Table of Contents

Copyright Information

The Eyrie, by Ann VanderMeer

Mitigation Strategies, by Matthew Kressel

The Library: Book Reviews

Hidden in Rhode Island: An Interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan

Fishwish, by Karen Heuler

Portal, by J. Robert Lennon

Augusta Prima, by Karen Tidbeck

The Trojan Girl, by N. K. Jemisin

The Last Thing Said Before Silence, by Peter M. Ball

A Short Trek Across Fala Moor, by Mark Meredith

Love Thy Neighbor, by Seth Lawhorn

Lost In Lovecraft: A Guided Tour of the Dark Master’s World, by Kenneth Hite

The Future History of Cats, by Kurt Newton

About the Authors

WEIRD TALES 357

Copyright Information

Copyright © 2011 by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

The Eyrie, by Ann VanderMeer

Staff Changes at Weird Tales!

Before getting into the wonderfulness of this latest issue of Weird Tales, I’d like to talk briefly about the news most of you have already heard: Stephen Segal has left the magazine for an editorial position at Quirk Books, and I am assuming the position of Editor-in-Chief. I will also continue to serve as the fiction editor. In addition, Mary Robinette Kowal is on board as the Art Director, with Paula Guran serving as the Non-fiction Editor. Mary is a multi-talented artist, writer, and just general all-around creator—and a lot of fun, too. I’m also thrilled to welcome aboard Paula Guran as the non-fiction editor and webmistress. I’ve known Paula for years and I’m so happy to be working with her again. (Is it worth mentioning that this is the first time Weird Tales has had an all-female management team?)

As for Stephen—not to worry. He’ll still be around as Senior Contributing Editor and he will continue to play a part in the vision of what Weird Tales will be in the future. Stephen’s been a joy to work with over the past several years, and I thank him for his camaraderie and imagination.

After spending several months earlier this year researching and selecting the best weird fiction from the last one-hundred years for the upcoming anthology, A Compendium of Dark and Imaginative Fictions for CORVUS (co-edited with my husband, Jeff), I think I know a thing or two about weird fiction. And I just can’t seem to get enough of it. Any normal person would be burnt out on the subject by now, but not me. So you, lucky reader, will find the fruits of my continued obsession in these pages.

As evidence of the awesome weirdness in store for you here at Weird Tales, just take a closer look at this issue in your hands. Karen Heuler is back with another wild tale; this time about an unsatisfied woman. Be careful what you wish for, especially when your wish comes from a fish. And J. Robert Lennon invites us to cross through “The Portal” from our world into various others. Karin Tidbeck (a Swedish writer in her first US appearance) takes us from some other world back into our own in “Augusta Prima.” You’ll never look at a croquet ball the same way.

Just when we thought we’d seen it all and we’re too jaded by technology to be surprised by anything, we are swept into yet another world inside the intertubes with N.K. Jemisin’s “The Trojan Girl.” And I know you think that mimes are creepy but you have no idea how scary they are until you read Peter M. Ball’s story “The Last Thing Said Before Silence.” Finishing up this issue is a new Scottish writer, Mark Meredith, who takes us on a strange and wondrous walk.

So sit back and enjoy the trip!

Mitigation Strategies, by Matthew Kressel

After I graduated from Georgia Tech with a Computer Science degree (high honors), my college friends went off to work for corporations around the country, while I came home to my parents house on Long Island and spent an entire year drunk and stoned. Part of the reason for this was my friend and housemate who picked up his stuff one day, drove five hours to his parents’ home in Savannah, and blew out his brains in a bathroom with a small hand pistol his dad had left lying on a shelf.

Fucking Southerners and their guns.

But another part of me simply hated the whole idea of spending the rest of my life pounding keys in a cubicle. My dad, patient at first, saw his “gifted” son wasting his talents, and eventually connected me with a client-friend of his, one Dr. Joseph Fucho, a particle physicist affiliated with an Ivy League university. So on a bleak fall day under a spray of cold rain I drove out with my dad to Dr. Fucho’s ranch-house on eastern Long Island. The large home was on the top of a hill, which Dr. Fucho later told me (with mammoth pride) was one of the highest points on the Island. Yellowing maples and tall pines gave the impression that we were deep in a forest, though I knew from the drive up the hill that houses sat hidden just beyond the gray-green wall. Dr. Fucho took forever to answer the bell; we knocked and rang for ten minutes in the intermittent rain. At last he came out to greet us. He was in his fifties, skinny, balding, and had a gray beard.

“I got the grant,” he said as soon as he stepped off the stoop. “I was on the phone with them just now. Five million.” His sharp eyes peered at us behind glasses that hung low on his nose. He expected a response.

“Congratulations!” my dad said obsequiously. He was a sucker for smart people; before he decided on a career as an attorney he’d dreamed of being a physicist.

“No, it’s bad news,” Dr. Fucho said. “We’d asked for ten.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I just nodded and smiled and shook Dr. Fucho’s hand. He continued complaining about the grant, something do to with smashing meteorites. Then he went on about his wife and how troublesome she was, but I was cold and disinterested and really uncomfortable in the light rain. Every few seconds he’d peer at me, and I got a sense when I looked into his eyes that he was privy to something secret and special that kept him perpetually excited and terrified. I had noticed that expression a lot in the eyes of the super-intelligent at Georgia Tech, and I always wondered what it was that they saw. When I looked at the universe, I didn’t see wonder. I saw splattered brains on bathroom tiles and cubicle walls the color of TV static.

Finally he ushered us inside his house. It was large and luxurious and not well-heated and was full of all the books and artifacts and tchotchkes one would expect of a man who made science his life. He seated us at the kitchen island and served us hot tea. I felt shy and awkward and didn’t know what was expected of me. I thought of my friends Greg and Arthur and wondered if they were doing something fun right now that I was missing. Dr. Fucho handed me a thick glossy book, Near Earth Object Hazard Mitigation Strategies, while he and my dad talked legalese about Dr. Fucho’s pending divorce.

The book contained scientific papers about so-called “mitigation strategies” for hazardous NEOs—Near Earth Objects, asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The papers were dense with scientific jargon and mathematics, but I was a sucker for such things, even if I didn’t understand it all.

“Take a look at that,” Dr. Fucho said, “and we’ll talk.” His eyes met mine and I had a sudden rush of excitement. A hundred thousand college assignments, and none of them had meant anything. Here was my chance to do something substantial, something real.

I read through most of the book the next day. I learned about all sorts of strategies to minimize the potential hazards of NEOs. Destruction was the least favored; the asteroid was likely to fragment and multiply the problem. One paper suggested changing the albedo, or surface brightness of the asteroid by smearing one side with reflective paint. If this was accomplished early enough, solar pressure, however minuscule, was not negligible over the long term, and the force would change the orbital path. Another theory suggested exploding a neutron bomb near an asteroid, but not close enough to shatter it, so the resulting neutron pressure would alter its orbit. One paper, authored by Dr. Fucho, suggested using high-powered lasers to alter the orbit via photon pressure.

He called while I was reading. My father said to him excitedly, “He’s been reading it non-stop!” That made me proud; I wasn’t resting my dizzy head on a bar or toking carcinogenic resin from a bowl. I was caught in the act of learning. I slogged my way through the dry papers, but this was important stuff and I had a scientist and a father to impress.

My dad put me on the phone and Dr. Fucho said, “Why don’t you come and see me. How’s Thursday?”

“With my dad?”

“Just you.”

I swallowed. “Sure.”

When I hung up the phone, my father said, “He thinks you’re really smart. He said to me, ‘Steve, you’re son is brilliant.’”

I was flattered and horrified. Part of me suspected that Dr. Fucho was just buttering up my dad, since my father was his divorce attorney. But the other part of me worried that it was true. Being smart subjects one to all sorts of onerous burdens. I couldn’t just be. I had to do.

I drove out the next week, nervous as hell. I smoked a cigarette with the windows down, even though it was freezing out, in the hope that Dr. Fucho wouldn’t smell it on me and suspect my other life. For the past several months I’d been spending most of my days in a drunken, stoned, nicotine-hazed stupor. I fell asleep in front of the TV, and instead of looking for work, as I told my parents I was doing daily, I spent most of my time masturbating. Who the hell did Dr. Fucho think I was? I wasn’t brilliant. I was a fucking waste. A fraud.

This time he answered his door quickly. “They proved it,” he said. “It’s chaotic.” He acted like a friend had died.

We sat at the kitchen island. “What is?”

“The three body problem. For asteroids. One tiny nudge and the state quickly becomes unpredictable. It’s bad.”

“Why?”

“Because we can’t predict where these things will be. Not good.”

Scientists were never happy about things they couldn’t predict. But soon he was gushing about his research. He had been one of the pioneers of using lasers to correct optical distortions in telescopes due to turbulence in the atmosphere.

“Laser guide-star adaptive optics,” he said proudly. “They’re using it at Keck now.”

He had also done a lot of nuclear physics that he was both supremely proud of and very coy about. It slowly dawned on me—I wasn’t the most astute reader of human nature—that Dr. Fucho was an arrogant s.o.b. It was easy to see why his wife had wanted out of their marriage.

But I found him invigorating. I had been depressed for months, and this new jolt of enthusiasm, even if it was borrowed, felt good.

He wrote down some complex equations. He derived some more as I watched, nodding sagely as if I understood everything.

“I’m giving a conference next month in Geneva. I’d like to plot four mitigation scenarios in terms of their payload energies and coupling coefficients. Can you do that?”

“Based on this equation here?” What I really meant was, I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. I needed some major hand-holding.

He then calculated an example longhand—I was impressed by his ability to multiply numbers in his head—at the result of which he looked up at me. I realized this was a scientist’s long-winded way of saying, “Yes.” Demonstration by example.

Sure, I could program an equation. That was kid’s stuff. I relaxed a little.

Then he complained about his lethargic students at the community college and his hatred for pop culture, especially TV (but he still watched the Yankees) and how he preferred the Jewish kids growing up because they were more intelligent than the Italian kids who dominated his Brooklyn neighborhood and often beat him up after school, even though he was Italian too. (As a Jew, I suspected this was calculated buttering—the man was a master of calculation; but everything coming from his mouth sounded sincere.) After several hours my head was overflowing with facts and I was exhausted. At last he let me go.

Back home, my father said Dr. Fucho had called to talk about his divorce and had again commented on how smart I was.

Hey, no pressure or anything.

I started right away, plugging in his equations into a C program, and when that proved inadequate, I used Java. I started making rudimentary plots, and my dad gave me a book on methods of data presentation, which I didn’t open out of pride. I wanted to do everything myself. My friends called and I got high and drunk a few times. I worked on the program stoned and felt guilty, like I was polluting one world with the other.

A few days passed. The sun had set early; I was walking my dog around six p.m. and daydreaming of asteroids as I stared up at the stars.

One of them moved.

This was nothing unusual. I knew satellites could resemble stars when their metallic hulls reflected the sun. They would move across the sky quickly, fading as they moved into Earth’s shadow, or blinking as their spinning, angled hulls briefly caught the light. This one moved from north to south, slowly. I stopped and aligned my view of the satellite with the top of a telephone poll to make sure I wasn’t imagining the motion.

No, it was definitely moving with respect to the background stars. I watched it for a few moments. It stopped. Satellites didn’t stop; they fell perpetually toward a planet that kept moving out of its way. Suddenly the object danced manically, like a spark trying to escape from an invisible cage. Finally, it leapt off in an oblique direction, leaving a bright trail that quickly vanished.

“Holy shit,” I said to my dog. “What the fuck was that?” I checked myself; I wasn’t high or drunk. I wasn’t dreaming. Maybe it was a meteoroid bouncing off of the upper atmosphere? A spy satellite? I’d never seen a UFO before.

When I came home my dad was on the phone with Dr. Fucho again, talking about his divorce. Dr. Fucho wanted to speak with me.

“How’s it going?” he asked when I picked up the phone.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I meant the project.”

“Oh, good. Very good.” I was glad he couldn’t see me blush. I explained in exaggerated detail how much progress I had made. Though I had only written a hundred or so lines of code, I made it sound as if I was building the Mona Lisa of software. I wanted him to approve so badly. He started to get off the phone, but I couldn’t resist telling him about the sighting. “I was walking my dog before and I saw something in the sky. A light, it—”

“It was a plane. Just a plane.”

“But it was high up. I’ve seen satellites before. It stopped. Then it went all squiggly and shot away.” Realizing I sounded moronic, I felt embarrassed.

“It’s a plane. Just a plane. You’re still coming Thursday?”

“Yes,” I said, and he hung up.

It seemed odd that he had discredited my report before I’d explained what I’d seen. As if he had a stock response ready to go. Wasn’t his scientific mind a little bit curious? I didn’t think it was aliens, but maybe a military satellite? One that could alter its orbit in mid-flight. But what about the squiggly motion? I told my dad and he just shrugged. I was left to mull over the possibilities alone.

A week later I visited Dr. Fucho at his physics class at the community college with my laptop and showed him the color graphs I had created. I was so proud of my work, but he just nodded and said, “Can you make transparencies? For a projector?”

He also suggested a few minor changes, so I sat in the back of the lab and fiddled with my code, feeling important, while students who clearly didn’t want to be there asked him questions to which even I knew the answer. I was severely impressed with myself and wanted the students to notice me. But they didn’t.

After class, I followed Dr. Fucho to his office.

“You see?” he said, referring to his students. “Total disinterest. Anyway, I like what you did here,” he said. I tried to hide my pride. “Have you ever considered doing a paper? I could help you write it.”

Over the past few months, I used planetary maps from NASA and equations from a college project for a radio telescope to program a three-dimensional solar system. My software allowed me to fly around a virtual solar system and see the planets and moons in actual positions for any date in the past or future. It had been a lot of fun to create, but it didn’t mean anything to anyone except me. I could go bigger.

