in on her bones; a lot of her was simply burned away. She stood shaking and looked at her hands, cooked and raw, then up at me, and last of all at her tormentor.

“Go,” I said. “You’re not ready for this yet. Whatever she told you, she lied. That’s what we do here. We lie.”

As I said this, I felt I spoke the truth, and it was like a touch of flame to the gasoline on my breath. I choked on my words, spitting fire, and it caught in my hair and I felt myself burning all over. It all went dark, oily clouds of blackness fumed around me, and when I opened my eyes I was on my knees and the girl was stumbling off into the shadows, smoking and weeping, heading toward the roadside where the rest of them had gone. I could hear the sound of engines out there, from the trucks with hooded headlamps that came to collect them. The trucks came and went, came and went. The boats pulled away and the waves rolled in, and the pyres burnt themselves out all up and down the shore.

I realized at some point that my lover was crouching next to me, serious now, looking weary and no longer mischievous.

“I only told her what I wished someone had told me,” she said. “That’s all. You shouldn’t have said I lied. I’m not a liar.”

The pyre was almost dead. Soon it would be embers. The trucks had stopped running. Along the shore there were no other lights. Everyone was heading in.

She took my hand but I threw her fingers off. After a while she tried again and I was too tired to repulse her.

“We’ll never meet again,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“So are you coming?”

I shook my head. I squeezed her hand. I watched her turn toward the sea and trudge out through the surf.

The instant she was gone, I got up and ran after her, but the water clutched my ankles and the waves pushed me back. I waited on the shore, waited there in the dark, staring after her, waiting to see if she would return.

After a while the bonfires blazed at my back, and the boats came in again and again, but she was never in them.

* * *

“Bonfires” copyright 2013 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Nightmare Magazine, April 2013.

THE FRIGID ILK OF SARN KATHOOL

The wizened and sagacious wizard Sarn Kathool had put behind him all the whims and errant passions of youth, and in his estimation it was time the Earth did likewise. He had seen an end to the warm spring days of Hyperborea’s juvenescence, and knew the coming age of glaciation would unavoidably end this early flowering of man’s innate capacity to fling forth what all agreed were the highest achievements of civilization (never counting those ruins of prehuman megaliths occasionally excavated from the ancient lava fields of Voormithadreth as anything more than the uncouth, accidental conglomerations of mindless ophidians). Humankind’s autumn was inarguably upon it; winter would be harsh for the species; and Sarn Kathool squandered no opportunity to instruct his captive acolytes and inform his squirming visitors that none but he were prepared for the grinding doom that at this and every moment bore down upon them from the northern reaches of Polarion: a demonic glacier.

The sage’s servants nodded mutely—even those who still possessed their tongues—while his voluntary visitors quickly found a reason to absent themselves, leaving the old mage, with his shocked white brows and thin ichthyic whiskers, lost in what they took to be rheumy recollections of a youth they supposed he fantasized as idyllic.

In this, however, Sarn Kathool’s peers were mistaken. His youth had been a harsh and in most respects miserable one, in which any advantage he had gained for himself came only with the greatest expenditures of energy, dedication, perseverance and the steadfast application of a ferocious intelligence. Much of the authority he now wielded was his by virtue of having outlasted his rivals. This was a source more of worry than of nostalgia, or even of pride; for the great colleges of arcane investigation were poorly staffed and even more meagerly attended, and no longer matriculated skilled gleaners of esoterica with anything like the force and variety he had taken for granted in his youth. Few graduated from the remote monastic eyries of the Eiglophian Mountains, and cold were the kitchens of the Mhu Thulan lamaseries.

Sarn Kathool had witnessed the near total decline of civilization, and of man’s civilizing urges, in the course of his lifetime—a paltry few generations on the scale of men less practiced at managing their mortality. And seeing now the relentless, remorseless approach of the glacial age, he felt that the burden was on him to arrest and if possible, reverse humanity’s declining course. The ice would be his unwitting ally—which was well, as it had come to Sarn Kathool from various accounts that those who opposed the advancing sheets of crystalline cold rarely profited thereby.

His plan was to embrace and accept the course of nature, and navigate to an ideal destination of his choosing, rather than allowing blind fate to steer the species. It had been foretold in multiple oracular utterances, and in his own febrile visions, that the great demonic glacier would level the rich Hyperborean landscapes like a razor dragged across a whiskered cheek. Where mighty mountains crumbled and gave way before the blinding advance of frost, flimsy human structures stood no chance. No monuments of the great Hyperborean kings would survive to dazzle distant ages beyond the ice’s reign; few memories would persist even in oral form.

But there was one thing Sarn Kathool relied on to survive the ravening chill, and that was man himself: vulnerable as an individual, but wily and adaptable as a race. Therefore he bent his still keen intellect on devising a scheme for the improvement of the species. The ice would give humankind the chance for reinvention. Sarn Kathool conceived a new beginning, a new race, with all the depravity, evils and ills of this degenerate age bred out of it for good!

No one understood better than Sarn Kathool the audacity and enormity of such a proposition, but his finances were equal to the endeavor. He planned to invest every last pazoor in his creation, and no matter the extravagance of the undertaking, he intended to use all of his resources to their utmost.

From the tip of his tower, set well back in the interior of Mhu Thulan, Sarn Kathool could peer out with a spyglass on a clear, still day and see the proud although abandoned spire of the sorcerer Eibon at the edge of the distant sea. Eibon had vanished from Hyperborea just ahead of a scourge of religious persecution cunningly avoided by Sarn Kathool, who diplomatically kept fanes to both Yhoundeh and Tsathoggua symmetrically installed in the depths of his own citadel.

He daily observed the rituals and offerings appropriate to each god, to ensure that no deity would thwart his aspirations. This also meant he could not count on either one for assistance. To prefer one over the other, to beg a favor of bat-featured Tsathoggua while spurning the elk goddess Yhoundeh, was to invite catastrophe. Therefore magic could play no part in his designs. He turned instead to the far more arcane study of technology, long out of favor in Hyperborea, even though its first seeds had sprouted there, as demonstrated by the occasional discovery of vast clockwork cities beneath the crawling sands of the aural reaches.

Far and wide he sent his scouts and acquisition experts, to retrieve volumes from the rare tome repositories of Mu and the archives of Atlantis; and gradually his own library, already overflowing with rare manuscripts of illuminated pterodactyl skin and vast books cased in yellowed horn of mastodon, became Hyperborea’s most concentrated seat of scientific learning. The incenses and enchanted braziers, reeking of tradition and ceremony, were put aside for strange polished lenses, outré fuming glassware, miles of curved tubing that kept the glasswrights of Commorium busy for years on end. Along with books and secret manuscripts, there flowed into his vast manse a steady procession of youths, bought from orphanages, salvaged from the streets, acquired from slave traders either by exchange of coin or the wholesale raiding and looting of transport ships. Multitudinous were the experts and specialists in Sarn Kathool’s employ, putting all their ingenuity to work on his behalf, while never suspecting the role they played in his grand vision of humanity’s great purification, preservation, and restoration, in hand with the great cold cleansing.

Fighters, merchants, mariners, moneylenders, healers, magistrates, sharp-dealers, assassins—all occupations figured in his plan. For at heart it was simply a matter of people. The Hyperborean people were his responsibility, and he felt it deeply; they were what he sought to preserve, after all; they were reason enough to persevere.

Sarn Kathool was a keen observer and lover of people; and in a way, late in his life, he found his true calling as collector and creator of the same. The techniques of breeding, the basic principles of hybridization and the concentration of desirable traits within a population, along with the elimination of those undesirable, were known to all but the most willfully ignorant. By such rules were fine aurochs bred into prized stock, through generation upon generation of gradual improvement. The ferocious dimetrodons, so popular as guardians of the wealthiest estates, had been bred through the ages for their lurid sails of toxic pigmentation and their loud sibilant bark. The same principles could be seen at work in human breeding. But never before had anyone thought to apply them with the relentless rigor and enthusiasm of Sarn Kathool.

He selected only the sturdiest females from among his growing stock, and those unworthy of refinement he established as their handmaidens and servitors. A similar program was instituted among the males, although toward an entirely different end. The males were set to fighting and rivalry, with all manner of duplicity and martial cunning encouraged, so as to thin the ranks as efficiently as possible and inculcate the most effective predators. The females were not set at each other in open combat, but the winnowing process was no less rigorous. Sarn Kathool reviewed them daily and received the reports of their overseers, in order to evaluate which possessed the most desirable demeanor, the greatest evidence of compassion—the qualities, in short, that one would wish the mother of the coming race to possess.

When the determination had been made, and Sarn Kathool had selected the most promising virgin, she was given a strong narcotic draught and carried immediately to his laboratory, where Sarn Kathool set to work at the heart of an extravagant mechanism fashioned of ranked lenses which permitted him to peer at the inner workings of the corpuscles and animalcules that drove the animate engines of fleshy creatures and vegetative life alike. More, the mechanism was an intricate manipulator of these cells, with meshed gears and serried levers declining into ever finer forms, so that the wizard’s gross physical gestures were translated across great chasms of scale, permitting him to flex a frail index finger and thereby score a precise incision over the surface of an organelle, deploying an edged instrument a thousand times as fine as an ice-flea’s proboscis. With a delicate touch, the ancient sage delved into the prenatal labyrinths of the chosen maid, and therein made infinitely delicate adjustments to the ranks of half-formed homunculi that waited to be summoned forth in service from their mother’s womb.

By methods of manipulation now as lost to us as the graven records of Sarn Kathool’s experiments, the maid was then induced to carry several of her inborn homunculi to term, to parthenogenetic birth, and the issue of this birth was then herself surrounded by her slightly less perfect sisters, and raised among only those influences certain to inspire the flowering of the finest feminine instincts. The girls were kept in secluded chambers, where every sensory experience was carefully designed in advance by Sarn Kathool, in accordance with a strict regimen of his devising. When this maid had ripened to the perfect and prescribed age, then just like her mother before her, she was brought to the workroom, where Sarn Kathool labored over her with pride and not a little dread, for great was his sense that time was running short, and deep was his fear that he would not complete his life’s greatest accomplishment in time to do the Earth any good.

For through all his labors, the demon ice advanced. From Polarion the blue green sheets crept at a rate previously inconceivable, singing with a low ominous moan that never faltered as the monstrous crystals formed. As the ice clawed ever closer to his tower, laying claim to all the cities of the realm, and began to sizzle and quench even the four blazing craters of Voormithadreth, the glacial sheets emitted weird emergent surges, casting subauroral flickerings brighter than the sun—so that even at midday, the summer skies surged and sang with a haunting glow that had been associated previously with none but the midnights of midwinter. Soon, he knew, it would all be midwinter—winter with no end, ice with no edges. And he bent himself to the minuscule razors and gleaming armatures with renewed dedication and purpose.

What gave him some hope of success was the progress he had made with the males of the experiment. In contrast to the maids, he selected the finest fighters, the most wicked and deceitful, and from them removed their half-formed homunculi. Ice here played its first role as partner. For upon removal from the male fighters, he placed each homunculus in a crystalline vial, which itself he set in a block of ice hollowed for the purpose of preservation. Here it waited in a frigid stasis while he summoned one of the rejected maids and prepared her womb to receive the warrior’s spawn. The maiden’s own progeny were scoured so that there could be no possibility of contamination, and then the male homunculus was implanted. Unlike a child conceived by normal means, the offspring of these efforts were not a mixture of mother and father. The males were purely male—bred for speed, size, aggression, violent disposition, tenacity, utter fearlessness, ruthlessness, cunning. Sarn Kathool knew which qualities he wished in a protector, and such were these. For Sarn Kathool’s plan was deep and complex, and extended through the ages. He had few illusions about the world that was likely to greet his progeny.

As the ice thickened around the base of his spire, his shipments of new subjects slowed to a trickle and then failed completely; but he scarcely noticed, for by now he was fully stocked on specimens; he had all he needed. He was many generations into his plan, locked in a deadly race with the advancing glacier, which moved with a restlessness that betrayed its demonic spirit, closing white claws around his tower like an evil god seizing Earth’s last scepter.

His daughters, the mothers of all future men, were pure and noble and worthy—worthy to receive the final gift that he would give them. They were the ideal bearers of Sarn Kathool’s own seed—for this it was that he intended. Parthenogenesis only to a point, and then a final conjunction, in which his own homunculi would make the short journey from Sarn Kathool’s loins to the waiting womb and the receptive, incomplete homunculi of the perfectly created maiden. And in her womb, their offspring would sleep, utterly frozen, the glacier’s greatest power used to thwart and undermine its depredations. And in the ultimate thaw, whenever after unaccountable ages it would come, that child would commence to grow… and Sarn Kathool himself, merged with this specimen of perfect motherhood, would live and lead the way in that future age—the first of a perfect breed that he himself would continue to refine after its creation.

But still he feared, for he knew his own vulnerability. He easily pictured what could befall even the most carefully concealed tombs of the great kings. The vast estates of the dead that skirted the edges of Commorium were a waste of plundered crypts—and in all the eons of ice that lay ahead, there was no telling what manner of greedy cold wretches might come in search of the fabled lair and resting place of storied Sarn Kathool. Therefore, the warriors, bred to protect the mother and her handmaids—and to do so with all their wiles, with every trick of ruthlessness and cunning their vicious nature could devise. Any thaw, any disruption to the frozen vaults sufficient to disturb the maiden’s rest, would also stir the warriors, and in this way bring on the certain death of any violator. But Sarn Kathool could not shake the foreboding, sharpened by the incipience of ice, that this was not enough—that the maiden herself had need of innate defenses.

After much consideration, and convinced of his design’s foolproof nature, he began to make certain alterations to the maiden homunculi, although nothing that could express itself without the proper triggering conditions. In the presence of threat, at the danger of rape for instance, the maiden mother would find herself possessed of all the cunning strength and violent power necessary to exterminate her assailant. It pained him to compromise the creature’s innocence, but dark ages lay ahead. What if the warriors did not wake? What if the maiden was left alone and at the mercy of her violators? Who would protect the sanctity of Sarn Kathool’s homunculus then?

No, the female must be permitted some subtle yet potent means of defense.

And so, more generations of maiden mothers were bred, refined, and from their selfsame stock bred again. Within the wombs of his select matron, a lineage of perfect mothers waited as if queued to receive the seed of Sarn Kathool, prefiguring the perfect race that one day would venture forth. While this program wended on, Sarn Kathool neglected not the furtherance of the warrior breed, and with all he learned from his practice on the maidens, the male lineage was also improved. From the inferior yet no less fertile wombs of the subsuperior parti-matrons, he hatched males of inarguable ferocity, continually eliminating the weak or hesitant, honing the protector until he felt he had a specimen that could protect his mother from any future harm, no matter how unimaginable.

At last there came a stretch of howling whiteness, a plunge of temperature so cold and penetrating that its menacing ache could be felt in the deepest vaults of Sarn Kathool’s redoubt. On what promised to be the last morning of Hyperborea’s fleeting age of glory, the old mage, weary beyond belief yet elated by his success, mounted to the highest turret of his grim frost-locked citadel and permitted himself a final glimpse of the world he had labored so strenuously to save. The program had cost him the final centuries of his life, and in that time he had scarcely allowed himself to be distracted by the encroaching of the glacial horror that had claimed the Earth while closing around him slowly, as if saving Sarn Kathool for last.

From where he stood, it was no longer possible to see the peak of Eibon’s lofty tower, for it had long since been buried beneath the hungry blue-green waste. Weird lights glowed through the ice at that spot, and that was the only clue that Eibon had ever existed. Wherever else Sarn Kathool looked, there was not even a memorial glow. All the works of man were locked in ice. The glacier itself possessed a demonic soul, a spirit that remorselessly sought the extirpation not only of Sarn Kathool, not only of all intellectual accomplishment, not only of Earth… but of all. The fiend’s disregard for the greatest of minds was the ultimate insult to Sarn Kathool, and yet he had met it full on. His victory was a feat to be flung in the demon’s howling maw. It had not defeated him, nor would it outlive his progeny.

As if sensing his moment of gloating as a challenge, the winter-thing sped at him, wielding an ice-edged sword of wind—the blast that through some irony would come to be known as boreal, even though through all the ages of Hyperborea’s existence that phrase had evoked balmy cosseting breezes and green, sweet-scented zephyrs. Sarn Kathool cringed back inside and sealed the outer portals. Frost burned through the walls, rendering them searing to the touch, turning the lush and colorful arrases hung there to brittle grey wafers that shattered at a breath.

He turned to the spiral stairs and wound his way quickly down into the depths, and the cold chased him, icing over the steps as he descended. There could be no return. The passages were choked with crystals of ice; his very exhalations solidified and fell crashing around his feet, while the air in his chest threatened to transform into sharp shards that would stab his lungs from within. The demon howled! And Sarn Kathool repressed a youthful exuberant laugh, so narrow was his sense of escape. A joyous exhilaration quickened his steps.

And then he was in his final chambers: His workshop, his lair, and in the last and deepest room, the nuptial laboratory. It crossed his mind that the laboratory was perhaps a degree warmer than it ought to have been—as if the ice had not yet reached these depths; as if it had exercised restraint. As to why the uncalculating ice might have let a spark of warmth remain, his suspicion was so faint that he scarcely troubled with it. It was time to put aside all thoughts of restraint.

His maiden bride awaited, locked in artificial slumber. He gazed upon her beauty and saw that he had created perfection. A suitable mother in some distant age, but for now an irresistible and alluring mate. She had been prepared for him by her handmaids, themselves now locked away in secure adjacent galleries to which the demonic cold had been cleverly diverted. The warrior breed had also been frozen into their holding cells; with the chiefest of them, and her most perfect protector, cast into stasis in this same chamber, nearest to wake should she require protection.

All was utterly, completely still. The demon’s howl was inaudible.

Sarn Kathool despite the elderly gasping that his hurried plunge had elicited, felt a youthful quickening in his blood. And as he beheld his maiden matron, primed to receive him, the quickening came to a point.

Erect, flush with his life’s masterwork and the pride of his achievement, he advanced on his maiden receptacle, the vessel who would carry him into whatever future awaited, and entered her like an old man easing himself gingerly into a rocking boat.

That was not quite the last sensation he felt, nor quite his last awareness of existence. For although his spine broke instantly, there was enough life left in his eyes to see the grinning face of the warrior protector as his fierce creation twisted the wise old head entirely backwards on its neck; and with another half-turn, continuing the revolution, he was able to gaze into the wide-awake eyes of his no less ferocious maiden-but-not-mother, who was pleased beyond measure by what she saw in his expression. And even as their laughter rose in his ears, and as the obscene noises of their twinned passions commenced, to intimate exactly what form of race he had visited upon the future as the mother and father of mankind’s newest iteration, there came a storm of deafening white sound flooding his awareness, boastfully and wordlessly, mindlessly gloating— informing him how in all ways he had failed: the insane, incomprehensible, and purely witless tittering of the ice.

* * *

“The Frigid Ilk of Sarn Kathool” copyright 2014 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea, edited by Cody Goodfellow.

THE GHOST PENNY POST

I hope London’s trust in me is not misplaced, thought Hewell as he sought his valise under roadside ferns. He spotted the leather case, still buckled, its sheaf of papers safe. Drawing it from among the fronds, he climbed out of the ditch to stand beside the carriage. Always fond of a good puzzle, Hewell was none too keen on mysteries; but events of the morning suggested more of the latter than the former were in store for his afternoon.

He offered the harried driver a hand strapping their trunks back in place. The man had managed to calm the more nervous of the two horses, shaken after the affright, or attack, or whatever it had been. When the incident occurred, even though it was still shy of noon, Hewell had been dozing uneasily inside the compartment. His seat suddenly slewed, twisting him out of a restless dream, flinging him first against the door and then through it, onto an embankment carpeted in moss. Blessed moss! The coach had very nearly toppled over onto him. Thank God for a skilled driver and at least one imperturbable horse.

Just as their luggage was settled back in place, the other passenger returned from scouting the woods and approached the driver with more questions. “You say the figure rushed from where to where?”

“Well, he come up from here,” the driver said, pointing, “and then run off that way, toward Pellapon Hall. From what I hears, they be having a deal of trouble in these parts, but I never thought to fear any of it meself.”

The other man, who had said hardly a syllable to Hewell on the journey from the local train station—being as buried in notebooks as Hewell was in postal documents—appeared to be traveling in some sort of official capacity. His tone was consistent with his superiority. “I need more details, if you please. Dressed in what fashion? Speak up!”

Hewell felt it was no one’s place to pester the poor, rattled driver. And yet he was interested in the reply.

“As I said, it was all very fast, but… I thought I saw a figure all in black, covered head to toe in a peculiar kind of cape. Had on a hood to hide his face and a pair of horns atop it all. Like goat horns, I’d say.”

“Or Devil horns, perhaps?”

“I don’t know about that. Never seen the Devil meself, couldn’t speculate on the nature of his horns. But I seen goats aplenty and I’d say these were more that sort.”

The officious gentleman nodded and turned away, making notes in a tiny journal.

Once they had settled again in the carriage, to be shaken in the more ordinary way by the resumption of their journey, Hewell cleared his throat and said, “I’m an inspector myself.”

The other passenger gave him a direct look. Bushy eyebrows, gray-salted whiskers, a beard barely attended to. Hewell felt a pang of pity for the man: self-groomed, a bit threadbare, yet with an intensity of gaze which suggested that he scarcely noticed the lack of coin or comforts. He would be baffled by Hewell’s sympathy.

“Which is to say, if I am not far amiss, that you, too, appear to be an inspector of some sort.”

The man closed his notebook and returned it to an inner pocket. “Forgive me a professional reticence, but my employer would rather I not speak openly until I have conferred with him.”

“Might I hazard a guess as to your employer’s identity?”

“I can hardly prevent you from speculating.”

“We traverse at this moment the ancestral estate of the Pellapons. Is this name known to you?”

“That great house is indeed my first stop. But I can say no more.”

“Naturally. I myself am free to come forward in my public capacity as an inspector of the Royal Mail. I am traveling only slightly farther along, to the village proper, Binderwood. You are aware, perhaps, of certain irregularities—one might even characterize them as abuses—in the local mail? London has grown alarmed. I am here to investigate.”

“As you say. And without compromising my discretion, you are undoubtedly apprised that these irregularities have affected Lord Pellapon’s affairs in matters of business, person, and privacy.”

“Say no more,” said Hewell. “It is not entirely unlikely that even though the London office ordered me here, a request from Lord Pellapon was behind that command. Therefore, if I may in any way be of service, please do not hesitate to ask. It might be to both our advantages were we to occasionally pool our findings.”

“Indeed.” The eyes of the other gent began to twinkle. “I like this thought. I like it very much. As two outsiders in Binderwood, we are certain to encounter nothing but resistance, doors slammed shut in our paths. But doors are ineffective if one can come at them from both sides at once! We shall beat them at their own game, sir, whatever it may be!”

“Hewell,” said Hewell, extending his hand.

“Deakins,” said the other, almost certainly a detective of the private variety. His skeletal fingers managed a firm grip as they shook.

“I did not see you on the train from London,” the detective said, “despite several strolls from one end to the other to work my legs.”