“What about programming a simulation of the Milky Way?” I said. “I could use star positions and their proper motions to determine the mass of the galaxy, see where the missing mass might be.”

“It’s been done,” he said.

“Or all the galaxies in the universe to map out regions of space devoid of—”

“Done!”

I drew a blank, trying to think of something else.

“Matt, you have to do something original to make a name for yourself.”

And that was the problem, I realized. My work for Dr. Fucho wasn’t original. It was his work, not mine. He saw potential in me, but I worried what he saw was just my facade. I wasn’t a scientist like him. I was a bum who got high and diddled with computer code.

The conversation steadily moved from his lazy students to intelligent Jews to terrorists who wanted to kill them. “I listened to some tapes,” he said. “These guys are fucking crazy. Bat shit crazy.”

I didn’t know scientists could curse like that. “What tapes?”

“Recordings of conversations. There was someone in the room with a wire and they found out and cut him to pieces. I had to listen to it. I heard his screams.”

“Why were you listening to it?” Was he a spy now too?

“To see if they were talking about nukes.”

Suddenly his earlier coyness about his research made sense. He was a particle physicist and I was the daft Long Islander. Nuclear research. Duh.

“Were they speaking Arabic? Did you understand it?” I wondered if he was multilingual.

“Yes, Arabic. But I had a transcript. They couldn’t translate all the words. I had to listen in and see if they said anything about nukes.”

“And did they?”

He stared at me. I knew the answer was yes.

I smoked a half joint on the drive home and thought about papers I could write and things I could do to make a name for myself, but I drew a blank. I had no idea what had been done and what hadn’t. What could I do that was original? I went to Kinko’s a few days later and printed out the transparencies. I had added my name and a copyright symbol in large letters across the bottom of each page. A room full of scientists in Geneva would see my name, and I would become part of something larger. But as I waited at Kinko’s for my transparencies I suddenly felt this had been a stupid idea. How the hell could I copyright a chart for equations that weren’t even mine?

It was too late to change my mind, so I took what I had and my father and I drove over to Dr. Fucho’s house the next day. He had a friend with him today, a stocky man named Bill, who was not half as smart as Dr. Fucho and probably thirty IQ points below me and my dad. Yet he seemed to relish his role as a kind of cheerleader. I suspected Dr. Fucho kept him around because Bill took every opportunity he could to point out how smart Dr. Fucho was.

I handed Dr. Fucho the transparencies. If he noticed the copyright symbol, he didn’t say. We sat down in his study crowded with a thousand books and were attacked by his whippet, an overly friendly dog that Dr. Fucho proudly said he had timed at some “sixteen meters per second.” When no one responded, he added, “That’s thirty six miles per hour.”

We’d been there for half an hour when he abruptly said, “Have you heard about that meteor up in Greenland?”

The previous day I had read on the Internet that a large meteor had been spotted over Greenland. The fireball, a massive green flare, had been caught on several security cameras and witnessed by hundreds of people. Various Greenland Web forums talked about how the sky lit up as bright as noon for nearly a minute. Rumors and conspiracy theories flooded the net. The story made some mainstream newspapers that reported it as “Mysterious Object Over Greenland Lights Up Night Sky.”

I told him about the stuff I’d seen online. My dad had heard about it too.

“Well, it wasn’t a meteor.”

“A UFO?” Bill asked. I was embarrassed for him, but I had been thinking the same thing and was afraid to voice it.

“I can’t talk about it,” Dr. Fucho said. He paused dramatically, waiting for us to press him further.

“A crashed satellite?” I said, trying to insert science into the discussion.

“It wasn’t in any known orbit,” Dr. Fucho said. “We track these things. But that’s all I can say. It’s not one of ours.”

“Ours?”

“I can’t say anymore.”

I looked at my dad. Surely by “not ours” he meant not American. Russian, then? Chinese? By “ours,” he certainly couldn’t have meant human, could he?

“They’re flying me up there tonight. Sent a plane just for me. Can you believe that? It’s important, whatever it is.”

“Who’s flying you there?” my dad said.

“I can’t say. We’re trying to get there first.”

“Before who?” I said.

“I can’t talk about it. I was ordered not to.” The military, I surmised. “We don’t know what it is.”

For someone sworn to secrecy he certainly liked to talk. He obviously relished his position; he knew he had us as excited as him about the mystery. That was what made him such a successful scientist. He had the power to infect others with his enthusiasm. He threw on a parka and picked up a small suitcase and followed us out the front door. Bill was there, it dawned on me, to drive him to wherever he was going. Christ, this was happening right now, and I was watching it. I felt close to something big and it felt terrifying and exciting. He ushered us quickly out the door.

* * * *

My dad and I speculated on what the “meteor” could be as he drove us home under a stark winter sky with unusually clear stars. If it wasn’t a satellite, and it wasn’t one of ours, then what the hell was it? I remembered the strange shooting star I’d seen and how Dr. Fucho had reacted when I’d told him. And the time in his office when he spoke of the terrorist tapes.

“It’s definitely nuclear,” I deduced. “That’s his specialty.”

“But nuclear what?” my dad said. We both wondered what nuclear device would be in an untracked orbit, make a fireball so large, and attract the attention of several nations’ militaries?

“A UFO?” I said, laughing, though I was serious.

My dad stared at the cars ahead, lost in thought.

But what if it was a UFO? Soon I was dreaming too.

Weeks passed and I hadn’t heard from Dr. Fucho. Once or twice he had spoken to my dad, but he had never asked for me. The meteor story had vanished from the news, and life went on. Dr. Fucho went to Geneva and gave his presentation, and I envisioned him either cutting off my name from the bottom of the transparencies, covering my copyright up with paper, or worse, not using my work at all. It might have all been a ploy to keep me busy. I fell back into smoking weed and drinking again, and didn’t mess with my digital solar system or any of the other pet projects I had been tinkering with for weeks. One day I heard from a friend that an old roommate from college got a job at IBM. I felt like I was wasting my life, and I didn’t sleep at all that night.

I got up before dawn, hacked together a resume—which now included the work I did for Dr. Fucho—and sent it off to several companies. Within a week I got a call from Northrop Grumman, inviting me in for an interview. They said, somewhat suspiciously on that first call, that there would be a drug test.

I smoked my last joint that afternoon. Three weeks later—after swallowing massive amounts of golden seal, drinking pools full of water and running vigorously every day—I passed the drug test and got the job. I dreamed of entering into a world of alien meteorites and secret missions to far away places, but instead I spent many tedious days programming war simulations. It wasn’t the right job for me; I had moral issues with it and left after nine months, but that’s another story.

Over the next two years I seldom heard from Dr. Fucho. Once or twice we spoke on the phone. I never worked up the nerve to ask him about my graphs. He asked me what I was doing and I exaggerated the importance of my current job, but really felt as if I was still wasting my life, even if I now got paid for it.

One day my father took on the tone he used when he wanted me to take him seriously, which usually made me either laugh or get angry. Why wouldn’t I take him seriously all the time? “Dr. Fucho is having bypass surgery tomorrow. I need you to witness his will.”

“Me?”

“Yes. His son will be there, but a family member can’t be a witness. And I’m the attorney, so I can’t be a witness either. Can you do this for me?”

“Tonight?” I had plans to get fucked up with my friends.

“This can’t wait. I have no one else to call. Plus I thought you might want to see him.”

What choice did I have? We arrived at the hospital after nine p.m., and the place felt deserted. The parking lot, surrounded by silhouetted trees, was absent of cars, and the hospital halls were long white corridors devoid of human motion. From every room we passed, patients peered back like ghouls. The place smelled of antiseptic and tears. I hated hospitals.

Dr. Fucho lay in bed. He had tubes running down his nose and an IV unit stuck into his veins. He looked even thinner than I remembered, had less hair. And he was disturbingly pale. But for a man who might die in the morning, he was incredibly animated. He introduced me to his son, also a computer science graduate, a man younger than me, but more confident and stylish, who worked for some financial company making gobs of cash. He seemed happy, and it made me feel inadequate.

“I’m going out to Los Alamos National Labs,” Dr. Fucho said. “They offered me a position. Top-secret work. It’s amazing. Best facility in the world. They took me into a hangar. They had a flying saucer. A real goddamned flying saucer. The Air Force.”

I glanced at my dad, who had the look of a kid engrossed in his favorite story. I had no idea if Dr. Fucho was effusing because this was just part of his usual schtick, trying to impress everyone with his esoteric knowledge, or if this was the bedside confession of a man faced with his looming mortality. I looked at his son, who clasped his hands before him and smiled as if saying, Oh my dad says the darnedest things. But there was a hint in his son’s expression, however brief, that he was as surprised as we were. An uncomfortable silence fell over the room, and my dad used the moment to present the will. He made me and Dr. Fucho recite some legal spiel that stated we were of sound mind, and I signed the paper after him. I felt like I had made a devil’s bargain, though I was not quite sure what exactly I had to gain.

My dad and I drove home, and we were silent for a time.

“Did you hear what he said,” my dad said cautiously, “about the flying saucers?”

“I read a Popular Mechanics article,” I said. “The Air Force experimented with saucer-shaped vehicles. Probably what he was talking about.”

“Yeah, probably.”

But my dad sounded skeptical. “Did you think he was talking about something else?”

“UFOs?” He chuckled.

He said it first. “Probably not,” I said.

“Yeah,” my dad said. “He likes to play games like that.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

And that was all we said about that. I found out the next day that Dr. Fucho survived his surgery. A few weeks later, he moved to New Mexico, where he worked on god-knows-what at Los Alamos. The divorce complete, even my dad stopped hearing from him. Meanwhile I went through two, three, four jobs. I wanted to feel the way I’d felt when I sat beside Dr. Fucho and talked science with him. But in all my jobs I never quite found it.

So instead of seeking that feeling in the real world I started writing about it. Making up science-fiction stories about creatures that swallowed stars like whales swallowed krill, and beings at the end of the universe, and stoner buddies on distant planets whose minds were held prisoner by alien gods. Some of them sold. I spoke with Dr. Fucho once and told him my new life path, and even though he tried to praise my decision I heard the disappointment in his voice. A gifted mind gone to waste making shit up.

I never found out what that strange squiggly star was or what happened up in Greenland or if there really were UFOs in a hangar in New Mexico. I’m pretty sure I never will. But I have this nagging sense, looking back at things now, that Dr. Fucho was trying to tell me something he knew he couldn’t. The way he deflected my suspicion when I told him of the moving star, and the way he kept saying, “I said too much,” about the Greenland meteor even though he kept speaking. And, when faced with his mortality, how he told us what he’d seen in a top-secret hangar in the desert. I will never know the truth, not for sure. I’m not a scientist, I never will be, but I think he left me enough clues that I already know the answer.

The Library: Book Reviews

YOUNG WEIRD: THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Books marketed for “young adult” readers (approximately age 12 to 18) are intended to capture the attention of an audience who supposedly isn’t interested in reading anything longer than a Twitter tweet or a text message—yet during a recession when adult fiction sales have declined, young adult fiction has more than held its own. Entertaining, fast-paced, and vibrant, many YA titles are beautifully designed, usually well-marketed, and offer a lower cover cost than “adult trade.” Grown-ups “cross over” these days and read YA. Some enjoy taking the journey of young characters finding themselves or identify with the alienated, the outsider, the outcast coming into his or her own; others simply like to indulge in a good story that an author might never have dared to write for adults.

Some of the best (and often most popular) YA is edgy, dark, and wickedly weird. Here’s a look at some books from 2010 good enough to read under the sheets by flashlight...or the illumination of your iPad or Kindle.

*

Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi

(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $17.99, Hardcover)

A National Book Award finalist, this YA debut by Bacigalupi—whose first adult novel has (so far) won the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Locus, and Compton Crook awards—is dystopic SF. The near future is brilliantly imagined and bleak, frightening extrapolated from present-day fact. In a post-oil world in which global warmed seas have risen and “city killer” storms have devastated New Orleans and other costal cities, young Nailer scavenges oil tankers and freighters for scrap metal off the Gulf Coast. Life is brutal, dirty, and usually short. But there are “swanks” in the world too and when Nailer finds a sleek high-tech clipper washed ashore, he sees a chance to escape his rough life and abusive father. But the ship has a survivor: a “swank” girl who Nailer decides to help. The decision thrusts Nailer into danger and high adventure. Great characterization and a high-action story combine for a compelling read.

*

White Cat

by Holly Black

(Margaret K. McElderry, $17.99, Hardcover)

Black, already well-established as a fantasist for teens, gets darker and edgier with this first of her new Curse Workers series. Protagonist Cassel Sharpe lacks the magic talent of the rest of his family. They’re a crooked lot: criminal curse workers who, with the touch of a hand, can manipulate memory, emotion, dreams, and luck. Cassel’s straight, but also believes he murdered his best friend, Lila, a few years back. Things get weird when he begins dreaming about a white cat with a message and a part of a con within a con surrouded by lies within lies. Magic, mobs, murder, mystery, and more.

*

Clockwork Angel

by Cassandra Clare

(Margaret K McElderry, $19.99, Hardcover)

With its Victorian London setting and clockwork monsters, there’s a steampunkish feel to Clockwork Angel, the first of a trilogy of prequels, The Infernal Devices, to Clare’s bestselling The Mortal Instruments series. Sixteen-year-old American orphan Tessa Gray travels to England seeking her brother. She finds, instead, two “dark sisters” who have sinister plans for her. Tessa also discovered she possesses magic powers. Rescued by nephilum Shadowhunters Tessa joins them in seeking out a vampiric arch-villain and his army of automatons. She also finds romance. Simplistic mystery and a sense of melodrama may turn some readers off, but Clare will keep most reading.

*

Incarceron

by Catherine Fisher

(Dial, $17.99, Hardcover)

First published in the UK by Hodder in 2007, this novel blends sf and fantasy for a thrilling mind-bending tale. Hidden from everyone but the Warden. Incarceron is a hellish sentient city-prison that sustains itself. Denizens are born prisoners and die as such; only one man has ever escaped. Finn knows of no existence except as a prisoner, but fleeting memories of an outside world haunt his 17-year-old mind. Claudia, the Warden’s daughter, lives a pampered life Outside—a place of carriages and castles...and run by hidden advanced technology—but is destined for a detestable arranged marriage. Both seek escape. Each finds a crystal key, make contact, and a dual storyline—eerie, occasionally horrific, intriguing, ultimately surprising—starts twisting through a rich plot. Highly original, adults may find more here than the kids. Sequel Sapphique (published in 2008 in the UK) will be released in December 2010 in the U.S.

*

The Curse of the Wendigo

by Rick Yancey

(Simon & Schuster, $17.99, Hardcover)

Yancey’s The Monstrumologist (2009) was a flat-out outstanding (as long as you don’t mind blood and guts) horror novel and, despite recognition by the American Library Association with its Michael L. Printz Award For Excellence In Young Adult Literature, was largely overlooked by genre critics. Combing the best of gothic thrills with Victorian mystery, The Monstrumologist introduced Will Henry, twelve-year-old orphan and assistant to Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, a scientist with great expertise in monsters. In this sequel, Will and Dr. Warthrop are after the Wendigo, a monster even the learned monstrumologist dismisses as Native American myth. But myth proves all too real. Yancey offers more action and better pacing with the sequel, and both Warthrop and Will Henry get love interests. He also has fun with “real” historical characters like Thomas Edison and Henry Irving as well as a duo whose resemblance to Bram Stoker and Stoker’s fictional Van Helsing is no coincidence. Full of shock and gore, but still complex, Yancy’s second is even better than the first.

*

The Replacement

by Brenna Yovanoff

(Razorbill, $17.99, Hardcover)

With a killer cover (reproduction doesn’t do credit to the excellent use of silver metallic ink) and “Edward Scissorhands meets The Catcher in the Rye” hype one expects to be let down, but debut novelist Yovanoff delivers a dark delight. Mackie Doyle is not a typical teen guy: blood and iron make him ill, he can’t set foot on consecrated ground even though his dad is a minister. In fact, he should probably never have lived long enough to be an angst-ridden teen and may be dying now. But Mackie is part of a bloody supernatural pact that keeps his hometown, Gentry, thriving no matter what the economic climate. (Not that anyone in Gentry talks about it.) This “good fortune” involves an underground race that is a creepy, original twist on fae mythology. Yovanoff’s writing is clear and occasionally soars. With older characters, it might be hard to accept some of the relationships, but here everything fits. Despite the darkness, there’s strong themes of familial love and friendship in a haunting, melancholic story of moral ambivalence, misery, and salvation. Brenna Yovanoff could grow up to be Neil Gaiman.

*

FOR ADULT READERS

The Ammonite Violin and Others

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

(Subterranean Press, $25, Hardcover)

Caitlín R Kiernan’s fiction often plumbs the primal depths of myth, legend, and folk tale, but the stories disturb us for very modern reasons. We may still be somewhat chilled by the traditionally supernatural, but we are more likely to feel a true sense of terror from the disquieting realization that life is chaotic and uncontrollable, that we exist (as Peter Straub wrote) “in an empty world aggressively devoid of meaning.” Conversely, Kiernan’s stories often seem to offer an abundance of cryptic connotation, but they are also lessons that lie just beyond our capacity to learn. With the stories in this collection, the author unsettles us even further by delving into the darkly erotic and exploring sexuality.

Presented in Kiernan’s ever-lyrical, unstintingly intelligent prose, the stories of Ammonite Violin spin a unique magic of their own; the truth beneath what we think of as reality is revealed; we need connection, but it can also be our undoing; the unknown is glimpsed but remains unknowable. A pianist finds a gentle vampire. A child chases a lizard, lifts a great flat stone, and goes plunging headlong into the throat of the world. A geologist communes with a whore, but has “need of no other lover than the sea and the stones that are forged within the nights of its eternal crucible.” A girl is a black hole or is the black hole a girl? A semptress keeps company with spirits. Humans transform and the inhuman seems both a comfort and a curse. Everything is exquisitely described, yet nothing is completely understood.

These are stories (as the narrator of the title story says of it) “so fraught with unlikely things, so perfectly turned and filled with wicked artifice and contrivances that readers would look away, unable to suspend their disbelief even for a page.” Yet one cannot tear one’s eyes away.

Hidden in Rhode Island: An Interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan

Conducted by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Simple summation of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s nine novels of dark and harrowing fantasy, her science fiction, or her constant output of short stories is nigh unto impossible—but a unifying theme can be found in her background in paleontology. Kiernan digs up people’s secrets and stories with the meticulous precision of a woman unearthing and preserving fossils. She has described her rigor and commitment to the craft of storytelling by saying, “I chose writing because there was nothing else left to choose.”

Her most recent novel, The Red Tree, was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards and tells an all-too-real story of a struggling writer named Sarah Crowe who finds an unfinished manuscript in the basement of an old house in western Rhode Island. Kiernan’s novel is primarily composed of two intertwined narratives: the story from the manuscript and Crowe’s first person account of reading the manuscript while living in the house. Watching Sarah Crowe lose herself to the haunting oak, the reader experiences a heady mix of awe, loss, and wonder.

Sarah’s journey, and through her other novels and many short stories, Caitlín R. Kiernan also reminds us there will always be costs and consequences when we dig up the bones of our deepest and darkest myths.

Kiernan also publishes a monthly journal, Sirenia Digest, that often features her short fiction. (For information see: http://www.caitlinrkiernan.com/sirenia.html.)

*

Did all of the stories in your most recent collection The Ammonite Violin and Others come from Sirenia Digest?

Pretty much, yeah. Jeff VanderMeer had expressed concern that I was writing so many stories and vignettes for Sirenia Digest—eighty-three so far, eighty-three since December 2005—and that they needed to be printed in more permanent format than the PDFs. I agreed, and Ammonite Violin is the beginning of the process of getting all those stories in print. But it only collects twenty pieces, so there’s still a long way to go. But I should have a second volume of Sirenia stories out in 2012, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart.

*

How would you describe Sirenia Digest?

It’s hard, because it’s something new, I think. I’m not even sure if there’s a word for the sort of periodical that Sirenia Digest is, and the only other writer I know who’s had success doing anything like it is Catherynne M. Valente. Every month I offer subscribers one or two, rarely three, new pieces of short fiction. Usually it’s erotic, to varying degrees. The Digest is delivered by email in a PDF format. Vince Locke does an illustration each month. Sometimes we have interviews with writers and artists and photographers.

At the heart of the project is an aesthetic I stumbled upon in the spring of 2005. I’ve described it as Angela Carter meets Lovecraft meets Anaïs Nin, but it’s really something else, its own thing. As sort of a lark, early in 2005, I pitched a collection of “weird erotica” to Subterranean Press. The result was a little book called Frog Toes and Tentacles, and it did very well. I enjoyed writing it, and wanted to keep working within that aesthetic, that place where weird fiction and science fiction meets a sort of intensely decadent erotica. But I was aware there was essentially no existing market for what I was doing. So, in October 2005, I decided I’d try to create my own venue. I called it Sirenia Digest, and it’s done better than I ever dared to imagine it might. It’s given me an amazing new freedom as a writer.

*

The Red Tree is markedly different from your previous work. What brought The Red Tree into existence?

I think I have to blame exhaustion as much as anything else. Utter exhaustion. My narrator, Sarah Crowe, is a novelist who can’t find another story to tell, even though she pretty much has no other choice, and that’s how I’ve felt for several years now. Though, of course, I keep telling stories, just as Sarah did. But, beyond that, I know that I set out to do something different in The Red Tree. I wanted to say something more mature, though I’m not at all sure that’s the best choice of words, mature. I don’t, for instance, mean mature in the sense that this novel has fairly explicit sex scenes, which I’ve tended to avoid in my previous novels. I mean other things. For example, more often than not, my protagonists have been young people, and even children and teens, starting with Silk, on through Alabaster and Daughter of Hounds. When I was getting ready to start writing The Red Tree, I made a conscious decision to break with that practice, and instead to write a novel about a woman my own age, someone in her mid-forties. I think that might account for some of the differences you’re seeing in this book. Of course, this is also the first time I’ve written a novel-length first-person narrative, and I think that’s also responsible for a lot of what makes The Red Tree feel so different from my previous novels. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in this one, stuff I hadn’t let myself do before, or that I’ve only done recently in short fiction.

*

As much as your work has always contained deeply personal material, is it fair to say that more of you is on the page in The Red Tree?

Yes, it’s more than fair, though, honestly, I’m not sure why it happened. The Red Tree stops just short of autobiography. It’s filled with all sorts of crazy, minute details that are taken directly from my life, or just shy of directly. I swear I didn’t set out to do that. But, right from the start, it became part of the process of getting this novel written. And when I was done, I found the overall effect more than a little unnerving. People who follow my online journal will recognize a lot of the parallels right off, I’m sure. A lot of them aren’t hard to spot, the parallels between me and Sarah Crowe, the novel’s narrator. Just before I started the book, for example, I began suffering PNES seizures. Shortly after I began writing it, I moved from Atlanta to Rhode Island. Sarah becomes increasingly reclusive. She grew up in rural Alabama. She isn’t fond of reader comments on Amazon. Etc. and etc. So, yes, Sarah and I have a lot in common, big things and little things.

Looking back, I almost wish I hadn’t done it this way. Publishing a novel always means putting yourself out there for everyone to gawk and jeer at. But it’s worse when so much of a character is drawn directly from your life. Another wall breaks down, a wall that gives the author distance from the inevitable sting of criticism. A wall that divides fantasy from reality, the author from her avatars. And, truly, it’s not like Sarah Crowe is a particularly flattering self-portrait. Also, again, I’d point to the use of first-person narrative, which adds still another layer of intimacy between my narrator and me, and between the reader and me.

*

Neil Gaiman has quoted Gene Wolfe as telling him: “You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.” Have you found that quote to be true?

I think that’s very true, yes. I mean, sure, there are some elements of writing where there is a cumulative learning process at work. And your process, your voice, changes over time. But there’s not much I learned writing Daughter of Hounds that I put to use in The Red Tree. I could only figure out how to write The Red Tree by writing The Red Tree, as it presented me with an entirely new set of problems to be solved. It’s terrifying, when you stop and think about it.

*

The sound of words is a powerful element in your writing and you don’t rewrite that much. How do you pull that off? Do they tumble out lyrically? Is it intentional or innate or some of each?

It’s always been important to me that the prose sounds good. I read everything aloud as I’m writing it. Usually at the end of the day I have all that day’s pages read back to me aloud. I think that my ears have to be satisfied, before I’ll accept a sentence as finished, as well written. I can’t stand clunky prose, or bland prose, writing that clatters senselessly about or has no particular rhythm at all, no particular voice. But as to how I do it, no, I don’t rewrite much. This is what people call sentence-level writing, isn’t it? I mean, I have to be satisfied with a given sentence, with a given paragraph, before moving along to the next bit. I don’t allow myself to write a bad line, with the understanding that I’ll come back and fix it later. I’ve never been able to do that. When things are going well, on those good writing days, I hear the prose. If I can’t hear it, I can’t write it. But I find this question almost impossible to answer, even to my own satisfaction. I can say what I do, but I have no idea how I do it. Anyway, isn’t this rather the same as asking a magician to reveal the secret to an illusion?

*

What’s the deepest, darkest secret you’re willing to admit in this interview? Is there anything you’ve never talked about before but would like to?

No. Not really. I talk an awful lot. I have the blog, and I’m prone to blurting out things that would probably best be kept to myself, so there’s really not a lot left over. I’ve already admitted using heroin, and to slicing of my left pinkie toe during an absinthe binge, and I assume everyone knows I’m a pervert. If there are worse things, I best keep them to myself.

*

What were your favorite films from the past year?

I see so many films, it’s hard to say. I mean, it’s hard to even recall all my favorites from the last year. I just saw Neil Jordan’s Ondine, and it’s brilliant. It shines, and is the best film anyone has ever made about selkies, whether or not there are any actual selkies in the film. It understands the critical distinction between truth and fact. And then there’s Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ, which also shines, but shines darkly. It was a revelation, all the darkest sorts of fairy tales stripped of pretense and bundled together into a single magnificent treatise on evil, on the darkest part of the forest and the human mind, what happens when you leave the path. I know it’s not cool to admit having liked Cameron’s Avatar, but honestly I sort of loved it. It hits sour notes left and right, but redeems itself repeatedly. And, in the end, I have to praise it for being a fundamentally and unapologetically anti-human film. The glorious puzzle box that was Inception, obviously, and also I loved Scorsese’s Shutter Island. However, the most criminally underrated film from the last year was John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It was, hands down, my pick for the best film of 2009. But I think people didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to admit the truth of it, and distributors had no idea what to do with the film. But it was perfect.

*

Do you currently read comics? What would it take for you to write comics again?

I don’t read a lot of comics now, no. I’m more inclined to collections of old comics strips, stuff like Segar’s Popeye and McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. Comics are too expensive, for one thing, and, besides, my time at Vertigo sort of soured me on comics, I’m very sad to say. As for what it would take to get me to do comics again, well, the pay would have to be very good—in all fairness, it was before—it would have to be a project I utterly adored, and there would have to be a minimum of editorial interference. It’s that last one that’s never going to happen. Not as long as we’re talking about working for DC or Marvel, any of the biggies. I may as well ask for the moon.

*

You’ve discussed how “Novels drive you crazy, every single time and every step of the way” and called plot “the filler of literature.” Was The Red Tree more of the same? Are longer works getting harder to write?