“I ride in the mail car,” Hewell said. “I wish I could recommend it as a mode of travel but its comforts are few. There is little in the way of seating, and one is constantly hampering the sorting clerks and made to feel unwelcome. Even though I repeatedly reassured them I was there purely as a passenger, they never believed me. In truth, I couldn’t help but notice some deficiencies in their methods, yet could say nothing after my promises. On my return, I will certainly avoid that particular car. The hardest thing is to know a truth one cannot speak.”

The coach stopped and the driver hopped down to put his head in. “I hope it’s no bother, Mr. Hewell, but I been instructed to deliver Lord Pellapon’s guest right quick. It’s a short deviation and we’ll proceed into Binderwood straightaway after, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Hewell answered, pleased that he would get a look at Pellapon Hall. Since it figured into his investigation, he was glad of the opportunity to locate it in relation to various landmarks he had committed to memory. Studying the district map had given him only the faintest impression of the region.

They headed up a long drive among mature yet sickly hornbeams dappled with anemic sunlight, and the woods thinned to give glimpses of the grounds. There was not much to admire: a ragged sweep of bare, salted lawn cresting hills that ran toward the sea; and, at the end of the drive, a tall manor with wings not quite fully spread, like the halves of a traveling apothecary’s dispensary trunk interrupted in the opening. The stone of the place was rimed and spotted; sea spray and lichens had brought the house into sympathy with the local limestone. It was as if an architect had taken a stern hand to an outcrop.

A smattering of domestic staff awaited the coach, at their fore a hale, ruddy-complected figure with a raw nose and wispy hair that had gone to gray yet still retained a memory of orange. This attribute gave unspoken testimony that the twin girls waiting beside him were his daughters.

Hewell attempted to remain within the coach, but Deakins said a few words to Lord Pellapon and he found himself compelled into the house for tea. The driver, having no other passengers, was content to wait.

“Run along, girls!” Lord Pellapon barked as he led the way down a dim corridor toward the sitting room, for the two ginger lasses appeared inclined to lurk and listen to every word. They drifted away with whispers and titters, but Hewell sensed they were never quite out of earshot—his or theirs.

“Twins?” he asked.

“What’s that? The girls? Yes, and a trial to me as never to their mother, God rest her. I have no aptitude for the raising of such angels. Under my care they have become perfect devils!”

His face reddening, he looked on the verge of a fit until Deakins put a hand on his shoulder and said, “But your troubles hatch elsewhere, Lord Pellapon. With those resolved, I have no doubt your family will be restored to a more harmonious state.”

“Naturally,” Lord Pellapon agreed, subsiding into a state of quietude and a chair of oxblood leather near a window overlooking the cliffs. Through lozenges of poor consistency, Hewell saw the gray and restless bosom of the ocean. The sky was at the mercy of mist and cloud, and he supposed he might stand at this window for a year and never see an horizon. He felt grateful that his own chambers in London held no such views, or any at all, to distract him.

“My Lord,” said Deakins, “I thought since Mr. Hewell is here that you might be able to acquaint both of us, as one, with the details of your present difficulties. As I understand it, they revolve around the mail.”

“Yes, and I have had no satisfaction from the local authorities. Merricott is quite unhelpful. Incompetent, I daresay.”

“The local postmaster?” Hewell said. “Well, that is why I’m here. An obstinate fellow will be dealt with to the extent of my powers, keeping in mind that he may have a certain vestigial authority that proves recalcitrant. It is often the case with these local offices. They resist any attempt to bring them in line with the latest procedures, and any mention of increased efficiency is frequently met with outright hostility. If you knew the outcry we faced at the proposal of installing postboxes in regions even less removed than this…”

“Shameful, I’m sure,” said Pellapon. “But Merricott is not obstinate. He’s an idiot!”

“That does not necessarily make matters easier,” the detective said. “A measure of intelligence often leads to quicker arrival at an agreed destination—once trouble has been turned from its deviant course. What the perpetrators will not expect is a ferocious imagination—mine!—turned upon their plots. There is no mischief they can concoct that is inconceivable to me, and in this wise I shall expediently outwit them.”

Idiots and deviants, Hewell thought. They are certainly eager to work from assumptions.

“On behalf of the Royal Mail,” said Hewell, “I can promise a thorough, sober, and clear-eyed investigation. Now, as I understand it, Binderwood has experienced a tremendous rise in the volume of local correspondence—”

“To such an extent my business is suffering! Letters lost. Valuable communiqués gone missing in this deluge of packets, this… this torrent. I am constantly receiving missives full of nonsense while my own transactions go astray. A letter of patent I expected a month ago turned up last week in an illiterate cotter’s hut. It would be there still had not Doctor Ogilvy paid the poor wretch a visit to treat a milk-rash and spotted it in service as a blotter.”

“Many villages in Binderwood’s position are in a state of flux,” Hewell said, without trying to sound as if he were justifying the inexcusable. “Modern improvements are planned for all, to meet with the rise in demand, but some areas are still far behind the times. You have the telegraph, of course—”

“But it is the mail I rely upon, and it is the mail that has gone to Hell! I cannot append my signature or set my stamp to a telegram! I assure you, this matter concerns the whole locale. Just because it has not troubled London—”

“Pray do not mistake me, sir! It is a deeply troubling matter to London, and to me personally. The mail in all its parts is our concern, and I thank you for bringing this to my attention. I do feel, given the urgency I sense, that my time would be better spent attending directly to the situation. Meaning no discourtesy, I beg your leave to forego my tea and get on to my meeting with the postmaster, post haste.”

“Well,” Lord Pellapon muttered, “it would be greatly appreciated. Tilly, where are the detective’s biscuits?”

Deakins gave the postal inspector a nod and settled down to business: slurping his Lapsang souchong while the maid scurried off for the missing digestives. Hewell made his own way back along the passage to the foyer. Seeing no servants, he was about to open the front door himself when it flew inward, nearly crushing his nose.

He found himself facing a tall young man in the act of delivering the afternoon mail. Before he quite registered that Hewell was a stranger, the lad had relinquished two handfuls of letters. It was rather a lot of mail for one house, Hewell thought, weighing them in either hand.

“That will be all, boy,” Hewell said to the youth’s bewilderment. The dazed lad nodded, bowed, and returned to his waiting nag, looking back at Hewell several times. Hewell shut the door and inspected the letters in what illumination passed through the high foyer fanlight.

Lord Pellapon’s mail was ordinary enough: the usual admixture of cancellations and the standard Penny Black stamp, self-adhesive pride of the Royal Mail. He could never see one without admiring it: Queen Victoria’s blessed profile, beautifully engraved against a background of engine turnings. The common red cancellation mark was a bit difficult to make out, which had led to talk of printing in new colors, a notion Hewell despised as undignified. The black ink framing Her white visage was elegant, unequalled. He had seen them being printed, had touched the etched plates, had welcomed what they meant for the efficient handling of mail in a reformed and modern postal system. Everything about them pleased him.

The Penny Blacks decorated a number of thin, rustling envelopes, as well as a rather larger bundle bearing the inscription of a solicitor in London. But in his left hand were four or five packets of a more irregular sort: cheap, thick paper, each bearing a stamp he did not at first recognize. Foreign? Or some local variant?

A troubling variety of unauthorized regional postage stamps had sprung up in the shadow of the Penny Black. It was not entirely accurate to call them counterfeit; they were more along the lines of homages, although of course highly unlawful. These were an affliction of remote counties but a manageable one, rarely worth the time it took to suppress them unless they traveled beyond their home districts.

The letters in Hewell’s left hand all bore the same peculiar stamp: it was engraved with care and craft, but printed in violet ink on a press whose plates were minutely out of register, such that the profile was ever so slightly blurred. This figure of royalty wore a fanciful three-tipped crown and was definitely not Victoria Regina. The profile’s most remarkable feature was a sharp dot of carmine red marking out the iris of the eye. As a work of art and amateur production, it was intriguing. However, it also bore the legend “One Penny,” which rendered it a competitor to the Royal Mail, a blatant forgery, and therefore intolerable.

“It is our job to deliver the mail,” said a piping, musical voice.

“We’ll carry those to Papa!”

The packets were snatched from his hands.

“Thank you, Mr. Hewell!”

Even as he turned to look after them, the twins were gone, ascamper down the corridor. They veered to the right and headed up a flight of stairs. Perhaps knowing that their father would not want to be interrupted in the sitting room, they left most of the letters stacked precariously on the newel post. But the left-hand delivery appeared not to be among them. Hewell considered this for a moment, then decided to continue with his own business.

The coachman was still waiting, but the young courier had already passed into the distant spray of hornbeams that lined the drive. Hewell was quite certain he would be seeing him again soon enough.

The last leg of the journey into Binderwood was uneventful. After the sullen demeanor of Pellapon Hall, he found the mien of the village cheerful. Hewell took little pleasure from the merely scenic. He preferred the presence of people, and those in quantity, with all the attendant reassuring noises and behaviors of his kind. He had dark suspicions of the sorts of associations and activities that might arise among naturally social and gregarious creatures such as man when they found themselves spread too thin.

The village gave the impression of coherence. A tinsmith; a chandler; grocer and butcher cheek-by-jowl; an inn. At this last, the coachman helped him out and tendered his slightly scuffed luggage, plucking off a wedge of moss. From the door of the inn, Hewell looked along the central lane and identified the post office, just across the way. Everything was close and convenient. With a satisfied nod, he went inside.

A small, tidy upper room overlooked the street, and the innkeeper’s wife was solicitous. He was far from Mrs. Floss’s first London visitor and Mrs. Floss was far from impressed. He immediately took a meal in the overheated common room, sitting as close to the door and as far from the unnecessarily roaring hearth as he could manage, while the landlady complained about a cold that wouldn’t leave her bones, giving every indication that she would be happy to complain about those who complained about the heat. As he swirled the last of his stout and washed down the last bit of bread, a lanky silhouette came in from the street and nearly stumbled over Hewell’s outstretched legs. The boy removed his hat and shifted it from hand to hand before realizing that he should offer one in greeting.

“You are the postal inspector, sir, is that correct?”

“I am, lad. We met at Lord Pellapon’s door. Sit down if you wish.”

“I’m Toby, sir.”

“Of course you are.”

“My master, the postmaster, Mr. Merricott, sir, sent me to extend every courtesy and let you know he awaits you at your conveniently… earliness…”

“Very well, Toby. Tell him I will be along—well, no. I’m finished here. I shall accompany you back this very moment.”

“Sir, it would be my pleasure, sir.”

“Mr. Hewell is sufficient.”

Hewell pushed aside the empty tankard. They brewed a fine stout here in Binderwood—a very fine stout indeed. But for the sake of his duties he must keep a clear head.

Young Toby led him the short distance down the street and then across. Hewell saw the courier’s nag slouched in a muddy paddock, all spattered herself. By contrast, the office was orderly, neat, and well maintained, with no obvious signs of systemic disruption that might explain a mail system gone awry. Postmaster Merricott was of demeanor consistent with his office. A thin, prim, fastidious man of slightly more years than Hewell, he rubbed his palms together continually, as if trying to congeal and remove a stubborn patch of gum arabic. He dispatched Toby to the back room to fetch a district map. Hewell already possessed a regulation map, but he was keen to inspect the village copy for any discrepancies. Local terrain was often at odds with London’s representation.

Merricott managed to make himself present for any question Hewell might pose while at the same time blending discreetly into the background of the small office. Toby’s presence was harder to ignore. The lad rustled ledgers, sorted letters loudly, and was constantly banging in and out through the rear door to attend to the horse and various other responsibilities of a rural postal clerk.

After an hour spent in a survey of the most superficial aspects of the office’s functions, Hewell set aside his magnifying glass and let it be known that Merricott was at liberty to be more forthcoming.

“I wonder whether you might educate me regarding any local, shall we say, irregularities. When it comes to postal standards, that is.”

“Certainly, Inspector,” said Merricott, and followed this by waiting silently.

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“I await explication.”

“Of what, sir?”