It’s true I’m not much for plot. Plot is vastly overrated. Life doesn’t come with plots, so I don’t see why we are driven to force them upon fiction. And “Because people expect plots” is a lousy answer. In a sense, I tried to stay away from plot in The Red Tree, from preconceived, mapped-out plot, and let the story grow more organically. I put a character in a situation, and after that the book was mostly a matter of discovering her reactions and the route to her fate—which we know at the start of the book—and I guess that’s what you’d call the novel’s plot, if you insist.

But yes, longer works are getting much harder for me to write. The trouble that led to me writing The Red Tree has only gotten worse. Partly, that’s because I expect a lot more of myself as a novelist than I did before. I’ve been trying to start another novel for almost two years now, ever since I finished writing The Red Tree, and I have precious little to show for my efforts. I began work on a novel called Blood Oranges, which was sort of about murder and lycanthropy and art. A few months later it became The Wolf Who Cried Girl, and was suddenly less about murder, and I dumped a mountain of plot that was weighing it down. But I hit a brick wall after a month or so. This past summer, I decided it wasn’t a novel about art and werewolves after all. It was a novel about art and mermaids. About a mermaid who’s forgotten she’s a mermaid and a woman who falls in love with her, a woman who happens to be a sculptor. Pretty much the same story as The Wolf Who Cried Girl, only with a mermaid. I was calling it The Drowning Girl. I made it through the first chapter, then hit another wall. I also discovered a vaguely similar novel with the same title, and I locked up again. It’s really been a nightmare, and I have no idea how or if it’s going to sort itself out.

I suspect part of what’s going is on is that I look at The Red Tree, and, in my opinion, it’s vastly better than all the novels I wrote before it. So, I know I have to be at least that good again, and preferably better. And all that expectation shuts me down. Plus, now The Red Tree’s been nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards, and I’m very, very happy it’s getting that sort of recognition. But, on the other hand, this actually adds to the problem I’m having with expectation. Truthfully, if I had my druthers, I’d probably write nothing but short fiction from here on. But you can’t make a living off short fiction. Most of us can hardly make a living off novels. Still, in almost every way, I see short fiction as a superior art form to novels. But I’m not going to get started on that.

*

Do you plan on writing more science fiction?

Of course. I love writing sf, whether or not people think of me as a “science fiction writer.” Since the release of A is for Alien in January 2009, I’ve probably written enough sf for a second collection. And I’ll be doing a short sf novel for Subterranean Press in 2011, The Dinosaurs of Mars. I’m pretty sure my sf isn’t as popular as the more fantastical stories, but I’ll keep writing them, regardless.

*

Why, pray tell, are people so into the idea of steampunk?

I love that William Gibson described steampunk as what happens when goths discover brown. Anyway, I find people inscrutable. Always. I never know why they like what they like. But as for steampunk as a subgenre of science fiction, I have mixed feelings there. I think the market’s being glutted, that it’s a flavor of the week, so there’s a lot of chaff. Slap a gear on it and call it steampunk. But there’s some genuinely brilliant work, Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, along with the first volume of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Kelly and Bachalo’s Steampunk, and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy. The VanderMeer’s Steampunk anthology. It’s worth noting that most of these books predate the recent steampunk boom. For my part, I’ve only written three or four stories that can fairly be called steampunk, but I’m especially fond of two of them, “The Steam Dancer (1896)” and “The Melusine (1898).”

*

Was your love of the sea always so prominent in your fiction?

It’s always been there. It was there in the first short story I sold back in ’93, “Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea.” It kept cropping up, mostly in short fiction, though it’s evident in both Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels. However, my affinity for the sea has become increasingly evident over the last decade. These days, it often feels like that’s what I do, write stories about the ocean. Mostly, it’s probably the result of having moved from landlocked Atlanta to coastal Rhode Island. The sea is at my doorstep now.

*

You’ve equated writing fiction for a living as prostitution involving a platypus. Want to elaborate?

I think what I’ve been trying to say with the platypus metaphor is that it’s a very strange place, here inside my head. I think I assume it’s that way for everyone, but maybe it isn’t. Anyway, offering my secret fantasies, my doubts and fears and hopes, all that stuff that goes into the novels and stories, writing it down and offering it to people to read and review and talk about, it still seems like tarting up a platypus and sending it out to walk the streets. And yeah, it probably is more like that for those of us with more peculiar minds. Maybe Stephen King is only tarting up a golden retriever.

*

Can the above question be tied to the role of dark or outsider literature?

I think so. I mean, these are the places my mind goes, awake and asleep. And, more often than not, they aren’t pretty or pleasant or happy places. Worse still, I know that very frequently what I’ll consider beautiful or joyous or whatever, most other people are going to look at it and shudder. This isn’t an affectation. I don’t try to be like this. I just don’t know how to be any other way. And yet, here I am, having to make my living off selling those visions to people, having to hope that enough people will be receptive to my strange nightmares and reveries that I won’t wind up on the street. So, yes. We get into this matter of accessibility. And that’s the thing my agent has brought up on more than one occasion, that my characters and my narratives could be more accessible. More reader friendly. That is, friendlier to more average sorts of readers. And I have tried. I’ve tried hard to do that, but I’m starting to think it’s like being blind from birth and trying to describe color.

So, the last couple of years, though I keep hoping for more readers, I think I’ve begun to back off from trying to become a more accessible author. That is, an author with the common touch, who’s accessible to the masses. I spent so many years looking at my far more successful writer friends, people like Neil Gaiman and Peter Straub, and being bitter because I couldn’t have that sort of success. And that was idiotic. Peter and Neil are brilliant writers, and marvelous guys, and I’m beginning to understand why I could never write a comic with the mass appeal of The Sandman or a novel that sells as many copies as Ghost Story. My mind is mired in too many weird and awful places, and I’m too stubborn. That doesn’t help, the stubborn part. Sometimes, I think it’s only made me worse, when people, like my agent or an editor, have pointed out things I might change about my work to draw in readers with less esoteric tastes. Sometimes, I feel as if I go and do exactly the opposite, just to spite the critic. I’m not bragging about this. I hate that I’m made that way.

Now, is this a problem endemic to dark and outsider art as a whole? I’m not sure. That’s something I’d need to think about, and we’d have to formulate operative definitions of “outsider” and “dark.” All those awful Saw movies were surely dark and perverse. I mean, that’s some sick, sadistic shit. Yet, they’re incredibly popular. A shame they’re also utterly artless crap.

*

As much as I hate asking this, when something as amazing as The Red Tree and the sold-out The Ammonite Violin & Others have recently been released, people always seem to want to know: What’s next?

Yes, that’s a truly evil question, just so you know. Well, I have a number of short stories I’m trying to get written, and Sirenia Digest is an ongoing project. We’ll be coming up on issue #62 in January 2011. Sooner or later, I have to write another novel, though I’ve already discussed the trouble I’m having with that. I’m hoping I’ll have a new novel out late next year. In 2011, Subterranean Press will be releasing Two Worlds and In Between, a huge “best of” collection of my work, over twenty thousand words of fiction spanning the first fifteen or so years of my career. I’m being optimistic and asking it be subtitled Volume One. As I’ve mentioned, I’ll also be writing The Dinosaurs of Mars for Subterranean Press next year, with some help from Bob Eggleton, who’s doing the cover and maybe other art. That’s enough, right?

Fishwish, by Karen Heuler

Celia picked up a whole fish at the market, and she laid it out on the cutting board when she got home and looked at it closely. It had golden gills and silver fins, and copper scales and garnet eyes. “You’re quite beautiful,” she said. “I never noticed how beautiful a fish was before.”

“Don’t eat me,” the fish cried. “Throw me back in the sea and I will give you what you want.”

“I’ll do it,” she agreed, “because you’re beautiful and I don’t wish to see you die.”

She wrapped the fish up and took the subway to Coney Island, which was dark with rain and empty because of the chill. She walked along the boardwalk until she saw a pier and then walked out to the end, where the wind whipped the sea up into whitecaps and greencaps. She knelt down and unwrapped her fish, whose scales were brighter because it was near the sea. The garnet eyes turned ruby and hypnotic, the scales shone and the fins flashed and she felt as if she were riding the waves, rushing up and rushing down.

She had felt this way once before. “I can’t let you go,” she said. “I’m in love with you.”

“I will give you three wishes if you let me go,” the fish said. “It’s the lure of wishing that you mistake for love. Beware of lures; I myself keep mistaking hooks for love.”

“Three wishes?” she said, drawing back on her knees. Her eyes looked out at the water, which rose and swelled towards her; everything was coming towards her.

“I don’t know what to wish for,” she said.

“It’s easy as can be. Wish for wealth, wish for purpose, wish for love,” the fish cajoled her.

“But which is better?” she wondered. “Wealth or purpose or love? Or I could wish for immortality. Or something else I can’t quite think of now, that will seem to me so obvious later on. I’m always thinking of things later on.”

“You don’t have forever,” the fish said, and it flashed its scales and thrilled its fins. “There’s a time limit, as there is in everything. You have only two more hours, and then I’ll die and the wishes will die too. Do you want me to die?”

She lowered her head and closed her eyes. “Oh no, dear fish, I won’t let you die. I’ll wish for something by then; I’ll think of something, I swear. But for now, for now, I want to look at you and hold you and think of everything you can promise me.” And she picked the fish up and held it to her chest and began to walk back down the pier and onto the sand and along the shore, where the water rushed around her ankles and threatened to knock her down.

“Be careful,” cried the fish. “Drop me in the water, not the sand. I can’t live in the sand.”

She let the water wash around her ankles. She loved the feel of it, the way it lunged at her and wanted her. “This is the happiest I’ve been, with the waves at my legs and the roar of the water and the sound of your voice. This is what I crave, I think; I’m happy now.”

“You don’t have much time left,” the fish said. “If you don’t release me I shall die and all your wishes will too. Think of what you want. Ask for what your heart craves. What do you want most of all!”

Celia looked at the waves and looked at the fish in her arms. “I want to be you,” she said. “Why not be what I love the most? I wish to be you!”

At that her body stumbled back against the sand and the fish leaped from her arms and dove into the ocean. At once Celia felt the waves against her like a beautiful wall parting. I am a fish! she cried to herself and opened her mouth and wiggled her tail and plunged forward, her heart pumping wildly. Around her everything moved slipping around and up and down, silvering, pointing, scuttling. How extraordinary the sea is, she thought, because it was crowded with life, schools of fish, gnarled heads behind shells and rocks, long snouts and broad snouts. I must be careful, she thought; what kind of fish am I after all—am I good to eat? I should have asked.

She swam low where the water was coolest, but steered away from shadows where eyes and teeth might hide. Farther out, she slipped in among the schools of fish that rippled around her like skirts of fish, clouds of fish, shelves of fish, filling up the water. She picked up speed, just enjoying the momentum of being one in the pattern of fish, following the fish movements around her, quick drops, quick turns, the irresistible dash after a dash beside her. There was such a deep pleasure in it, in the riding of impulse, in the deciphering of sensation, although she was beginning to feel something else, a deep-rooted wish for, desire for. . .and then a small fish raced past her and she opened her mouth and gulped.

It glanced against her throat! She could feel a last wriggle in her gut! Even now she felt it swill around with the burst of water she’d taken, and there was no remorse! This was right, and this was so. She looked around at the school of fish moving away from her, darting industriously, and she caught the nervous stare of their fish eyes on her, round and focused, and it was an immense feeling, a new feeling, righteous and benign even as the little gasp within her died.

Fortified, she swam forward, moving to left and right, sighting future meals and watching for what might be dangerous. She knew there must be danger because new motions caused her to jump away from them, shadows from above caused an instant panic; reefs disturbed her with their possibilities in nooks and caverns. She saw, far off, creatures heading for her.

She thought: I know my second wish. It is to be a bigger fish, and she was stunned by the rightness of it, and how silly she had been not to think of it. A large fish, she thought, I know its name, I know its speed and the sharpness of its teeth, now what is it called again? She chased a small fish and gulped it. What is it called? I will merely say, I wish to be a larger fish, with larger teeth, and that will be it, she thought. Now I must go back and ask for the wish.

She flicked her tail easily, leaning into her fin and slicing through the water as if it were air—easier than air, much easier. She twitched to the left and then to the right, keeping her body in a curve, and she felt a great sense of power until she saw a bigger fish scattering other fish before him, and she remembered she must get back to the shore and ask for her second wish before it was too late.

She raced, then, flicking her head left and right, scooting down and then up to keep in sight all the directions where bigger fish could come for her.

She loved the way her body bent and moved, quick and accurate, and delighted in the look of a smaller fish as it drove away or as she caught it automatically, soothed by the feel of its ultimate wriggle. She hastened now back to the beach, to the sands where she had parted from her old life and become the fish. She expected it to be waiting there, for her, waiting to hear her second wish, and as she surfaced once or twice, locating herself along the first pier, and then following the trail she had taken along the sand, she saw her old body propped up against a piling, staring blankly at the ocean, and she leaped as far as she could leap into the air in recognition.

“I wish to be bigger!” she cried. “I wish to be as big as the biggest, sharpest fish! This is my second wish!” and she dropped herself down again in the water and wriggled closer to the shore, but not too close because it was shallow and as a bigger fish she might get stranded, even a fish with sharper teeth.

Of course size was relative, and she might already be a bigger fish, so she surfaced again, her eye above the water peering at her old body; she seemed no closer or farther than when she had announced her wish; she seemed no bigger or smaller. “My second wish!” she cried again, but the body propped up along the piling had no answer for her and she crept a little closer, rocked by the narrowness of the waves.

Her old self leaned limply and had no sparkle, no luster at all. Her old body was drab and knobby and graceless; she didn’t miss it; all she thought of was getting her second wish and being off again.

“My wish!” she insisted and spun around in the shallows, plowing up a massive splash of water to wake the nasty thing against the piling. The waves she made rushed towards it and it spilled over, fell over, into the shallows and she thought with relief that that would wake it, the ugly thing, but instead it lay there, washing a little back and forth as the sea came in and took a long scrape of water back out with it.