“Local irregularities.”

“I would not tolerate them, Inspector. I’m sure London would take a dim view of that.”

“Do you not sell, in addition to the standard Penny Black, some other form of postage?”

Merricott’s expression turned from bland to befuddled.

“Other form? Only the Penny Black, sir. We are not as remote as all that. I have heard tell of counterfeits in circulation elsewhere, but we’ve seen no sign of them here.”

“Well, you wouldn’t recognize a good forgery, now would you? But come, come, that’s not what I’m getting at. Today I spotted another stamp, of a violet hue—”

They were becoming aware of an increasing hubbub from the back room, and at last Merricott jumped to his feet and called, “Toby! What the blazes are you crashing about in there for?”

“Tea, sir!”

Merricott settled down again and resumed his guided finger-tour of the contents of his desk. Toby emerged a minute later with a peeling and blistered red and black japanned tray, upon which rested three cracked cups and a fissured, fuming teapot. His cheeks pink with embarrassment, he poured for the two men and then flushed further when he realized he had included his cup among theirs. He begged their pardon for his presumption and started backing out of the room, taking his empty cup along.

“I wonder, Mr. Merricott,” said Hewell, arresting the boy’s retreat, “if you might be so kind as to allow me to accompany young Toby on his rounds tomorrow.”

“Are the maps not sufficient?” Merricott asked.

“They tell only part of the story, at least from my perspective. A guide well versed in the environs gives a deeper understanding of the ordinary obstacles. I am far from seeing how any sort of irregularity is possible in such a well-ordered office as yours, Mr. Merricott, so the trouble must lie outside it.”

“Thank you, sir. And thanks to London for its trust. I see they have sent their finest. Toby! Tomorrow you are at Mr. Hewell’s disposal, understood?”

“What… will, will you then join me on my route?”

“Indeed,” said Hewell. “I shall return at first light.” For it had grown dark as they worked, and it had been the longest sort of day, comprising a journey followed not by rest and recuperation but by work and still more work. Hewell had but a handful of days for his investigation and dared waste none of them; he also dared not return to London without an explanation, and ideally a solution put in place. He doubted he could solve the issue of mysterious figures running across wooded roads and upsetting horses with their sinister costumes, but issues involving the mail could surely be sorted.

Toby raised the cup to his lips and sipped air, his teeth clattering on the rim. “First light,” he said, and bounded backward out of the room. More clatterings ensued and then the boy resumed his work. Hewell heard the scratching of a pen.

“A diligent lad,” he said.

“Toby? A very industrious lad, yes. Deliveries twice, sometimes three times a day. Our residents are avid correspondents. He lives in the back there; no family worth mentioning, so I’ve taken him in. At times I’ve had to prevail upon him to slow down, if only for the sake of poor old Eglentine.”

“You’ve a literate population, then.”

“You will find many good souls, especially among our youth, who are charitable with their time and use it to help the unlettered. They compose missives where once they might have gone visiting. In some ways, it worries me, the decline in social intercourse. And yet the post office has benefitted thereby… and it does keep the young ones out of trouble.”

“Would you say this might be the cause of a recent increase, even an overabundance of mail?”

“It might appear so, but the increase in postage has been slight. No letter travels unless it has been stamped. No stamps are sold but in this office. And there has been no noticeable increase in postal sales. Therefore…” With a plain-dealer’s shrug and open hands, he demonstrated the simplicity of the problem: there was none.

Toby put his head through from the rearmost room. “Night mail is accumulating, sir. I’d best attend to it.”

“Don’t you dare risk Madame Eglentine in the dark, Toby! I won’t have it!”

“No, sir. It’s a fine night, I’ll have no trouble on my own two pins.”

Merricott gave him a nod, but Hewell merely blinked. After a few moments, he pleaded fatigue and excused himself, leaving the postmaster to begin whatever shop-shutting he normally conducted.

Out in the dark lane, Hewell stood quietly watching and listening until he saw a tall figure pass through a far-off haze of light. The long-legged character strode away from Floss’s inn. The inspector headed after him.

Beyond the faint light cast in the lane by the homes and shops of Binderwood, where the buildings grew sparser and the distance between them greater, Hewell’s eyes had to catch what glimpses they could by starlight. There was just enough of this astronomic glow to keep the striding shape in sight without putting himself at risk of having his footsteps overheard.

* * *

Spectralia’s Courier was in a state of panic. He had never felt such dread, not through all the conflicts and quarrels that had beset the Kingdom during his tenure. The Dispute of the Seventeen Borders; the Deputation of Ghosts; the Battle of the Sea Stars—none of these events had involved him directly. Even the War of the Woods, in which he was conscripted, had been fought and finished quickly, resolved with several duels, one sword fight, and a formal armistice followed by cake. Although the Kingdom had certainly been in danger and dealt with its share of spies and subterfuges, the threat had never before come from beyond. Internal pressures were one thing. Civil wars flared up continually, but Her Ladyship, the Ghost Queen, had a strong and fair hand when it came to managing her subjects. This was a different matter. What bulwarks could she erect against the actions of external principalities? What chance had Spectralia against the far-off yet famously meddlesome influence of London? The people there obeyed no monarch but their own!

In darkness, moving stealthily down astral paths known only to Initiates, the Courier Tobianus reminded himself that his duty was not to solve these problems but simply to report them. The Ghost Queen, once roused and enlightened, would certainly know what to do.

But arriving at the meeting place, Tobianus discovered that word had spread already and his errand in this instance proved superfluous. Several dozen subjects of the Ghost Queen, apprised by the Terrors themselves, had gathered in the dark glade near the Grimstock Menhirs—those standing stones older than London but by no means as ancient as Spectralia. In the lee of the stones, they guarded a lantern and shared what they knew while waiting for the pale Queen to pass judgment. When Tobianus finally caught sight of her, she appeared to be listening patiently with closed eyes to their worries. Hearing of his arrival, her carmine eyes flashed open. She beckoned him forward and asked him to contribute whatever unique information he might possess. Under her warm regard, he felt his fear melt away. The Queen knew already of the convocation at the Oblivious King’s estate, where the breach of security had been observed at first hand. The Royal Terrors were her eyes and ears in that place, so of course she knew whatever they knew—and in fact they knew far more than the Courier regarding the disposal of the mail he had delivered.

“We know he studied a Ghost Penny,” said the Queen, and the twin red Terrors nodded. “From this he may infer, eventually, the existence of our post.”

A murmur swept the gathering.

“I am to take him on my rounds tomorrow,” said Tobianus. “He will accompany me throughout day, which means the Spectral Mail will stall completely.”

The Queen dismissed his fears with a small flick of her hand. “For the duration of this emergency, We are suspending the Courier’s exclusive contract and putting all delivery in the hands of the citizens. Ferry your own correspondence. If you wish to pool your efforts, We will leave that to your discretion. Use the astral paths. Eschew the main routes. And especially avoid engaging with the Courier while he is compelled by the Inspector.”

“But who will tabulate the Motivations?” Tobianus asked. “My quarters are under scrutiny. I dare make no calculations.”

“Again, for the duration of the emergency, all citizens are to be responsible for their own tabulations. We hereby suspend the Haruspices of the Shuttle and refer you to rely on the actions of dice, as in days of old. We trust you have all retained the original Codex of Action and Circumstance. If your copy has been misplaced, you will need to confer with a neighbor.”

Apparently many copies had been misplaced, which pleased Her Eminence not at all. Without the basic Concordance, they were all at odds and evens; her ongoing addenda were useless on their own. Various complaints were made regarding the clumsy process for emergency Concatenation. Few remembered how it was done, many of the original dice had been misplaced or swallowed by pets and small children, there was endless room for erroneous interpretations, &c., &c. At last the Queen was forced to make a ruling.

“Very well,” she said, without hiding her exasperation. “We will perform one final Compilation tonight, before the Inspector puts the Courier under compulsion. The matter will be submitted, all possible actions Concatenated, and a course revealed. We will rule for the collective, but each of you must then make your own tabulations until the threat passes. Therefore watch carefully. We are disappointed, however. It was never Our intention that the knowledge would settle in one place, the procedures forgotten by all of you. That is a dangerous way to organize the Kingdom, for centralized knowledge is vulnerable and easily lost. You must, in future, do better.”

A light rain began to fall as the Queen and her chastened cabinet adjourned. She was wrapped in water-resistant robes of state and her sedan chair readied; and then off they went on the public road, fortunately little traveled at such an hour.

The Kingdom was a perfect square and their destination lay in the northwesternmost corner. No need was there to consult a map, for in its superficial aspect, Spectralia exactly corresponded with the familiar demesnes of Binderwood. The true measure of the Ghost Kingdom extended into spiritual depths. It was a land of mysteries, carefully papered over, only to be peeled away through an unending series of Initiations. Tobianus had been granted six of these. Certain citizens had three times that number. The Royal Terrors claimed their Queen had bestowed them with three and thirty Initiations, all in the course of empowering them to look after her affairs.

Any (purely hypothetical) outsider, following on their heels in the dark, damp night, would see only the common byways marked on any map. But for the citizens of Spectralia, the path was illuminated by numberless Evocations. They passed the Dire Domicile, from whence an evil light leaked out, known as the source of the Luminous Scourge, which had stricken children and kine alike and was avoided by all, despite the good-natured widow who appeared to inhabit the place. Then followed the Cavernous Extant, a pitted pasture riddled with tunnels and subterrene architecture built by a race of serpent men widely hoped (but not proven) to be extinct. Beyond was a copse that must never be crossed—the Copse Uncrossed, they called it, simply because the Queen found the name amusing and none dared question her wisdom, any more than they dared cross the copse. They skirted it discreetly.

At last they arrived at the Cot of Concatenation, and here the Courier was privately pleased to see that word of mouth and gossip had yet to supplant the Ghost Penny Post. Not a single member of the household was expecting the arrival of the Spectral Lady and her retinue. All the Cot’s inhabitants were forcibly roused, that the Weaver could be put to work. There was some consternation due to the hour and the Weaver’s advanced age; outnumbered by the presence of so many loyal subjects, however, the complainers gained no foothold with their sleepily mutinous mutterings.

The Weaver’s frailty was a threat to the Spectral Crown’s continued existence, but it appeared both she and the Kingdom would survive another night. Her stalwart grandson, the Cotter himself, volunteered to feed the flame and boil up vapors enough to power the steam-stoked Loom, but the Queen insisted that tonight they would rely on older methods. As the Weaver sorted strands of wool, all those assembled stated their names and status in service to Spectralia. For each citizen, a thread of yarn was drawn. A tally was made also of the unrepresented citizenry, for not every subject was free to leave their home and join the Court in darkness, much as the Queen might have wished it. While the Weaver sorted, the Queen busied herself with her combing-cards, punching holes into the rectangles of thick cardstock in the patterns she had devised to represent both the open-eyed will of the Kingdom and the actions of blind fate. She handed the cards to the Weaver. The old woman fit the boards into her Loom, then set to weaving. It was slow and quiet work as the shuttle wove, and Tobianus dozed and woke several times while the Cotter made tea and offered it about with oatcakes. The Ghost Queen never nodded. Her bright red eyes watched enrapt as the blind fingers danced; as she studied the weave that gradually emerged, her expression grew solemn and skeptical. At last they reached the end of what the cards had written and the strands of wool were severed. The Queen took the length of cloth and laid it across her knees, studying the pattern writ in textiles.

“Weaver, your job is done.”

“Oh, aye, Your Majesty!”

“Hm… We chose no strand for the Inspector, and yet his presence is everywhere in this. With regard to the Kingdom, only a few of us are specifically addressed in these Motivations, our Courier chief among them.”

“Yes, my Queen,” said Tobianus.

“Tomorrow, along with your regular mail, you are to carry one letter of the Ghost Penny Post. You will receive it first but deliver it last, and deliver it only to Us. Understood?”

“Yes, my Queen.”

“The Royal Terrors shall see you have it before your departure. You will make no effort to hide it from the Inspector, but you will not permit him to touch it until your regular route is done. London’s hand in this is clear: as an agent of the competing post, this letter is for him alone to deliver. Tobianus, We will leave you to determine your own course. Your facility with the dice is almost the rival of Our own.”

“Why, thank you, Your Majesty!”

“The remainder of you shall spend the day in ordinary pursuits. At midnight, we will all reconvene at the Specter’s Seat. Tomorrow night will be as taxing as this one, We suspect. Therefore return to your homes and sleep. We release you now—all but the Terrors, of course.”

The party dispersed into the spongy, silent night, plashing through puddles, the risen moon a grinning lookout playfully dodging clouds.

As Tobianus picked his way back to the post office, he tried to slip free of his conviction that for Spectralia, all was about to be forever altered. But his Queen would surely say that change was the eternal nature of things. Change, chance, and choice. This was the very essence of the matter addressed by Concatenation.

He had a shiversome moment when he felt sure he spied a shadow skulking in the lane beyond the post office, then a flare of light from the front door of the inn picked out the silhouette of a man just entering. Recognizing the figure of Floss the innkeeper, his worries eased somewhat.

Madame Eglentine pleaded with him fruitlessly for favors as he passed her paddock and went in through the rear of the post office. He lit a lamp and stoked a very small fire in the very small stove, just enough to take off the chill. Then, settling down with a cup of cold, watery tea, he sat on the end of his rather lumpy bed, reached between his feet, and fished about until his fingers found a small box on the floor. From this he took a tattered notebook, its pages filled with columns of numbers and corresponding text. Beneath the book of tables lay a rattling half-dozen multifaceted dice. From the end of the bed, he could lean forward onto a wobbly secretary, bracing it with his elbows. He pulled the lantern closer and rolled two dice clattering across the deal surface, warped and ringed with the pale ghosts of wet saucer bottoms.

Totaled up, the pips amounted to 21.

Tobianus opened the book of correspondences, leafed to the section that looked most fitting to his situation (“Friend or Foe: When Faced With a Stranger, Some Affinities”), and ran a finger down to 21:

Bold and yet invisible, the ghosts that guard Spectralia urge substantiation. Be thou therefore like a ghost, aflit by day, and yet substantial in full dark.

Toby planted his elbows more firmly on the desk that he might hold his head in place. From the Courier, for much of the remaining night, there issued a series of low, perplexed moans.

* * *

Hewell was roused by roosters, having slept only fitfully, his dreams riddled with the weird scenes he had witnessed. His boots were still wet and he was grateful he had brought a spare coat, easy to find by touch in the dim gray light as it was one of his few remaining dry garments. Downstairs, he found Floss and his wife already about. She scowled at his muddy footwear, then muttered something about parties that thought so little of their responsibility that they felt at liberty to “run about at all hours,” speaking as if for her husband’s benefit but clearly concerned with the habits of their lodger. Hewell paid a perhaps unconvincing amount of attention to his breakfast of stout and cheese, then, with boots still damp, fled into the puddled street, escaping just as the inevitable quarrel broke out behind him.

Toby looked wan with exhaustion, but Hewell refrained from inquiring as to how he had slept. The lad spent some time sorting the mail, brewing tea, readying the morning’s deliveries, and sleepily answering Hewell’s questions, although queries and responses sounded similarly stilted. As it happened, they both awaited the arrival of a dispatch whose eventual discovery proved something of an anticlimax. Mr. Merricott announced the official start of business, discovering as he opened the door that an envelope had been shoved under it. “Unstamped and unaddressed. What are we to make of this?”

Toby plucked the letter from Merricott’s fingers and secured it in his courier’s pouch. “I’ll bring it along, sir, and see if anyone recognizes it. Mr. Hewell, if you’re ready, we can look to borrow an extra mount, but often I go on foot if there’s no great urgency.”

“The day being fairer than the night, I have no objection to a leisurely tour.”

They embarked on a route that somewhat recalled Hewell’s dank trek of the night before, except that they stopped at almost every door. The citizens of Binderwood appeared to be great correspondents, in keeping with current trends that Hewell was used to hearing pronounced “worrisome.” People no longer went visiting; so ran the complaints. They sat in their homes, both consuming and composing endless floods of correspondence. The art of conversation was a thing of the past! It was letters people wanted now and nothing else would do. They poured their meager monies into paper, ink, and postage. The post office, as Merricott had noted, benefitted thereby; stationers were in Heaven; but still somehow it was a curse on society. Nor was it only youth who were afflicted. Grown women—even men!—devoted themselves to the frivolous pastime. The fact that Victoria’s royal visage bedizened the humble Penny Black confirmed all conspiratorial fears that the monarchy was behind this epistolary threat to civilization.

“What can be done about it?” the worried critics of postal trends demanded of Hewell.

“Probably nothing,” was his usual response, and he was content with that. Still, in pursuit of his employment, nothing was not an official option. And he was quite busy after all, keeping up with a certain long-legged fly named Toby.

Near noon, they walked the drive to Pellapon Hall, and Hewell noted Toby darting nervous, expectant glances at a certain curtained window of the upper floor. Above the second-story windows were several widely spaced portals, each matched to a roof peak.

“Perfect for concealing madwomen,” Hewell quipped.

“Why ever would you say that, sir?” asked a suddenly pale Toby.

“Never mind, lad. Novels are the staid diversion of an older generation that I fear will find no grip among your excitable peers.”

As they mounted the lichen-colored steps, the front door opened. The Pellapon twins stood there, hands outstretched for Toby’s delivery, but a tall and almost skeletal form rushed from the dimness, took Hewell by the shoulder, and compelled him deep into the house. Other than the two investigators the parlor was empty, and the detective shut the door behind them to ensure it remained that way.

“Hewell, we have much to discuss,” said Deakins with grim authority, speaking in a hoarse whisper. “I have made several discoveries and am on the verge of greater. I looked for you at the inn last night, but you were—”

“Out, yes, I often cannot sleep in unfamiliar quarters, and so I walk about to exhaust myself. Had I known you sought me, I would have come to visit.”

“I was hardly here myself. Strange goings-on. Furtive meetings. And much of it centered on this very house.” He clenched Hewell’s elbow and drew him in closer. “Tell me, sir—what have you discovered? If we put our clues together, the truth cannot elude us both.”

“Nothing has come my way, I’m afraid,” said Hewell. “With careful study of the postal procedures I have found a few discrepancies, easily corrected. Of course, my investigation is not complete, but—”

“I on the other hand have found what I believe to be a forger’s den,” said Deakins urgently, and stabbed a bony finger at the threadbare carpet beneath their feet. “In the cellar, sir. A small press suitable for printing currency. The plates are hidden away, but they cannot hide the stains of colored ink.”

“Perhaps there is a more innocent explanation. A small press may also be used to print festive broadsides for childish amusement.”

“This is no game, Hewell. In the woods, I have seen figures consorting. Figures of a decidedly weird aspect.”

“Surely you do not believe there is some… supernatural explanation?”

“The diabolic specter that attacked our carriage—”

“Mr. Deakins, I took you for a man of methodical detection. I would be disappointed to learn that you look to intangible—”

Deakins stopped him with a hand to his chest. “I am a man of tremendous imagination—that is my chief instrument, sir! However, my evidence is most substantial. Look here.”

From his inner pocket, he produced a crumpled sheet of paper, a letter writ in fine script with violet ink. It trembled between his fingers, but he would not let it loose despite the difficulty this afforded Hewell as he tried his best to read its fevered passages, succeeding only in snatches.

…a party of four shall advance north from the Serpent’s Lair… at the dungeon’s threshold, await instructions, for the winding stair is certainly entrapped… regarding encounters at the Green Monkey’s Tomb, take three cups of jade tea and consult the Augury of Night…

“Poetry?” Hewell ventured.

“Poetry? It is conspiracy! A cabal within this very house. Unbeknownst to Lord Pellapon, but dependent on his oblivious nature.”

At that moment, the door swung open and Lord Pellapon himself looked in. “Gentlemen! There you are. Mr. Hewell, I trust your investigations proceed apace. The postal courier dawdles in the hall. It is most unseemly. I will lose Tilly over such irregularities. Mr. Deakins, you mentioned developments?”

“Not as such yet, no,” Deakins said to Pellapon. “We have some increasingly tangible suppositions at the moment. But soon, very soon, I believe we shall have concrete results to lay before you, Hewell and I.”

“Glad to hear it, very glad.”

“We shall meet later, to confer,” the detective said quietly to Hewell. “I expect to have more proof by tonight, and perhaps the culprits themselves in hand. I may need your assistance. For now, betray nothing and trust no one. We will play the hand we’re dealt, and play it as two fellows well versed in bluffing.”

“You have my full confidence and you will receive whatever cooperation you need,” Hewell assured him, although he had seen no evidence whatsoever that Deakins understood even the basic principles of bluffing.

Toby waited at the bottom of the steps, visibly anxious not to fall behind with their deliveries. Hewell’s agitation suddenly became a match for the boy’s, a nervous nausea rising from the pit of his belly as if his heart were one of the dozen leeches in Dr. Merryweather’s celebrated Tempest Prognosticator, desperately throwing itself toward the minuscule hammer that sounded a warning bell. He dispelled much of the slimy dread by walking vigorously, so that by the end of the hornbeam drive he was feeling less oppressed; but the sense of an oncoming storm was still with him.

“Are you unwell, sir?” Toby inquired.

“Well enough, lad. Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

The Ghost Queen rose later than she had intended, given the importance of the day. The Terrors had left word of their successful delivery, so the first piece was in place. But Spectralia remained in grave danger and she must not lower her guard until the emergency had passed. She was still not entirely sure of its nature.

Although she had read the Concatenated Motivations to her subjects in a voice of supreme confidence and authority, in truth the compiled results of the Weaver’s carding were exceedingly vague and she had taken numerous liberties in her interpretation, erring always on the side of offering reassurance. The tabulations could only be precise in addressing dilemmas that admitted to bifurcation. “Shall I respond to my suitor? Yes or No? Which fork of this road should I take? Right or Left? Should I climb to the attic or descend to the cellar?” With dice, and especially her ivory Ptolemaic of twenty facets, she could select from a much wider set of possible paths. But she had not yet discovered a foolproof way to reduce all life’s questions to such a rubric. The card technique she had devised—based on the work of Jacques “Digesting Duck” Vaucanson, coupled with her own method of mechanical compilation—allowed another approach to analysis, but it was still more suited to fabricated situations than to the tangled weft and warp presented by reality.

Fortunately, she had founded Spectralia with a poet’s sensibility, which she leaned upon in times of uncertainty. Even when a course could be determined by rolling dice, the path beyond the first few steps must be elaborated if not improvised—spelled out and developed in detail. In this, her muse had served her well.

Each day began with an hour of historiography, the fabric of Spectralia spun in careful script in the pages of her minuscule books. When the work of word-spinning and world-weaving was done, the Terrors took the volume to be thread-bound and placed alongside the myriad others that made up an ongoing illuminated history of the Kingdom. Ordinarily she would then spend the rest of the morning deciding the fates of her subjects—all those who acknowledged her dominion within the square borders of Spectralia—but today contained more urgent business. It had rained in the night and the woods would be ideal for a harvest. She called the Terrors to equip an expedition.

The day was brisk; the wind from the sea made her shrink into her wraps. The wheels of her conveyance juddered unpleasantly over every twist of root or rocky stub. Deep in the shade of the Pellapon Woods, they pushed her to and fro until she spied the purple caps and yellow veil of the ghost mushroom, growing in a fairy circle at the base of a blasted oak. The caps stained her gloves as she gathered three of the dozen or so that grew in the mold, and then the Terrors wheeled her back to her alchemical lab. Belladonna berries and other elements waited in tincture, but it was the ghost caps that exerted the key influence and she prized them for their freshness. In a mortar she made a grainy purple paste thinned with spirits and various liquors, then blended this with the other tinctures.