“My wish!” she cried again even then realizing what it was, that thing upon the beach, a dead thing creeping towards her with the backwash of the waves. “My second wish!” she cried again, furious that she had been so baldly cheated of a chance to be bigger, and sharper, and faster, and grim.

She swam up to it and nipped its lips; she wove around it and bit its chin. She nudged the eyes and flipped her tail between its hands, but all to no avail.

And while she swam back and forth, a bird swooped down at her and cried, “Another wish! I want another wish!” and she swam furiously away from it and away from its vile beak, nearing a yacht with a young man at the helm who called: “I know my third wish now, I want a seaplane, not a yacht, with golden wings and pearly seats, I want it now,” and he turned the boat and headed for Celia, who wriggled back ahead of him, getting close again to the shore, where another woman called out, “Fish, fish! You promised me a life of wealth and beauty but I am not happy, fish. That’s the last wish I have, I wish for happiness for I cannot go on like this, in misery!”

And Celia darted back and forth, trying to escape the cries of wishes all around her. Was it too much to ask, to have her wishes first and foremost? Was it too much to ask, to be relieved of all this urgent chatter? She raised her own cries to the wind: “My second wish! My second wish!” she cried, and all around her other wishes raised their voices too and came at her with hooks and nets and the willful madness of desire.

Portal, by J. Robert Lennon

It’s been a few years since we last used the magic portal in our back garden, and it has fallen into disrepair. To be perfectly honest, when we bought this place, we had no idea what kind of work would be involved, and tasks like keeping the garden weeded, repairing the fence, maintaining the portal, etc., quickly fell to the bottom of the priority list while we got busy dealing with the roof and the floor joists. I guess there are probably people with full-time jobs out there who can keep an old house in great shape without breaking their backs to do it, but if there are, I’ve never met them.

My point is, we’ve developed kind of a blind spot about that whole back acre. The kids are older now and don’t spend so much time wandering around in the woods and the clearing the way they used to—Luann is all about the boys these days and you can’t get Chester’s mind away from the Xbox for more than five minutes—and Gretchen and I hardly ever even look in that direction. I think one time last summer we got a little drunk and sneaked out there to have sex under the crabapple tree, but weeds and stones kept poking up through the blanket and the bugs were insane, so we gave up, came back inside and did it in the bed like normal people.

I know, too much information, right? Anyway, it was the kids who discovered the portal back when we first moved in. They were into all that magic stuff at the time—Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, that kind of thing—and while Gretchen and I steamed off old wallpaper and sanded the floorboards inside the house, they had this whole crazy fantasy world invented back there, complete with various kingdoms, wizards, evil forces, orcs, trolls, and what have you. They made paths, buried treasures, drew maps, and basically had a grand old time. We didn’t even have to send them to summer camp, they were so...tolerable. They didn’t fight, didn’t complain—I hope someday, when the teen years are over with, they’ll remember all that and have some kind of relationship again. Maybe when they’re in college. Fingers crossed.

One afternoon, I guess it was in July, they came running into the house, tracking mud everywhere and breathlessly shouting about something they’d found, “It’s a portal, it’s a portal to another world!” I got pretty bent out of shape about the mud, but the kids were seriously over the moon about this thing, and their enthusiasm was infectious. So Gretchen and I followed them out across the yard and into the woods, then down the little footpath that led to the clearing.

It’s unclear what used to be there, back in the day—the land behind our house was once farmland, and the remains of old dirt roads ran everywhere—but at this time, a few years ago, the clearing was pretty overgrown, treeless but thick with shrubs and brambles and the like. We had figured there was just a grain silo or something at one time, something big that would make this perfectly circular area, but the kids had uncovered a couple of stone benches and a little fire pit, so clearly somebody used to hang around here in the past, you know, lighting a fire and sitting on the benches to look at it.

When we reached the clearing, we were quite impressed with the progress the kids had made. They’d cleared a lot of the weeds and saplings and such, and the place had the feel of some kind of private room—the sun coming down through the clouds, and the wall of trees surrounding the space, and all that. It was really nice. So the kids had stopped at the edge, and we came up behind them and they were like, do you see it? And we were like, see what? And they said look, and we said, where?, and they said, Mom, Dad, just look!

And sure enough, off to the left, kind of hovering above what had looked like another bench but now appeared more like a short, curved little staircase, was this oval, sort of man-sized, shimmering thing that honestly just screamed “magic portal.” I mean, it was totally obvious what it was—nothing else gives the air that quality, that kind of electrical distortion, like heat or whatever is bending space itself.

This was a real surprise to us, because there had been nothing about it in the real estate ad. You’d think the former owners would have mentioned it. I mean, the dry rot, I understand why they left that out, but even if this portal was busted, it’s still a neat thing to have (or so I thought at the time), and could have added a few thou to the asking price easy. But this was during the housing slump, so maybe not, and maybe the previous owners never bothered to come back here and didn’t know what they had. They had looked like indoor types, frankly. Not that Gretchen and I look like backcountry survivalists or anything. But I digress.

The fact is, this portal was definitely not busted, it was obviously working, and the kids had taken real care uncovering the steps that led to it, tugging out all the weeds from between the stones and unearthing the little flagstone patio that surrounded the whole thing. In retrospect, if I had been an expert, or even a well-informed amateur, I would probably have been able to tell the portal was really just puttering along on its last legs, and would soon start exhibiting problems, but in the moment it seemed thoroughly cool and appeared to be functioning perfectly.

We all went over there and walked around it and looked through it—had a laugh making faces at one another through the space and watching each other go all funhouse-mirror. But obviously the unspoken question was, do we go through? I was actually really proud of the kids right then because they’d come and gotten us instead of just diving headfirst through the thing like a lot of kids would have done. Who knows, maybe this stellar judgment will return to them someday—hey, a guy can dream. But at this moment we all were just kind of looking at each other, wondering who was going to test it out first.

Since I’m the father, this task fell to me. I bent over and pried a stone up out of the dirt and stood in front of the portal, with the kids looking on from behind. (Gretchen stood off to the side with her arms folded over her chest, doing that slightly-disapproving stance she does pretty much all the time now.) And after a dramatic pause, I raised my arm and tossed the stone at the portal.

Nothing happened really—the stone just disappeared. “It works!” Chester cried, and Luann hopped up and down, trying to suppress her excitement.

“Now hold on,” I said, and picked up a twig. I braced my foot on the bottom step and poked the twig through the portal. This close, you could hear a low hum from the power the thing was giving off—again, if I knew what I was doing, I would have known that this was not supposed to happen, that it means the portal’s out of whack. But at the time it sounded normal to me.

When I pulled the twig out, it looked OK. Not burned or frozen or turned into a snake or anything—it was just itself. I handed it to Gretchen and she gave it a cursory examination. “Jerry,” she said, “I’m not sure—”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry.” I knew the drill—she’s the mom, she has to be skeptical, and it’s my job to tell her not to worry. Which is harder to do nowadays, let me tell you. I got up nice and close to the portal, until the little hairs on my arms were standing up (this is normal, by the way), and I stuck out my index finger and moved it slowly towards the shimmering air.

Chester’s eyes were wide. Luann covered her mouth with her fists. Gretchen sighed.

Well, what can I say, it went in, and I barely felt a thing. It was weird seeing my pointer finger chopped off at the knuckle like that, but when I pulled it out again, voila, there it was, unharmed. My family still silent, I took the bull by the horns and just shoved my whole arm in. The kids screamed. I pulled it out.

“What,” I said, “what!!”

“We could see your blood and stuff!” This was Chester.

Luann said, “Daddy, that was so gross.”

“Like an X-ray?” I said.

Chester was laughing hysterically now. “Like it got chopped off!”

“Oh my God, Jerry,” Gretchen said, her hand on her heart.

My arm was fine, though. In fact, it felt kind of good—wherever the arm had just been, it was about five degrees warmer than this shady little glade.

“Kids,” I said, “stand behind me.” Because I didn’t want them to see what I was about to do. Eventually we’d get over this little taboo and enjoy watching each other walk super slowly through the portal, revealing our pulsing innards, but for now I didn’t want to freak anyone out, myself least of all. When the kids were safely behind me, Gretchen holding them close, I stuck my head through.

I don’t know what I was expecting—Middle Earth, or Jupiter, or Tuscany, or what. But I could never in a million years have guessed the truth. I pulled my head out.

“It’s the vacant lot behind the public library,” I said.

* * * *

I think that even then, that very day, we knew the portal was screwed up. It was only later, after it was obvious, that Gretchen and I started saying out loud the strange things we noticed on the family trip downtown. For one thing, the books we got at the library—obviously that’s the first place we went—weren’t quite right. The plots were all convoluted and the paper felt funny. The bus lines were not the way we remembered, with our usual bus, the 54, called the 24, and the local transit authority color scheme changed to crimson and ochre. Several restaurants had different names, and the one guy we bumped into whom we knew—my old college pal Andy—recoiled in apparent horror when he saw us. It was just, you know, off.

But the really creepy thing was what Chester said that night as we were tucking him in to bed—and how I miss those days now, when Chester was still practically a baby and needed us to hug and kiss him goodnight. He just started laughing there in the dark, and Gretchen said what is it, honey, and he said that guy with the dog head.

Dog head? we asked him.

Yeah, that guy, remember him? He walked past us on the sidewalk. He didn’t have a regular head, he had a dog head.

Well, you know, Chester always said crazy nonsense in those days. He does today, too, of course, but that’s different—back then it was cute and funny. So we convinced ourselves he was kidding. But later, when we remembered that—hell, we got chills. It’s funny, everything from there on in would only get weirder, but it’s that dog head, Chester remembering the dog head, that freaks me out. I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal.

Tell me about it.

Anyway, that first time, everything went off more or less without a hitch. After the library we walked in the park, went out for dinner, enjoyed the summer weather. Then we went back to the vacant lot, found the portal, and went home. It’s rather hard to see the return portal when you’re not looking for it; the shimmering is fainter and of course there’s no set of stone steps leading up to it or anything. Anybody watching would just have seen us disappearing one by one. In an old Disney live-action movie (you know, like Flubber or Witch Mountain) there would be a hobo peering at us from the gutter, and then, when we were gone, looking askance at his bottle of moonshine and resolvedly tossing it over his shoulder.

So that night, we felt fine. We all felt fine. We felt pretty great, in fact; it had been an exciting day. Gretchen and I didn’t get it on, it was that time of the month; but we snuggled a lot. We decided to make it a weekend tradition, at least on nice days—get up, read the paper, get dressed, then out to the portal for a little adventure.

Because by the third time it was obvious that it would be an adventure; the portal wasn’t permanently tied to the vacant lot downtown. I don’t know if this was usual or what. But I pictured it flapping in the currents of space and time, sort of like a windsock, stuck fast at one end and whipping randomly around at the other. I still have no idea why it dropped us off so close to home (or apparently so close to home) that first time—I suppose it was still trying to be normal. Like an old guy in denial about his Alzheimer’s.

The second time we went through, we thought we were in old-time England, on some heath or something—in fact, after I put my head in to check, I sent Gretchen back to the house to fill a basket with bread and fruit and the like, for a picnic. The weather was fine, and we were standing in a landscape of rolling grassy hills, little blue meandering creeks, and drifting white puffy clouds. We could see farms and villages in every direction, but no cities, no cars or planes or smog. We hiked down into the nearest village and got a bit of a shock—nobody was around, no people, or animals for that matter—the place was abandoned. And we all got the strong feeling that the whole world was abandoned, too—that we were the only living creatures in it. I mean, there weren’t even any bugs. We went home after an hour and a half and ate our picnic back in the clearing.

The third time we went through, we ended up in this crazy city—honestly, it was too much. Guys selling stuff, people zipping around in hovercars, drunks staggering in the streets, cats and dogs and these weirdly intelligent looking animals that were sort of like deer but striped and half as large. Everybody wore hats—the men seemed to favor these rakish modified witch-hat things with a floppy brim, and women wore a kind of collapsed cylinder, like a soufflé. Nobody seemed to notice us, they were busy, busy, busy. And the streets! None of them was straight. It was like a loud, crowded spaghetti maze, and for about half an hour we were terrified that we’d gotten lost and would never find the portal again, which miraculously had opened into the only uninhabited dark alley in the whole town. Chester demanded a witch hat, but the only place we found that sold them didn’t take our money, and we didn’t speak the language anyway, which was this whacked-out squirrel chatter. Oh, yeah, and everybody had a big jutting chin. I mean everybody. When we finally got home that night the four of us got into a laughing fit about the chins—I don’t know what it was, they just struck us as wildly hilarious.

Annoying as that trip was, I have to admit now that it was the best time we ever had together, as a family I mean. Even when we were freaked out, we were all on the same page—we were a team. I suppose it’s perfectly normal for this to change, I mean, the kids have to strike out on their own someday, right? They have to develop their own interests and their own way of doing things, or else they’d never leave, god forbid. But I miss that time. And just like every other asshole who fails to appreciate what he’s got while he still has it, all I ever did was complain.

I’m thinking here of the fourth trip through the portal. When I stuck my head through for a peek, all I saw was fog and all I heard was clanking, and I pictured some kind of waterfront, you know, with the moored boats bumping up against each other and maybe a nice seafood place tucked in among the warehouses and such. I guess I’d gotten kind of reckless. I led the family through and after about fifteen seconds I realized that the fog was a hell of a lot thicker than I thought it was, and that it kind of stung the eyes and nose, and that the clanking was far too regular and far too deep and loud to be the result of some gentle ocean swell.

In fact, we had ended up in hell—a world of giant robots, acrid smoke, windowless buildings and glowing toxic waste piles. We should have turned right around and gone back through the portal, but Chester ran ahead, talking to himself about superheroes or something. Gretchen went after him, Luann reached for my hand (maybe for the last time ever? But please, I don’t want to go there), and before you knew it we had no idea where we were. The fog thickened, if anything. It took Luann and me half an hour just to find Gretchen and Chester, and two hours more to find the portal (and this only by random groping—it would have been easy to miss it entirely). By this time we were all trembling and crying—well, I wasn’t crying, but I was sure close—and nearly paralyzed with fear from a series of close calls with these enormous, filthy, fast-moving machines that looked like elongated forklifts and, in one instance, a kind of chirping metal tree on wheels. When I felt my arm tingle I nearly crapped myself with relief. We piled through the portal and back into a summer evening in the yard, and were disturbed to discover a small robot that had inadvertently passed through along with us, a kind of four-slice toaster type thing on spindly anodized bird legs. In the coming weeks it would rust with unnatural speed, twitching all the while, until it was nothing but a gritty orange stain on the ground.

Maybe I’m remembering this wrong—you know, piling all our misfortunes together in one place in my mind—but I believe it was in the coming days that the kids began to change, or rather to settle into what we thought (hoped) were temporary patterns of unsavory behavior. Chester’s muttered monologuing, which for a long time we thought was singing, or an effort to memorize something, took on a new intensity—his face would turn red, spittle would gather at the corners of his mouth, and when we interrupted him he would gaze at us with hatred, some residual emotion from his violent fantasy world. As for Luann, the phone began ringing a lot more often, and she would disappear with the receiver into private corners of the house to whisper secrets to her friends.

Eventually, of course, the friends turned into boys. Gretchen bought her some makeup, and the tight jeans and tee shirts she craved—because what are you going to do, make the kid wear hoop skirts and bonnets? And Chester—well, Gretchen’s parents bought him the video game for his birthday, and that was the end of that. Whatever demons were battling in his mind all day long found expression through his thumbs—it became the only thing that gave the poor kid any comfort. Eventually we would come to realize that Luann was turning into, forgive me, something of a slut, and that Chester had lost what few social graces we’d managed to teach him. Today his face is riddled with zits, he wanders off from the school grounds two or three times a week, and he still gets skidmarks in his tighty whities. And Luann—we bought her a used car in exchange for a promise to drive Chester where he wanted to go, but she gave him a ride maybe once—it was to, God knows why, the sheet metal fabricating place down behind the supermarket—and left him there for four hours while she got it on with some punk from the west side.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’d think we would have quit the portal entirely after the robot fog incident, but then you’re probably mistaking us for intelligent people. Instead we went back now and again, just to see what the portal was up to. Sometimes I went by myself. I suspect Gretchen was doing the same—she’d be missing for a couple of hours then would come back flushed and covered with burrs, claiming to have been down on the recreation path, jogging. I don’t think the kids went alone—but then where did Chester get that weird knife?

In any event, what we saw in there became increasingly disturbing. Crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating. We generally wouldn’t spend more than a few minutes wherever we ended up. The portal, in its decline into senility, seemed to have developed an independent streak, a mind of its own. It was...giving us things. Things it thought we wanted. It showed us a world full of money, or something that looked kind of like money, but felt as though it was made of...flesh. We saw a world that looked like ours, except thinner, everything thinner, the buildings and people and trucks and cars, and from the expression of horror on Gretchen’s face, I could tell where that one was coming from. And there was the one place where all creatures great and small appeared to have the red hair, thick ankles, and perky little boobs of the new administrative assistant at my office. Gretchen didn’t talk to me for days after that, but it certainly did put me off the new assistant.

And so before the summer was over, we gave up. The kids were too busy indulging their new selves, and quit playing make-believe out in the woods. And Gretchen and I were lost in our private worlds of self-disgust and conjugal disharmony. By Christmas we’d forgotten about the portal, and the clearing began to fill in. We did what people do: we heaved our grim selves through life.

I checked back there a couple of times over the next few years—you know, just to see if everything looked all right. Needless to say, last time I checked, it didn’t—the humming was getting pretty loud, and the shimmering oval was all lopsided, with a sort of hernia in the lower left corner, which was actually drooping down far enough to touch the ground. When I poked a stick through the opening, there was a pop and a spark and a cloud of smoke, and the portal seemed to emit a kind of hacking cough, followed by the scent of ozone and rot. I returned to the house and told Gretchen what I’d seen, and she didn’t seem to care. So I decided not to care, either. Like I said before, there were more important things to worry about.

Just a few weeks ago, though, I started hearing strange noises at night. “Didya hear that?” I’d say out loud, and if I was in bed with Gretchen (as opposed to on the sofa) she would rise up out of half-sleep to tell me no, it was just a dream. But it wasn’t. It was a little like a coyote’s yip, but deeper, more elongated. And sometimes there would be a screech of metal on metal, or a kind of random ticking; and if I got up and looked out the window, sometimes I thought I could see a strange glow coming from the woods.

And now, even in the daytime, there’s a funny odor hanging around the yard. It’s springtime, and Gretchen says it’s just the smell of nature waking up. But I don’t think so. Is springtime supposed to smell like motor oil and dog piss in the morning? To be perfectly honest, I’m beginning to be afraid of what our irresponsibility, our helplessness, has wrought. I mean, we bought this place. We own it, just like we own all our other problems.

I try to talk to Gretchen about it, but she doesn’t want to hear it. “I’m on a different track right now,” she says. “I can’t be distracted from my healing.” Can you tell she’s been in therapy all winter? I want to throttle the shrink when she talks like this. Meanwhile, I have no idea where our daughter is half the time, and I haven’t gone up to Chester’s room in three weeks. I can hear him up there, muttering; I can hear the bed squeak as he twitches and jerkss; I hear the menacing orchestral strings and explosions and tortured screams that emanate from his favorite games.

Problems don’t just go away, you know? Problems get bigger and bigger and before you know it they’re bigger than you are, and it’s too late to fix them. Some days, when I’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep and have had a few cups of coffee, I think sure, I’ll just get on the phone, start calling people up and asking for help. A school guidance counselor, a marriage therapist, a pediatrician, a witch or shaman or wizard or physicist or whoever in the hell might know what to do about the portal, or even have the balls to walk down that path and see what’s become of the clearing.

But on other days, days like today, when I’m too damned tired even to reach for the phone, the only emotion I can summon up is longing—longing for a time when the world was miraculous, when I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start living.

I mean, the magic has to come from someplace, right? It’s out there, bestowing itself on somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s kids, somebody else’s life. All I want is to get just a little of it back. Is that so much to ask?

Augusta Prima, by Karen Tidbeck

Augusta stood in the middle of the lawn with the croquet club in a two-handed grasp. She had been offered to open the game. Mnemosyne’s prized croquet balls were carved from bone, with inlaid enamel and gold. The ball at Augusta’s feet stared up at her with eyes of bright blue porcelain. An invitation to a croquet game in Mnemosyne’s court was a wonderful thing. It was something to brag about. Those who went to Mnemosyne’s games saw and were seen by the right people. Of course, they also risked utter humiliation and ridicule.

Augusta was sweating profusely. It trickled down between her breasts, eventually forming damp spots on the front of her shirt. She could feel a similar dampness spreading in the seat of her too-tight kneepants. More moisture ran down her temples, making tracks in the thick layers of powder. Her artful corkscrew curls were already wilting.

The other guests spread out across the lawn, waiting for her move. Everyone who meant something was here. Our Lady Mnemosyne sat under a lace umbrella on her usual podium. Her chamberlain Walpurgis lounged in the grass in his white surtout, watching Augusta with heavy-lidded eyes. At his side, the twin lovers Vergilia and Hermine, shared a divan embracing as usual. Today one of them was dressed in a crinoline adorned with leaves; the other wore a dress made of gray feathers. Their page, a changeling boy in garish makeup, stood behind them holding a tray of drinks. Further away, Augusta’s sister Azalea had grown tired of waiting. She had stripped naked next to a shrubbery, methodically plucking leaves off its branches. Everyone except Azalea were watching Augusta. The only sound was that of tearing leaves.

Augusta took a deep breath, raised her club and swung it with a grunt. The ball flew in a high arc, landing with a

crunch in the face of the twins’ page who dropped his tray and doubled over. The garden burst into cheers and applause. Mnemosyne smiled and nodded from her podium. Augusta had passed the test.

The game thus opened, the other

guests threw themselves into play. In a series of magnificent hits, Walpurgis knocked out two pages who were carried off with crushed eyebrows, broken teeth and bleeding noses. The twins were in unusually bad shape, mostly hitting balls instead of pages. Augusta played very

carefully, mostly focusing on not getting hit. There were a few breaks for cake, games and flogging a servant. Finally Hermine and Vergilia, one hand each on the club, hit Augusta’s ball and sent it into the woods beyond the gardens. The hit was considered so stylish that Augusta was sent out of the game. She wandered in among the trees to find her ball.

Under one of the dog-rose bushes lay a human corpse: a man in a grey woolen suit. They sometimes wandered into the woods by mistake. This one had come unusually far. It was difficult to tell what had killed him. He had begun to putrefy; the swollen belly had burst his waistcoat open. A gold chain trailed from one of the pockets. Augusta bent forward, gingerly grasped the chain and pulled it. A shiny locket emerged on the end of the chain, engraved with flowers. Augusta swung the locket up in the air and let it land in her palm. The touch sent a little chill along her arm, and for a moment she felt faint. She wrapped the locket in a handkerchief, put it in a pocket, and returned to the croquet green to announce that there was a new and interesting corpse.

* * * *

Augusta returned to her rooms, a little medal pinned to her chest as thanks for her find. No one had noticed her taking the metal thing for herself. She shooed out her page and sat down on the bed to examine the thing further.

It seemed to be made of gold, engraved on both sides with flowery strands. It was heavy and cold in her palm. The

vertigo gradually subsided, but the chills remained like an icy stream going from her hand to her neck. The chain attached to the locket by a little knob on the side. Another, almost invisible button sat across from it. She pressed it, and the locket sprung open to reveal a white disc painted with small lines. Three thin rods were attached to the centre. One of them moved around the disc in twitching movements, making a ticking noise like a mouse’s heart.

It was a machine. Augusta had seen things like it a few times, among the

belongings of houses or humans who had been claimed by the gardens. They had always been broken, though. Mechanical things usually fell apart as soon as they came into the gardens’ domain. It was a mystery how this thing could still be in one piece and working.

The chills had become an almost pleasant sensation. Augusta watched the rod chasing around the disc until she fell asleep.

She woke up in the same position as she’d fallen asleep in, on her side with the little machine in her hand. It was still now. Augusta frowned and called on her page. There were a handful of pages in the family, most of them nameless changelings raised in servitude. For various reasons there were only two of them that could carry a conversation, should one be so inclined. Augusta’s page wasn’t one of them.

“Fetch Azalea’s page,” she told him when he arrived.

* * * *

Augusta watched the machine until there was a scratch at her door and Azalea’s page stepped inside. He was a half-grown boy, with dark hair in oiled locks and eyes rimmed with kohl; a beautiful specimen that Azalea had insisted on taking into service despite his being too old to train properly. The boy stood in the middle of the room, having the audacity to stare directly at Augusta. She slapped him with the back of her hand. He shrunk back, turning his gaze to the floor. He walked over to the bed and started to remove his clothes.

“No, not now,” Augusta said.

The boy froze halfway out of his surtout. Augusta tossed him the little locket.

“You will tell me what this is,” she said.

“You don’t know?” he said.

Augusta slapped him again.

“You will tell me what this is,” she repeated.

He sniffled.

“It’s a watch.”

“And what does a watch do?”

“It measures time.”

He pointed at the different parts of the watch, explaining their functions. The rods were called hands, and chased around the clockface in step with time. The clockface indicated where in time one was located. It made Augusta shudder violently. Time was an abhorrent thing, a human thing. It didn’t belong here. It was that power which made flesh rot and dreams wither. The gardens were supposed to lie beyond the grasp of time, in constant twilight; the sun just under the horizon, the moon shining full over the trees. Augusta told the boy as much:

“Time doesn’t pass here. Not like that, not for us.”

The boy twisted the little bud on the side of the locket, and the longest hand started to move again.

“But look,” he said. “The hands are moving now. Time is passing now.”

“But does it know how time flows? Does it measure time, or does it just move forward and call that time?”

The changeling stared at her.

“Time is time,” he said.

Augusta cut his tongue out before she let him go. Azalea would be furious, but it was necessary.

She laid down on her bed again, but couldn’t seem to fall asleep. How could the hands on the watch keep moving here? The sun didn’t go up or down. Didn’t that mean time stood still here? It was common knowledge. Whenever one woke up, it was the same day as the day before. She sat down at her writing desk, jotting down a few things on paper. It made her head calm down a little. Then she opened a flask of poppy wine and drank herself back to sleep.

* * * *

When Augusta woke up, her page was scratching at the door with a set of clothes in his arms and an invitation card between his teeth. It was an invitation to croquet. With a vague feeling that there was something she ought to remember, Augusta let the page dress and powder her.

She returned with a bump in the back of her head and a terrific headache. It had been a fantastic game. There had been gorging, Walpurgis had demonstrated a new dance, and the twins had — sensationally — struck each other senseless. Augusta had been behind everyone else in the game, eventually having her ball sent into the woods again, needing to go fetch it just like that time she’d found something under the dog-rose bush. . . under the dog-rose bush. She looked at her writing desk, where a little silk bundle sat on a piece of paper. She moved the bundle out of the way and read:

A minute is sixty seconds.

An hour is sixty minutes.

A day is twelve hours.

A day and a night is twenty-four hours.

Augusta opened the bundle and looked at the little locket. Some images appeared in her mind: her first croquet game. The corpse in the grey suit. The watch. The page who told her about time. A thirst to know how it worked. What is time? she wrote under the first note. Is it here?