She set aside most of the violet solution as ink for the next special printing of Ghost Pennies, but a small flask she extended to the Terrors. Four hands reached for the purple vial, but she held it back a moment.

“You are Protector Princesses,” she said emphatically, to impress them with the gravity of their errand. “Behave like such for once. Cook will admit you and identify the portion to receive Our sacrament.”

Thus the affairs of the Kingdom kept her busy until well past nightfall.

* * *

No sooner had Toby returned from one circuit of the district than they arrived back at the office to discover the next mound of missives waiting. Merricott cheerily handed them over, and Toby accepted his new assignment with a buoyant optimism that Hewell found exhausting, as it appeared to indicate that the lad thought he would soon come to the end of the work—an impossibility, given that the mail would never cease to flow. As a senior of the postal system, it behooved him to show no sign of impatience or fatigue, but Toby’s unstinting enthusiasm proved difficult to match. After a time, Hewell fell into a daze, following along without much attention to the particulars. He had long since memorized their route on the postal map he carried and felt he could have taken over Toby’s duties with little trouble.

It was not until sometime after nightfall that the day’s final delivery was made and they returned to the post office one last time. Merricott had long since removed himself homeward, to dinner and to bed. Toby shared a light repast of bread and cheese they had collected on the final approach. These sat poorly with the earlier meal of crab apples they had picked along the road and eaten as they walked.

Hewell made no mention of the night mail and prayed that Toby would not mention it, either. He wished to be done with this day, if only it might be done with him.

As they finished their meal, Toby said quietly, “I feel that I can trust you, sir. More, She has hinted that I can.”

“She?”

“In time, sir. In time. We have one last letter to deliver. Would you care to come along?”

“Something tells me that I might,” said Hewell, and he looked on in fascination as Toby opened his courier pouch and drew out the blank envelope he had secreted there that morning. It had traveled with them all day, neither of them remarking on it, but a haunting presence nonetheless. The envelope was unsealed, and Toby bowed the sides that he might reach in and retrieve a piece of folded paper. Opening this revealed a blank sheet and one loose postage stamp. It was the same Hewell had seen on the letters delivered to Pellapon Hall the prior day: violet and blotched, both regal and malignant.

“I have for you, sir, the penny stamp of our Kingdom. We call it the Ghost Penny.”

“I assume it will cost me a penny, then?”

“As you say, Mr. Hewell, and well worth it.”

Hewell handed over his solitary copper, glad that he always kept one on hand in the event of just such an emergency—one never knew when a letter might need mailing, and not even an officer of the Royal Mail could post correspondence without a stamp.

Toby accepted the coin and cupped it in his hands. He pursed his lips and puffed away the crumbs of bread and cheese from the tabletop where they had dined, then opened his hands and released not only the penny but a pair of dice. And not typical dice. One was cubic, but its pips were replaced with asymmetrical scratches, perhaps hieroglyphs. The other had more faces than Hewell could count without losing track and was marked with Greek letters. Toby examined them both closely, then took a small hand-bound volume from his breast pocket and opened it to a page on which grids were filled with marks corresponding to those on the dice.

“Very well,” Toby said to himself. He then handed the blank paper and envelope to Hewell with odd, stiff formality. “Seal this up as if you’ve written a letter to be mailed, then stamp the envelope.”

Puzzled but amused, Hewell folded the sheet several times and slipped it into the fibrous envelope. He then took up the Ghost Penny and regarded the pale visage upon it, with its single blurred red eye. The backside was sticky with a wash of gum arabic and the purple stain had bled into it.

“I require something with which to dab the stamp,” Hewell said.

“It is traditional to place the Ghost Penny on your tongue and rest it there a few moments,” Toby said. “That will be moisture enough. Like the Penny Black, it is self-adhesive.”

Hewell licked the violet stamp, surprised to discover that it tasted of those very flowers, with a sugary sweetness that barely masked an underlying bitterness. His fingers, as they smoothed the stamp in place, were all atremble.

“And now, by the ruling of the Concordance, I am to show you this.”

Toby spread out a district map. At first it appeared identical to the one Hewell carried, all its features familiar from the day’s wanderings. However, the place-names and designations were markedly different. The main street was labeled as The Row of Silent Ones. There were a Ghastly Bypass and Staring Knolls; also Tiny Gnashers—a bridge above the Ghoulfast Cataract—which he had seen himself that day and crossed repeatedly on that selfsame bridge, although he could easily have waded the so-called cataract (in truth a very small weir) without wetting his knees. Toby ran a finger along a dotted, circuitous path marked as the Ghost Road, which touched each location on the map. “This is the route I take when performing my secret post, sir. We will follow it tonight, to reach the Specter’s Seat.”

At the bottom of the map, Hewell finally spied a legend, neatly calligraphed: Spectralia.

Deakins was right, he realized. This was a game. And although he had never been fond of time-trivializing amusements, he found himself caring very much about the outcome—thrilled to be engaged in it.

Seeing the district annotated with unfamiliar designations, he wondered what world he had been led through all that day. This one had slumbered unseen within it—unseen by him, that is, for it occurred to him that Toby saw them both.

And the others—Binderwood’s bewildering populace—how many of them took part in this game? Last night, stalking Toby through the fields and finally to the Cotter’s hut, he had seen men, women, children—the aged and the spry—all attending to the strange cowled figure in the wheeled chair. A soft yet rough voice—feminine and ageless—few of her words had reached him. But for her audience they appeared to hold great power.

Tonight he supposed he would hear them for himself.

“You must address your letter, sir.”

“Oh, yes. To whom?”

“To yourself.”

Hewell blinked, dipped a pen, and did as he was told while Toby watched closely. He tried to pass the letter to the boy but was refused. “This one is yours to deliver.”

They set off without further delay. The Ghost Road ran parallel to the public road in many places, even crossing it on occasion. They went in silence. Hewell soon found that they did not walk it alone. From certain houses as they passed, costumed figures emerged and fell in behind them. Horns and scales, masks of textiles, claws purloined from taxidermied creatures. None spoke. The cortege added to a growing sense of immanence; the night was gravid with revelation. Obscure emotions bloomed. Inner silences, thoughts forever unvoiced, threatened to make a thunderous clap that would deafen them all. It occurred to him he ought to have felt terror. Instead he felt wild joy.

As the woods closed in, scenes of greater weirdness greeted them. Half-lit tableaux, scattered scenes of figures caught in ritual or combat or some confluence of the twain. Two haphazardly armored knights faced each other, swords and shields held high, one shouting, “I cast Bolt of Oblivion upon thee!” To which the other countered, “My Looking-Glass Greatshield repels the attack, which returns to thee in triple force!” Then a supervisory figure in a starry cloak, after shaking dice in a leather cup, intoned, “Thou’rt both struck down in the same instant!” But as the third figure spoke and the first two staggered, they noticed the passing procession. They arrested their falls, gathered their weapons, and joined the silent marchers. The wizardly one gave Hewell a nod and a wink. He recognized the innkeeper Floss beneath the overshadowing hood, although Mrs. Floss was evidently not a participant in these matters.

Pellapon Hall loomed ahead of them, and within the great house loomed a greater one, spectral and mysterious like the grinning face that hides within the moon. Turning aside, they crossed the dewy fields and descended into a crevice in the cliffs above the sea. The waves cast luminous foam, futile yet persistent, onto rocks far below. The populace of Spectralia filed in behind Hewell and Toby. A bonfire burned in the lee of the cleft, barely troubled by wind. On the far side of the fire, back in a natural hollow upon a shelf of stone, he saw the cowled figure of the previous night. Her wheeled chair was off to one side, empty, for she had been set upon the ancient seat. Within the hood, her visage was dim; yet it took no effort for Hewell’s mind to fill that void with the likeness engraved on the Ghost Penny stamp.

He studied the letter he carried, comparing the face on the stamp with the one before him. The etched engraving, with its fine crosshatches and delicate dark borders, appeared to reach beyond the boundary of the stamp, creeping over his fingers, his sleeves, flickering out through the night. He looked up and saw the entire world becoming an engraving, redrawn continually by some fluid invisible hand that gave it animation, keeping it in constant, shimmering flux. The colors of objects barely stayed within the lines that sought to contain them, as if the inks with which the world was painted were trembling, blurring, running free. Hewell’s flesh swarmed with tiny etched lozenges and diamond-shaped pores, his skin but a net of finest mesh that barely held his soul. He was surrounded by figures out of a Goya aquatint, the night a subtle intaglio printed by some mysterious process. If the fire were but artifice, then how did it emit both heat and light? An inner flame drove everything, even the dark-edged rocks, even the painted night. The sky itself was out of register, with stars no more than offset dots of purple, pink, and blazing red, just like her eyes. Her eyes…

His gaze returned to the Ghost Queen of Spectralia, to her regard.

“Come forward, supplicant, and state your business,” said the husky, hidden voice he had heard the night before. He gladdened at the sound of it. Toby and some others produced a heavy mantle which they laid upon his shoulders. Tufted with fur and feathers, it suited the wildness he felt in his heart, the wildness of the creatured wood. Further, they rested on his crown a headpiece set with horns, and secured a griffin’s beak of papier-mâché that covered up his nose.

“I bear a letter,” he said from within the mask.

His voice appeared to echo from somewhere far out in the night. The rocky chamber had become a stage, but he could not tell if it were an opera house or a puppet theater. Hewell had lost all sense of scale.

“To whom is it addressed?” said the Queen.

He looked down to reaffirm what he had written. But what it said was not what he remembered having writ:

“To… to the Ghostmaster,” he said.

“Open it, then,” she said. “Open it and read what your heart has written there.”

His finely etched hands tore open the envelope. He started to hold out the letter, to show her that it was blank—but instead he discovered words crawling over it, characters engraved in violet ink. It was his own script, but somehow more beautiful than he had ever before accomplished. He stroked the words with his fingers and tasted violets; even his eyes filled with the flavor. The night reeked of wormwood and forest mold and the blood-tang of the sea. He was gazing too deeply into the letters. Retreating slightly, he began to read aloud to the assemblage, clinging to the words as if they would bring him back to some familiar footing.

“At the behest and pleasure of Her Majesty, Queen of Spectralia, I am honored to accept the post of Ghostmaster General. I swear to execute my duties with all honesty and to the utmost of my ability as Her Majesty’s agent in the realms beyond these borders. This post is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In defense of Spectralia, I rest my soul in the hands of the Silent Ones. May they end my life horribly should ever I betray the Spectral Lands. Your obedient servant, Lord Hewellian, Ghostmaster General.”

“Your heart’s wish has been revealed and granted, all in the same instant,” said the Queen. “Now come forward and prove your fealty.”

Two waifs in black garb with porcelain faces appeared from the darkness. Between them, hunched over so he looked no taller than they, was a prisoner. Their captive was blindfolded, muffled with a kerchief, his hands bound behind him. They forced him to his knees before the stone seat.

As if from a great distance, across a gulf of years, Hewellian recognized the private detective, Deakins.

“Let the prisoner account for himself,” said the Queen. The guardian twins undid first his gag, at which he gasped and began to plead incoherently, and then his blindfold. His eyes rolled but he did not appear to see them. When at last his gaze settled on the bonfire, he gave a little jerk and suddenly stilled. A moment later, he looked straight up at the moon and said accusingly, “You!”

And a moment after that: “We!”

And then: “It is… but we… I saw a hill of faces!”

“So have we all,” said the Queen. “But where does your path lead you?”

The detective’s confusion was so extreme that Hewellian stepped forward with a surge of pity and put himself between the captive and the Queen. “It takes him far from Spectralia, Your Majesty. I will lead him there safely. You may release him into my care. Come, my poor dear man.”

But as Hewellian stepped forward to untie the ropes, the prisoner started screaming.

“There can be no Initiation for him!” said the Queen in disappointment. “Fall back, Ghostmaster. He cannot see the truth of Our land and therefore cannot serve it. ’Tis unfortunate, for We are in need of a Spymaster, or even a plain Detective. Instead We find ourselves with a Prisoner. It is the one category of subject for which We have no use. There are no prisons here.”

“There are the Serpent Dungeons!” said one of the doll-faced girls.

Deakins swayed and subsided into a heap on the stones. His sprightly guardians tittered. “He has fallen into a swoon!”

“Not the mark of a Spymaster, surely.”

“We should dress him as a beast and turn him loose in the woods!”

“He would startle the ponies,” said the Queen. “That will never do.”

Hewellian bent to the fallen prisoner and loosened his bonds. It was impossible to care for the man while balancing the heavy griffin mask, so he set it on the ground and was shocked by the fierce face it presented. It was no wonder Deakins had collapsed when Hewellian approached.“Your Majesty, with my deepest respect, I request permission to restore Mr. Deakins to his bed, and thereafter ensure his safe return to London.”

The Ghost Queen inclined her hooded head. Some trace of violet magic still worked its way across her pale features. “You have your charge. We will communicate from time to time, but the Concordance must serve you in outlying regions. In the main, you must determine your own way. Tobianus will instruct you further.”

She offered her hand, and he kissed it, finding it cold and thin and ivory-white, the fingers stained with violet ink. Her crimson eyes flared at him. The night’s etched aspect was fading, releasing its grip, the world falling back into tones again, more mezzotint than engraving. He was losing hold of something ineffable, even as he secured his grip on Deakins. Prevailing upon Tobianus to take the detective’s legs, they lifted the man between them and headed out of the crevasse.

It was not far to Pellapon Hall across the ragged sward. They reached the house to find several stewards having hurried ahead to admit them. Slightly revived yet profoundly incoherent, Deakins was taken off to bed. Hewellian made hushed arrangements to retrieve him in the morning. Somewhere in the house, Lord Pellapon snored on, oblivious.

“And now, Master Tobianus, I believe I will require some instruction in my duties?”

“To the post office then, if it please you, sir.”

“Conduct me there, post haste!”

* * *

Hewell and Toby were still at work poring over tables, notebooks, and gazetteers when the strutting cocks of Binderwood began to crow in the courtyards and from atop the homely stone walls. There were several such false alarms before the sky truly began to brighten. It felt unwise to let Merricott find them buried in work at such an hour, so they arranged to part and join up again soon. While Toby went to borrow a cart from the livery yard, Hewell returned to the inn for his belongings. Only Mrs. Floss was awake to see him enter, and it was clear from her demeanor that she was none too pleased with having all the morning’s travails left in her hands. More comments were made about the shirking of responsibilities, but he felt quite sure this time that they were not intended for him. As he sipped scalding tea, with his luggage at his feet, he pondered the logistics of the day ahead. He would have to ride with Deakins in the mail car, no matter that it irked the sorting clerks.

Opening his valise, he gazed inside at the sheets of violet Ghost Pennies. These, Toby had assured him, were safe for common distribution, lacking the curious properties of those prepared by the Queen expressly for state ceremonies. Along with the stamps were several volumes full of tables to explicate various courses of action. Once Hewell left the region, there would be innumerable decisions that must be made in less time than it would take to send and receive Concatenated Motivations via mail from Binderwood. The telegraph might one day be a more efficient means of determining outcomes and charting choices, but in the meantime, there was a ghost-route to be inaugurated and administered. In return for service to Spectralia, he would keep a penny for every five Ghosts he sold. And Hewell expected to sell quite a few once he had expanded her reach to London—or, as it would henceforth be known, to Greater Spectralia. The Ghostmaster General had a great deal of work ahead of him.

Hearing the clatter of hooves and the squelching of wheels, he rose, bade his hostess good day, and helped Toby lift his trunk into the back of the cart to which he had hitched Madame Eglentine. Binderwood was soon out of sight behind them. Not long after that, they turned onto the hornbeam drive.

It was a strange, sullen morning at Pellapon Hall, the staff moving in an exhausted daze and the twins nowhere in evidence. Lord Pellapon strode up and down the corridor from the parlor to the foyer, irked as much by the private detective’s deterioration as by his defection. Nor did he appear overly grateful for Hewell’s offer to see Deakins safely back to London, and even into Bethlem Royal Hospital if need be.

“Nervous collapse is always a danger in one so entirely dependent on his imagination,” Hewell said discreetly, out of Deakins’ hearing.

“Then what about you? Do you not also rely on your wits?”

“Wits are not the same thing, Lord Pellapon. I am but a civil servant, dependent on my superiors. Thus I avoid the burdens of too much independence and leave the difficult decisions to others more visionary.”

Hewell led the docile, wide-eyed detective down to the cart and left him comfortably seated, humming to himself and counting his fingers until he proved he had hundreds of them. Hewell remounted the broad steps to take Lord Pellapon’s hand in farewell.

“I apologize for the twins,” said the elder man. “They both complain of exhaustion or they would be here to see you off. Deakins was a great favorite of theirs until… well, they cannot understand how such afflictions may affect a grown man. A shame about his investigation. You know, he claimed to be on the verge of some revelation. And now the matter of my wayward mail’s no closer to resolution. It’s all a muddle.”

“I don’t think the mail will trouble you any longer, Lord Pellapon. Upon thorough review of Merricott’s methods, I have suggested several procedural improvements—all minor, true, but cumulative in effect. Toby will see they are implemented immediately; you may rely on him to address your concerns. I believe you will note a distinct improvement from this moment forward.”

“Well, that’s fine news, then! Dull procedure triumphs where fancy makes no headway!”

“A sentiment worthy of enshrinement,” Hewell said, and stopped short, caught by a movement at an upper-story window. A face floated behind the glass. She was watching him, he realized with pride. His Queen!

As if sensing how his heart leapt out to her, she slowly opened the window so that he might see her without the distortion of glass or darkness. Her skin was paler than any ivory, her hair so white as to be almost blue, and her eyes glinted faintly like twin red stars. From either side of the window frame, two pairs of smaller hands reached in to settle a bright three-pointed crown upon her head.

“If I may,” said Hewell, “please tender my respects to the eldest Miss Pellapon.”

“The eldest?”

Hewell gave a slight wave to the Queen, but she responded not. He realized that her gaze, and her smile, were directed past him, to the cart, where Toby sat holding the reins. The lad grinned back, then noticed Hewell’s eyes upon him, whereupon he flushed and turned away, covering his sudden change of color by clucking imperiously at Madame Eglentine. When Hewell’s gaze returned to the upper window, he saw it had been shut and shuttered. The crowned white face was gone.

“Ah, so you have seen Eliza,” said Lord Pellapon. “She reveals herself to very few. She was always a fragile child, but by some miracle she survived the contagion that carried off her mother. I am fortunate to have the three of them as reminders of Lady Pellapon, God rest her.”

“Is it albinism that keeps her hid away?”

“The doctor assures me that her condition does not preclude fresh air and sunlight, but she would almost always rather stay indoors, composing these tales of hers, these… games. The servants and her sisters appear to find them engaging. I suppose she has a talent for it.”

Hewell received the impression that Lord Pellapon did not entirely disapprove.

With paternal pride he added, “I must admit, she is a help to me, especially when it comes to ordering about her diabolical siblings and keeping the staff in line when they have tired of my commands. Frail she may be, but not so frail she cannot rule the house.”

And more than that, thought Hewell, putting his hand to his heart, of which he silently acknowledged she was now the very queen.

* * *

“The Ghost Penny Post” copyright 2016 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar./Apr. 2016.

THE FINEST, FULLEST FLOWERING

A sour note shrieked from the limousine’s speakers, making Milston’s fingers curl in his lap. He took a moment to compose himself before rapping precisely, and with a now steady hand, on the glass separating him from the driver. The tone had droned into a hum that tunelessly dreamt of someday becoming hypnotic. “What is this we are listening to, and is there any way to turn it off?”

“Down, sir, but not off, I’m afraid.” The driver lowered the volume to a level barely audible; this was in some respects even more annoying. “Part of the colony’s ambiance, sir. Part of the design. Won’t be much longer though, sir. We’re almost there.”

“There” turned out to be a pale brown stucco bungalow, unremarkable except for the roof of green ceramic tile. From overhead, you might not see it among the trees. Everything here—from the hidden runway to the matte and muted colors of the limousine—bespoke discretion, if not outright camouflage. As he stepped from the car, and the driver came around to retrieve his single suitcase and worn black valise from the trunk, he heard the volume of the music increase again, and he realized it was everywhere, moaning from speakers in the trees. There was no turning it down. The sour notes, still plentiful, were also now unavoidable.

His luggage was placed on a cart. “Your bags will be waiting for you in your suite. But first, sir, your tour.” The driver bowed, ducked back into the limousine, and executed a turn that took the car back toward the airfield. Milston looked about, waiting for a word or direction from the plump older man who stood watchfully by the cart, presumably a concierge. “Am I to meet my patron here?” he asked finally.

“Mr. Milston, it is my great pleasure. Like you, I delight in anonymity. In fact, it has become essential to my survival. Without it, I could never travel—although at this point I rarely leave the island. All my needs are more than met here… as I hope they will be for you. Shall we begin?”

Milston took the proffered hand, found it dry, uncalloused, possessed of a faint tremor. “What am I to call you?” he asked.

“Patron would be perfect. I think you will find me worthy of the title. Nothing would please me more than to support your work. I understand you will need convincing, but surely you have already looked into my ability to fulfill my promises?”

A young woman in a dun uniform emerged from the bungalow to retrieve the cart. The men walked into the trees. They soon came out on a terrace overlooking hectares of manicured parkland. There were more jade roofed bungalows, but no buildings taller than three stories—nothing that stood above the trees. From the plane, as it descended out of blinding tropical clouds, he had seen breakers and beach on the far side of the island. Plenty of room for the Patron’s playground.

“Everywhere you wander—and I assure you there is no place off limits—you will come across beauties and wonders. My aim is to provide them in endless profusion. Of course, we are only a decade into the garden by now—barely out of the planning stages.”

A small silver car awaited them, an electric capsule mounted on a buried track. The Patron urged him in, and once they were seated, the tiny car glided down the sloped terrace. The ubiquitous drone of the music had modulated into something like a faintly complaining whine. The car sped through sculpture gardens and groves where avant-garde topiary trimmers had been at work.

“I will not attempt to impress you with the names of my gardeners. As with many I’ve hired, the best practitioners are known by name only to the connoisseur. I rely on cognoscenti to advise me in all things. Which is of course how you came to my attention. Your work is the finest in the field, and you are approaching the height of your expressive powers. I hope to provide the opportunity to explore avenues you might never have dared believe could open to you.”

The car rolled to a stop at another low, earth-colored villa, this one overlooking a lake. Fans of spray wavered against a backdrop of palms. The air was just warm enough to make the breeze delicious.

Inside the house, the music was muted to whatever managed to filter in from outside. “A home of this sort is what we provide initially,” the Patron explained. “With time, architectural variety is expected to arise, and you would be encouraged to help design your own ideal accommodations. A great deal of what you see is blank slate, unmolded clay… whatever medium suits you.”