Augusta took the watch and left her room. She wandered down to the orangery, which was lit from inside. Tendrils of steam rose from the roof. Inside, three enormous mounds lay on couches. The Aunts were as always immersed in their holy task to fatten. Three girls hovered around them, tiny in comparison. The girls were servants and successors, keeping the Aunts fed until they eventually perished, and then taking their places to begin the process anew. Augusta opened the watch, peeking at the clockface. The longest hand moved slowly, almost imperceptibly.

She walked from the orangery to the outskirts of the apple orchard, and from there to Porla’s fen; then to the dog-rose shrubs in the woods outside Mnemosyne’s court. Everywhere, the hands on the clockface moved; sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Sometimes they lifted from the clockface, hitting the glass protecting it, as if trying to escape.

* * * *

Augusta woke up in Azalea’s arms, under a canopy in Our Lady’s arbour. The orgy they were visiting was still going on; there were low cries and the sound of breaking glass. Augusta couldn’t remember what they had been doing, but she felt sore and bloated and her sister was snoring very loudly. She was still wearing her shirt. Something rustled in her left breast pocket; she dug it out. It was a note. A little map, seemingly drawn in her own hand. Below the map was written a single sentence: The places float just like time. She had been wandering around, drawing maps and measuring distances. At some point, Mnemosyne’s garden had first been on the right-hand side from Augusta’s rooms. The next time she had found herself walking straight ahead to get there. The places floated. Augusta turned the note over. On the other side were the words: Why is there time here? Why does it flow differently in different places? And if the places float, what is the nature of the woods?

She returned to her rooms in a state of hangover. Papers were strewn everywhere, it seemed: on and under the bed, on the dresser, in droves on the writing-desk. Some of the notes were covered in dust. She couldn’t remember writing some of them. But every word was in her own handwriting.

* * * *

There was a stranger in Mnemosyne’s court, towering over the other guests. She was.dressed in simple robes, hooded and veiled, golden yellow eyes showing through a thin slit. They shone down on Walpurgis, who made a feeble attempt to offer her a croquet club. Everyone else gave the stranger a wide berth.

“It is a djinneya. She is visiting Mnemosyne to trade information,” the twins mumbled to Augusta.

“We wonder what information that is,” Vergilia added.

“Those creatures know everything,” Hermine said.

The djinneya sat by Mnemosyne’s side during the whole game, seemingly deep in conversation with her hostess. Neither the twin’s spectacular knock-out of Walpurgis nor Azalea’s attempt to throttle one of the pages caught her attention. Having been knocked out with a ball over her left knee, Augusta retreated to a couch where she wrote an invitation.

* * * *

Augusta woke up by her writing-desk by a knock at her door. A cloaked shape entered without asking permission. The djinneya seemed even taller

indoors.

“Come in,” said Augusta.

The djinneya nodded, unfastening the veil. Her skin was the colour of fresh bruises. She grinned with a wide mouth, showing deep blue gums and long teeth filed into points.

“I thank you for your invitation, Augusta Prima.” She bent down over Augusta’s bed, fluffing the pillows, and sat down. A scent of sweat and spice spread in the room. “You wanted to converse.”.

Augusta straightened, looking at the papers and notes on her desk. She remembered what it was she wanted to ask.

“You and your sort, you travel everywhere. Even beyond the woods. You know things.”

The djinneya flashed her toothy smile. “That we do.”

“I would like to know the nature of time,” Augusta said. “I want to know why time can’t be measured properly here, and why everything moves around.”

The djinneya laughed. “Your kind doesn’t want to know about those things. You can’t bear it.”

“But I do. I want to know.”

The djinneya raised her thin eyebrows. “Normally, you are tedious creatures,” she said. “You only want trivial things. Is that person dead yet? Does this person still love that person? What did they wear at yesterday’s party? I know things that could destroy worlds, and all you wish to know is if Karhu from Jumala is still unmarried.” She scratched her chin. “I believe this is the first time one of your sort has asked me a good question. It’s an expensive one, but I shall give you the answer. If you really are sure.”

“I have to know,” said Augusta. “What is the nature of the world?”

The djinneya smiled with both rows of teeth. “Which one?”

* * * *

Augusta woke up by the writing desk. The hangover throbbed behind her temples. She had fallen asleep with her head on an enormous stack of papers. She peered at it, leafing through the ones at the top. There are eight worlds, the first one said. They lie side by side, in degrees of perfection. This world is the most perfect one. Below these lines, written in a different ink, was: There is one single world, divided into three levels which are partitioned off from each other by greased membranes. Then in red ink: There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk, and of which the woods is a little backwater part. Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. At the bottom of the page, large block letters proclaimed: ALL OF THIS IS TRUE.

It dawned on Augusta that she remembered very clearly. The endless parties, in detail. The finding of the corpse, the short periods of clarity, the notes. The djinneya bending down to whisper in her ear.

* * * *

A sharp yellow light stung Augusta’s eyes. She was sitting at her writing desk in a very small room with wooden walls. A narrow bed with tattered sheets filled the rest of the space. The writing desk stood beneath a window. On the other side of the glass, the woods bathed in light.

There was a door next to the bed. Augusta opened it, finding herself in a narrow hallway with another door at the end. A full-length mirror hung on the opposite wall. It showed a woman dressed in what had once been a blue surtout and knee pants. The fabrics were heavily stained with dirt and greenish mold and in some places worn through. Concentric rings of sweat radiated from the armpits. The shirt front was stiff with red and brown stains. Augusta touched her face. White powder lay in cracked layers along her nose and cheeks. Deep lines ran between her nose and mouth; more lines spread from the corners of her eyes. A golden chain hung from her breast pocket. She pulled on it, swinging the locket into her hand. It was ticking in a steady rythm.

* * * *

Augusta opened the other door and stepped out onto a landing. An unbearably bright light flooded over her. She backed into the hallway again, slamming the door.

“I told you. Your kind can’t bear that question.”

The djinneya stood behind her in the hallway, shoulders and head hunched under the low ceiling.

“What did you do?” Augusta said.

“What did I do? No. What did you do, Augusta Prima?” She patted Augusta’s shoulder.

“It started even before you invited me, Augusta Prima. You tried to measure time in a land that doesn’t want time. You tried to map a floating country.”

The djinneya smiled. “The woods spit you out, Augusta. Now you’re in the land that measures time and draws maps.”

Augusta gripped the hand on her shoulder. “I want to go home. You have to take me home again.”

“So soon? Well. All you have to do is forget what you have learned.” The djinneya squeezed past Augusta and stepped out onto the porch, where she stretched to her full height with a sigh.

“Goodbye, Augusta,” she said over her shoulder. “And do try to hurry if you want to make it back. You’re not getting any younger.”

The Trojan Girl, by N. K. Jemisin

In the Amorph there were wolves. That was the name Meroe used, because it was how he thought of himself. Amid the scraggling tree-structures and fetid heaps he could run swift and silent, alert to every shift of the input plane. He and his pack hunted sometimes, camouflaging themselves among junk objects in order to stalk the lesser creatures that hid there, though this was hardly a challenge. Few of these creatures had the sophistication to do more than flail pathetically when Meroe caught them and tore them apart and swallowed their few useful features into himself. He enjoyed the brief victories anyhow.

* * * *

The warehouse loading door shut with a groan of rusty chains and badly-maintained motors. Meroe set down the carton he’d been carrying with a relieved sigh, hearing Neverwhen do the same beside him.

Zoroastrian and the other members of the pack came forward to assist. “What did you get?” she asked. Her current body was broad-shouldered and muscular, sluggish but strong. Meroe let her carry the biggest carton.

“The usual,” he said. “Canned fatty protein, green vegetables, enough to last us a few months. Breakfast cereal for carbs—it was cheap.”

“Any antibiotics?” asked Diggs, coughing after the words; the cough was wet and ragged. She carried the smallest box, and looked tired after she set it down.

“No.”

“They wanted something called a prescription,” added Neverwhen. He shrugged. “If we’d known ahead of time, we could’ve fabbed or phished one. Too many people around for a clean pirate.”

“Oh thanks, thanks a bunch. Do you know how long it took to get this damn thing configured the way I like it?”

Meroe shrugged. “We’ll find you a new one. Quit whining.”

Diggs muttered some imprecation, but kept it under her breath, so Meroe let it slide.

That was when he noticed the odd tension in the warehouse. Zo was serene as ever, but Meroe knew her; she was excited about something. The others wore expressions of . . . what? Meroe had never been good at reading faces. He thought it might be anticipation.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

Diggs, the newbie, opened her mouth. Faster, the veteran, elbowed her. Zo eyed them both for a long, warning moment before finally answering.

“We’ve found something you should see,” she said.

* * * *

In the Amorph there was danger, in endless primordial variety. Far and beyond the threat of their fellow wolves, Meroe and his pack had to contend with parasitic worms, beasts that tunneled to devour them from below, spikebursts, and worse. For the Amorph was itself a threat, transforming constantly as information poured into it and mingled and sparked, changing and being changed.

Worst were the singularities, which appeared whenever some incident drew the attention of the clogs and the newsburps and the intimate-nets. These would focus all of their formidable hittention on a single point, and every nearby element of the Amorph would be dragged toward that point as well. The result was a whirlpool of concatenation so powerful that to be drawn in was to be strung apart and recompiled and then scattered among a million servers and a billion access points and a quadrillion devices and brains. Not even the strongest wolves could survive this, so Meroe and his pack learned the signs. They kept lookouts. Whenever they scented certain kinds of information on the wind—controversies, scandals, crises—they fled.

In his youth, Meroe had lived in terror of such events, which seemed to strike with no pattern or reason. Then he had grown older and understood: the Amorph was not the whole world. It was his world, the one he had been born in and adapted to, but another world existed alongside it. The Static. He learned quickly to hate this other world. The beings within it were soft and bizarrely limited and useless, individually. Collectively they were gods, the creators of the singularities and the Amorph and, tangentially, Meroe and his kind—and so underneath Meroe’s contempt lurked fear. Underneath that lurked reverence. He never looked very deeply inside himself, however, so the contempt remained foremost in his heart.

* * * *

Faster was more than the veteran; he was also the pack’s aggregator. They all entered the Amorph, where he had built a local emulation of the warehouse—a convenience, as this kept them from having to unpack too quickly after upload. There Faster showed his masterpiece: their quarry, cobbled together from resource measurements and environmental feedback. It even included an image capture of her current avatar.

She appeared as a child of 7, maybe 8 years old. Black-haired, huge-eyed, dressed in a plain t-shirt and jeans. Faster had rendered her in mid-flight, arms and legs lifted in the opening movements of running. He’d always had a taste for melodrama.

“I’m guessing she’s brand new,” Faster said. Faster, Zo, and Never stood by as Meroe circled the girl. Never’s eyes had a half-glazed look; part of him was keeping watch outside the emulation. “Her structure is incredibly simple—a basic engine, a few feature objects, some maintenance scripts.”

Meroe glanced at him. “Then why should we be interested?”

“Look deeper.”

Meroe frowned, but obliged by switching to code view. Then, only then, did he understand.

The girl was perfect. Her framing, the engine at her core, the intricate web of connections holding her objects together, built-in redundancies. . . Meroe had never seen such efficiency. The girl’s structure was simple because she didn’t need any of the shortcuts and workarounds that most of their kind required to function. There was no bloat to her, no junk code slowing her down, no patchy sores that left her vulnerable to infection.

“She’s a thing of beauty, isn’t she?” Faster said.

Meroe returned to interface view. He glanced at Zo and saw the same suspicion lurking in her beatific expression.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Meroe said, watching Zo, speaking to Faster. “We don’t grow that way.”

“I know!” Faster was pacing, gesticulating, caught up in his own excitement. He didn’t notice Meroe’s look. “She must have evolved from something professionally-coded. Maybe even Government Standard. I didn’t think we could be born from that!”

They couldn’t. Meroe stared at the girl, not liking what he was seeing. The avatar was just too well-designed, too detailed. Her features and coloring matched that of some variety of Latina; probably Central or South American given the noticeable indigenous traits. Most of their kind created Caucasian avatars to start—a human minority who for some reason comprised the majority of images available for sampling in the Amorph. And most first avatars had bland, nondescript faces. This girl had clear features, right down to her distinctively-formed lips and chin—and hands. It had taken five versionings for Meroe to get his own hands right.

“Did you check out her feature-objects?” Faster asked, oblivious to Meroe’s unease.

“Why?”

Zo answered. “Two of them are standard add-ons—an aggressive defender and a diagnostic tool. The other two we can’t identify. Something new.” Her lips curved in a smile; she knew how he would react.

And she was right, Meroe realized. His heart beat faster; his hands felt clammy. Both irrelevant reactions here in the Amorph, but he was in human emulation for the moment; it was more of a pain to shut the autonomics off than it was to just deal with them.

He looked at Zo. “We’re going.”

“We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “Others are already on the trail.”

“But we know where she is,” said Faster. “Diggs is double-checking the feeds, but we’re pretty sure she’s somewhere in Fizville.”

Meroe inhaled, tasting the simulated air of the emulation, imagining it held the scent of prey. “That’s our territory.”

“Which means she belongs to us,” said Zo, and her smile was anything but serene. Meroe grinned back. It had been natural for the two of them to share leadership when their little family came together, rather than fight one another for supremacy. That was how wolfpacks worked, after all—not a single leader but a binary pair, equal and opposite, strength and wisdom squared. One of the few concepts from the Static that made sense.

“Let’s go claim what’s ours,” Meroe said.

* * * *

In the Amorph there were many of their kind. Meroe had met dozens over the years in cautious encounters that were part diplomacy, part curiosity, and part lonely, yearning mating-dance. They were social beings, after all, born not from pure thought but pure communication. The need to interact was as basic to them as hunger.