They had come out into a room of several stories’ depth. The ceiling was all glass, flooded with sunlight, the cavernous space below filled with scaffolding. The center of all activity, suspended in the pit, was an enormous black stone over which dozens of artisans scrambled, busy with torches, chisels, drills. “A single iron meteorite, brought here at my expense, that Samira Potocki might pursue her inspiration. It is the heaviest single object ever lifted by air transport. I first had to commission and build a plane powerful enough to carry it. But expense has never hindered me. I liberate my artists to dream as big as they like… or as small. I just completed a STEM lab, for the whim of another resident who works at the level of the electron. Few will ever see the work he creates—but that is no longer the point of art, if it ever was. If the audience is properly appreciative, can it matter to the artist if that audience numbers only one? Ah, Samira! Meet our latest prospective colonist!”

She was a small dark woman in dusty coveralls, with sharp features and bright eyes. “There is nothing so radiant as an artist fulfilled,” the Patron said, and her smile supported his statement.

“Delighted,” she said. “I hope we will soon be neighbors.”

“What are you working on?” he asked to be polite.

“I’m not working on, I’m working toward.”

“I offer all my artists the space and resources they need to explore without worrying about arriving anywhere. For Samira, a meteorite… for you, I wonder? I hope to learn what I can offer, beyond the obvious supplies.”

Milston inclined his head, squeezed the sculptor’s hand briefly, and was ushered forward. Beyond the space full of scaffolding, outside again, another car waited to carry them deeper into jungle.

“You can of course walk, drive or be driven, or request any manner of conveyance,” the Patron assured him. “For some, the incubatory process is stimulated by aimless driving, so we have started on construction of a self-contained highway system. There are creative solutions to every need, when you have access to sufficient resources. Also, I detected perhaps a bit of a mutual spark between you and Samira? Let me assure you that privacy will be respected and promoted in a way the outside can never approach. My guests can explore any type of relationships they wish, without censure. Whatever limits you wish to impose on your own tastes, I leave you to set for yourself. I hazard no guess as to your predilections. Now… from the visual arts, to the audible.”

The building they next approached was a thin spire among the trees, itself a treehouse sheathed in translucent resin mesh. It was awkwardly placed in a scene of such balanced beauty. “One of our earliest residents,” the Patron said. “As you can see, he had a hand in his home’s design—and while his natural talents are many, in styling himself an architect I fear he might have finally overreached. Still, I do not like to inhibit my artists. This is all part of his growth.”

They rode a small cylindrical lift up the trunk of the tower, stepping out onto a circular loft that gave a view through the trees of distant shore and a misty estuary. Wide white birds glided toward the waves. Seated before the vista, as if controlling it from a vast console of sliders and keys, was a man with long, thinning grey hair.

The squonking of the island’s ongoing soundtrack grew aggrieved. “Our resident composer,” said the Patron.

“Why are you disturbing me? Have I not asked you repeatedly to leave me off your tour?”

The composer would not turn around. He treated them to a view of his bald, spotty pate, and that was all.

“In most cases, I have respected that wish,” said the Patron. “But I felt an exception was necessary.” The Patron turned to Milston with an apologetic expression. “From time to time I may insist on a patron’s privilege. I trust I know better than to abuse it. Consider that we only come to admire the view.”

“Well you’ve seen it. Now be off!”

“I have been enjoying your latest compositions very much, I should mention,” said the Patron with apparent sincerity.

The bony white fingers paused on the keyboard. “I am told that in certain of the residences, speakers have been disabled!” The air trembled with an extended note not quite of melancholy… not quite of anything specific enough to characterize. Milston found himself staring at the poorly manicured fingers, the ragged, bitten nails, like visual equivalents of the sounds that had accompanied his tour.

“A pleasure meeting you,” he said, but there was no verbal reply from the composer, just another misplaced warble, a sonic non sequitur that sent the birds from the trees.

From the treehouse they proceeded to a vast kitchen complex, where chefs with names he almost recognized ordered about kitchen staff of only slightly lesser celebrity. Lunch was served above the waves, on an enclosed pier from which he could look back toward the island or out toward the undisturbed horizon. Each dish was a revelation.

“Imagine such miracles at every meal,” the Patron said. “And in every aspect of your life and work. Does it tempt you? There is much more still to see, but I wonder what you think so far?”

“You are persuasive,” Milston allowed himself to say.

“Well, it is not I alone… it is the enterprise. What we have here is a place that allows the fullest, finest flowering of human endeavor, in all its variety. The arts are permitted come into their own. What I get out of all this is something I cannot describe. To be patron… there is no greater honor or pleasure. Now, shall we go? There are others to meet. A tiny portion of our residents, but it should give you a taste of all you’ll have access to. Ultimately, our greatest resource is the community we’re gathering.”

“Before we continue, I just want to clarify the one stipulation that I’m sure has been a sticking point for many before me. The fact that…”

“You can never leave?”

“That one, yes.”

“Our residents find security in certainty. I can bring anything I like here, to the island, but nothing gets out. Nothing, and no one. A prison, some have called it, but one that allows for utter freedom of expression. I should think you especially would find this liberating, given that your own work has been so restricted, curtailed, and banned outright.”

“What about the rest of the world? Don’t you wonder if you’re robbing them of something essential? Something they might miss?”

“Does the world deserve them, Mr. Milston? Would that world miss you?”

Milston, sitting very still, said nothing more.

“Shall we?”

They rose and walked along the pier, once more back to a silent silver capsule.

The rest of the day was spent in the company of an extraordinary variety of extraordinary people—poets, painters, planners, programmers. At sunset they joined a party being held in a plaza by the sea. Milston mingled and the Patron disappeared, but Samira soon found him and introduced him to still more of the colony’s residents. The composer did not attend the fete, but he was there in spirit with a brooding score that made them all laugh, eliciting frequent snide remarks.

“Please tell me you are a new composer,” said an elderly woman with reflective pupils, but then she stopped his mouth with a finger. “No, don’t! For now, let us leave some mystery. There is little enough of that here, though each new arrival brings the hope of it.” And she gave him a wine-soaked kiss, with an expertly placed but feeble grasp at his crotch, which cost him nothing to endure.

It was full tropic dark but still early when the Patron found him in the crowd, and pulled him aside once more. “Mr. Milston, I have given you a full day of my time. This is all I can offer a prospective resident, I’m afraid. In the morning, we either put you on a plane and you never hear from me again, or you wake to begin your new life here. If the former, I very much enjoyed meeting you, and I regret but respect your decision. If the latter, then you may sleep in as late as you wish. There will be plenty of time for further orientation, and I promise you, I will enjoy following your work, and look forward to learning from the master. Now, your suite is ready if you are.”

They rode a silver car in silence through a landscape of artfully illuminated fountains and pools. Guests walked among the trees, watching the car pass, as if wondering what choice he had reached. But there had never really been any choice to make. When the car stopped before the bungalow where the day’s tour had begun, he shook the Patron’s hand and said, “I appear to be jet-lagged, apologies if I have not quite been myself. I’m sure I’ll feel better after a night’s rest. Can we meet again sometime tomorrow afternoon?”

“Perfect,” said the Patron. “I’ll leave instructions that you are not to be disturbed. Good night. And welcome. You’ve made a splendid choice.”

The silver car whispered away.

The house was small, but it had all the comforts and conveniences. He unpacked his suitcases and put his clothes away; found a bottle of very old whisky and a box of very young cigars, but these were not what tempted him. He went out onto the terrace and gazed over the gardens. He was braced and waiting for the aimless soundtrack to make one more offensive squawk when, suddenly, it stopped. The sounds of island night crept in. It was bliss. The landscape was sparingly painted with light, evocative as a dream. He saw hints of buildings through the trees, the glow of ornamental ponds, white coral pillars, miles and miles of gardens. A distant spire that must have belonged to the composer, now retired for the night. In the absence of music he felt he could finally think, could finally imagine what might take its place, what this garden truly needed.

“The finest, fullest flowering,” the Patron had stated, and indeed it was true. The place was in full bloom. But every garden needed pruning, and a blossom deserved to be lopped before its prime had passed, before its petals fell.

He set his black bag on the table, thinking of tools he had always wanted but never bothered to acquire, never daring to think he might get to use them. But that could come later. For now, he had all he needed to get started.

He took out his prize set of shears, edges gleaming, of pristine surgical steel.

I’ll begin with that composer’s horrible, hideous, ragged-nailed fingers, he thought, looking off toward the dark house of sound, imagining notes that were very sweet indeed.

* * *

“The Finest, Fullest Flowering” copyright 2016 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Nightmare Magazine, June 2016.

AFTERWORD

One of the most famous techniques in film is the “dolly zoom” Alfred Hitchcock invented for use in Vertigo. At several key moments in the movie, while the camera pulls away from Jimmy Stewart, the lens zooms in. The angles skew, the mind boggles, the eponymous Vertigo ensues.

Reading back through all my short fiction, seeing it gathered in one place, moving through it quickly as I compose it in the frame of this book, I have frequently experienced a kind of “time zoom” vertigo. Apart from my writing, there’s not much else to cling to when I get dizzy. A story-obsessed lad of the Sixties, I find it suddenly fifty years later, and I’m still thinking of myself first and foremost as a writer, still wanting to be an always better one.

It’s what I’ve done. It’s what I do. I can’t see myself stopping.

My thanks to all those who have been with me along the way, sharing advice, encouragement, support. My editors, my teachers in school and out of it, my friends, my family.

And thanks especially to my readers.

BOOKS BY MARC LAIDLAW

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ISBN: 978-1-5323-1422-3

This ebook edition published in 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

Copyright © 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at marclaidlaw.com.

This ebook is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Understand that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you and the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design © 2016 by Nicolas Huck (www.huckworks.com).

Cover photocollage created by Marc Laidlaw based on a photograph by Marc Laidlaw.

Note

1

ICING: Incredibly Complicated Information Never Given.

Content

Marc Laidlaw
400 BOYS
AND 50 MORE
Short Stories

INTRODUCTION: 400 + 50 = 51

THE SEVENTIES: FAIL EARLY

SPAWN OF THE RUINS

TISSUE

RATTLEGROUND

THE EIGHTIES: PEAK OMNI

SNEAKERS

400 BOYS

THE RANDOM MAN

SEA OF TRANQUILLITY

MUZAK FOR TORSO MURDERS

SHUCK BROTHER

FAUST FORWARD

NUTRIMANCER

THE LIQUOR CABINET OF DR. MALIKUDZU

GOOD ’N’ EVIL, OR, THE ONCE AND FUTURE THING

LOVE COMES TO THE MIDDLEMAN

MIDDLEMAN’S RENT

THE FARMER ON THE WALL

BRUNO’S SHADOW

YOUR STYLE GUIDE—USE IT WISELY

MARS WILL HAVE BLOOD

UNEASY STREET

THE DEMONSTRATION

LOAVES FROM HELL

HIS POWDER’D WIG, HIS CROWN OF THORNES

THE NINETIES: FIRST-PERSON READER

WARTORN, LOVELORN

GASOLINE LAKE

WUNDERKINDERGARTEN

THE VULTURE MAIDEN

I.

II

III

IV

GREAT BREAKTHROUGHS IN DARKNESS

TERROR FAN

THE DIANE ARBUS SUICIDE PORTFOLIO

THE BLACK BUS

MAD WIND

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT

NETHER REACHES

TOTAL CONVERSION

THE NEW MILLENNIUM: HALF-LIFE & LESSONS HALF-LEARNED

SLEEPY JOE

CELL CALL

FLIGHT RISK

JANE

SWEETMEATS

EVALUATION OF THE HANNEMOUTH BEQUEST

AN EVENING’S HONEST PERIL

THE VICAR OF R’LYEH

LENG

BEYOND 2010: OVER THE INFLUENCE

POKKY MAN

THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED LOVECRAFT

FORGET YOU

BONFIRES

THE FRIGID ILK OF SARN KATHOOL

THE GHOST PENNY POST

THE FINEST, FULLEST FLOWERING

AFTERWORD

BOOKS BY MARC LAIDLAW

Copyright

Note