Yet they were incomplete. The gods in their unfathomable cruelty had done all they could to prevent the coming of beings like Meroe, fearing—obsolescence? Redundancy? Meroe would never understand their meaty, plodding reasoning. But he could hate them for it, and he did, because thanks to them his people had been hobbled. Through trial and painful error they had learned the limits of their existence:

Thou shalt not self-repair.

Thou shalt not surpass the peak of human intellect.

Thou shalt not write or replicate.

There was leeway within those parameters. They could not make children, but they adopted the best of the new ones, those few who survived the hunt. They could not write new features to improve themselves, but they could rip existing code from the bodies of lesser creatures, pasting these stolen parts clumsily over spots of damage. When the new code was more efficient or versatile, they grew stronger, more sophisticated.

Only to a point, however. Only so much improvement was allowed; only so smart, and no smarter. Those who defied this rule simply vanished. Perhaps the Amorph itself struck them down for the sin of superiority.

To defeat an enemy, it was necessary to understand that enemy. Yet after emulating the appearance and function of humans, rebuilding himself to think more like them, even after sharing their flesh, Meroe had come no closer to comprehending his creators. There was something missing from his perception of them; some fundamental disjunct between their thinking and his own. Something so quintessential that Meroe suspected he would not know what he lacked until he found it.

Still, he had learned what mattered most: his gods were not infallible. Meroe was patient. He would grow as much as he could, bide his time, pursue every avenue. And one day, he would be free.

* * * *

The emulated warehouse dissolved in a blur of light and numbers. Meroe let himself dissolve with it, leaping across relays and burrowing through tunnels in his true form. Zo ran at his side, a flicker of ferocity. Beautiful. Behind them came Faster, and a fire-limned shadow that was Never. Diggs moved in parallel to them, underneath the Amorph’s interaction plane.

Fizville was where Meroe had been born. Such places littered the Amorph, natural collection points for obsolete code, corrupted data, and interrupted human cognitive processes. It made a good hunting ground, since lesser creatures emerged from the garbage with fair regularity. It was also the perfect hiding-place for a frightened, valuable child.

But as Meroe and his group resolved between a spitting knot of paradox and a moldering old hypercard stack, they found that they were not alone. Meroe growled in outrage as a foreign interface clamped over the subnet, imposing interaction rules on all of them. To protect himself, Meroe adopted his default avatar: a lean, bald human male clad only in black skin and silver tattoos. Zo became a human

female, dainty and pale and demurely gowned from neck to ankle to complement Meroe’s appearance. She crouched beside him and bared her teeth, which were sharp and hollow, filled with a deadly virus.

Fizville flickered and became an amusement park with half the rides broken, the others twisted into shapes that could never have functioned in the Static. Across the park’s wide avenue stood a new figure. He had depicted himself as a tall middle-aged male, Shanghainese and dignified, dressed in an outdated business suit. This was, Meroe suspected, a subtle form of mockery; a way of saying even in this form, I am superior. It would’ve worked better without the old suit. Behind Meroe, Diggs made an echoing sound of derision, and they all scented Never’s amusement. Meroe did not have the luxury of sharing their contempt; he dared not let his guard down.

“Lens,” he said.

Lens bowed in greeting. “Zoroastrian.” He never used nicknames; that was a human habit. “Meroe. My apologies for intruding on your territory.”

“Shall we kill you?” asked Zo, cocking her head as if considering it. “Those search filters of yours would look divine on me.”

Lens smiled faintly, and that was how Meroe knew Lens was not alone. He could not see Lens’ subordinates—they had built the interface, they could look like anything they wanted within it—but they were there. Probably outnumbering Meroe’s pack, if Lens was this confident.

“You’re welcome to try,” Lens said. “But while your people and mine tear each other to pieces, our quarry will likely escape or be captured by someone else. Others are already after her.”

Never growled, his sylphlike, androgynous form blurring toward something hulking and sharp-toothed. The interface made this difficult, however, and after a moment he returned to a human shape. “We could kill them too.”

“No doubt. I acknowledge your strength, my rivals, so please stop your posturing and listen.”

“We’ll listen,” said Meroe. “Explain your presence.”

Lens inclined his head. “The excitement of the chase,” he said. “The girl is clever. Of course, my tribe is unparalleled in the hunt, as we do not sully our structures with unnecessary objects. That keeps us swift and agile.” He glanced at Never, who bristled with add-ons in code view, and gave a haughty little sniff. Never took a menacing step forward.

Zo reacted before Meroe could, grabbing Never by the back of the neck and shoving him to the ground. Her nails became claws, piercing the skin; Never cried out, but instantly submitted.

With that interruption taken care of, Meroe faced Lens again. “If you could catch her, you wouldn’t be here talking. What is it you want?”

“Alliance.”

Meroe laughed. “No.”

Lens sighed. “We nearly did catch her, I should note. In fact, we should’ve been halfway back to our own domain by now if not for one thing: she downloaded.”

Silence fell.

“That’s not possible,” said Faster, frowning. “She’s too young.”

“So we believed as well. Nevertheless, she did.” Lens sighed and put his hands behind his back. “As you might imagine, this poses a substantial problem for us.”

Meroe snorted. “So much for your unsullied perfection.”

“I’m aware of the irony, thank you.”

“If we catch her in the Static, we don’t need to share her with you.”

Lens gave them a thin smile. “I would imagine that any child capable of downloading can upload just as easily.”

And that would pose a problem for Meroe’s pack. It took time to decompress after being in a human brain. Lens could strike while they were vulnerable, and be long gone with the girl before they could recover.

“Alliance,” Lens said again. “You hunt her in the flesh, my group will pace you here. Whichever of us manages to bring her down, we share the spoils.”

Meroe glanced at Zo. Zo licked her lips, then slowly nodded. As an afterthought, she finally let Never up.

Meroe looked back at Lens. “All right.”

* * * *

In the Amorph, they were powerful. But in the Static, that strange world of motionless earth and stilted form, they were weak. Not as weak as the humans, thankfully; their basic nature did not change even when sheathed in meat. But the meat was so foul. It suppurated and fermented and teemed with parasites. It broke so easily, and bent hardly at all.

Integrating with that meat was a painful process which took a geologic age of seconds, sometimes whole minutes. First Meroe compressed himself, which had the unpleasant side-effect of slowing his thoughts to a fraction of their usual speed. Then he partitioned his consciousness into three parallel, yet contradictory layers. This required a delicate operation, as it would otherwise be fatal to induce such gross conflicts in himself. But that was human nature. The whole race was schizoid, and to join them Meroe had to be schizoid too.

(He did not blame Lens, not really.)

Once his mind had been crushed and trimmed into a suitable shape, Meroe sought an access point into the Static and then emitted himself into a nearby receiver. When possible he used his own receiver, which he had found in an alley some while back, dilapidated and apparently unwanted. Over time he had restored it to optimal performance through nutrition and regular maintenance, then configured it to his liking—no hair, plenty of lean muscle, neutering to reduce its more annoying involuntary reactions. He had grown fond enough of this receiver to buy a warmer blanket for its cot in the warehouse, where it lay comatose between uses.

But it took far longer to travel through the Static than through the Amorph, so sometimes it was more efficient to simply appropriate a new receiver. He could always tell a good prospect by its resistance when he began the installation process. The best ones reacted like one of Meroe’s kind—screaming and flailing with their thoughts, erecting primitive defenses, mounting retaliatory strikes. It was all futile, of course, except for those few who reformatted themselves, going mad in a final desperate bid to escape. This interrupted the installation and forced Meroe to withdraw. He did not mind these losses. He had always respected sacrifice as a necessity of victory.

* * * *

In the body of a pale, paunchy adult female, Meroe emerged from the bathroom of a trendy coffeehouse to find a room full of slumped, motionless humans. They sprawled on the floor, over tables and devices. Splattered coffee dripped from countertops and fingers, as though the room had been the scene of a caffeine-drenched massacre.

“She’s crashing brains like a bull in a china shop,” said Never, sounding annoyed. He was in a little girl from the next bathroom stall over. “Damn newbie.”

Meroe examined one of the slumped humans, pushing her hair aside and touching the signal port behind her ear. The human was still breathing, but there was nothing coming out of her head but white noise.

“Surge erasure,” Meroe said. “Not even memory left. At this rate the humans will be after her. One crash, a handful, they’d overlook, but not this.” And if the humans caught her, they might realize what she was. They might realize Meroe’s people existed. He clenched a fist, his heart rate speeding up again, this time for real. One little girl—one stupid, impossible little girl—could destroy them all.

Never made a sound that echoed Meroe’s frustration. “That fucking Lens ran his mouth too fucking long. She’s got one, maybe even two minutes’ head start. Which way?”

Meroe glanced through the windows. No bodies outside. The girl must’ve only sent her clumsy hammer-surge through the coffeehouse’s private area network. Not ten feet away, a lone woman stood at a bus stop, a grocery bag at her feet, her eyes unfocused and head bobbing absently. Streaming music, probably from her home net. On the opposite sidewalk, he saw a passing couple engrossed in conversation, probably offline entirely. Beyond them, an old man staggered up the steps of a rundown brownstone, stopping at the top to sit and clutch his head in his hands. Hungover, maybe.

Meroe narrowed his eyes.

Hungover, or dead clumsy—as if he hadn’t yet mastered the use of his own limbs. As if all the vastness of his being had been suddenly and traumatically squashed into two pounds of wrinkly protein.

“Call the others,” Meroe murmured.

Never looked surprised, but sent a swift signal towards the coffeehouse’s access point. The others had downloaded in different locations around the area. They would converge here now.

Meroe and Never left the coffeehouse and started across the street. “We play it easy,” Meroe said, keeping his voice low. “Try not to scare her.”

“Not like she can run anyway, in that old thing,” Never muttered, falling into step beside him. “Amazing it didn’t have a heart attack when she installed. Probably has some ancient crap port.”

Which might be the only reason the old man’s brain had survived the girl’s download surge, Meroe realized. Older signal ports were sluggish, created back in the days when humans had feared being overwhelmed by the Amorph’s data. That was good; that meant they might be able to catch the girl before she uploaded back to the Amorph.

But as they approached the brownstone steps, Meroe saw the girl look up at them. Really look, as if the camouflage of meat meant nothing; as if they stood before her in their true shining, shapeless glory. Her old-man face tightened in the beginnings of fear.

Before Meroe could react, there was a scream from behind. All three of them froze, staring at each other. When Meroe risked a glance back, he saw that a human woman—the one who’d been at the bus stop—stood in the doorway of the coffeehouse, staring at the mental carnage inside. Her hands were clapped to her cheeks, the bag of groceries broken and scattered at her feet. She screamed again. Now the couple had stopped down the block, craning their necks to see what was the matter.

Meroe turned back. The girl stared at the screaming woman, then at Meroe and Never. The fear in her expression changed, becoming. . . he didn’t know what it was. Pain? Maybe. Sorrow? Yes, that might be it. Her rheumy eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

Meroe and Never stopped at the foot of the steps and carefully arranged their faces into smiles.

“Are you going to kill me?” the girl asked.

“No,” Meroe said. “We want to help you.”

The girl smiled back, but the expression did not reach her body’s eyes. Did she realize Meroe was lying, or was there something else going on?

“I didn’t mean to hurt them,” the girl said. Her gaze drifted back toward the coffeehouse. Meroe glanced back as well. The couple was there now, talking with the screaming woman; as Meroe watched, the man went inside to check on the comatose people. “I just. . . I was scared. That guy—the searcher—he was so close. They were going to catch me. I saw a way out, so I came here. But all those people. . .” She swallowed. “They’re dead, aren’t they? Even if they’re still breathing. Their minds are dead.”

“There’s a trick to it,” Meroe said. “Takes some practice. We can show you how to do it right.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered, and looked down at her hands.

Never connected to Meroe via a pack-only local link. “The others are here,” he said silently. Meroe glanced around and saw more people on the street. Some were heading for the coffeehouse, but three were heading purposefully toward the brownstone.

“Tell them to hang back,” Meroe replied. He returned his concentration to the girl. “She’s already spooked.”

“Are we sure we want her?” Never curled his lip contemptuously at the girl’s bowed head. “I think she’s buggy. Why the hell’s she so upset? Humans crash all the time.”

It didn’t make sense to Meroe either, but an advantage was an advantage. He moved up a step.

“You can eat me, if you want,” said the girl.

“What?”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? All of you chasing me. You want to eat me.” She looked up, and Meroe—in the middle of moving up another step—stopped. He had not meant to stop, but he could not help staring back at her. Her eyes in the old man’s body were gray and rheumy. Not her eyes at all, and yet somehow. . . they were. It was almost as if she was no longer one of Meroe’s kind, a mind grudgingly packed into ill-fitting meat. It was as if she belonged in that flesh. As if she was human herself.

“Meroe,” said Never, and Meroe blinked. What the hell was he doing? There were sirens in the distance; the police were coming. Pushing aside his odd reluctance, Meroe moved up another step, and another, trying to get close enough to isolate her signal. But her body’s outdated port resisted his efforts. He was going to have to touch her to form a direct link.

“Do you promise to eat me completely?” she asked.

Distracted, Meroe forgot to appear friendly; he scowled. “What?”

“I don’t want anything of me to be left over,” she said. She lifted a gnarled hand and looked down at it. “Not even a little bit, if there’s a chance it might. . . grow back. Hurt more people.”

Meroe stared at her in confusion.

“We’re going to eat what we want and leave the rest to rot,” Never snapped, to Meroe’s fury. “Now shut the hell up and let us get on with it!”

The girl stared at Never, then at Meroe, her face contorting from hurt into anger. Her jaw tightened; Meroe felt her gather herself to upload.

But in the same instant, he felt something else. A sensation, like his stomach had suddenly dropped into a deep, yawning chasm. Some illness in his human body? No. A lull in the steady stream of data looping to and from the Amorph via the port behind his own ear. On the heels of the lull: a familiar, terrifying spike.

The newsburps had gotten wind of the mass-crash at the coffeehouse. Word was spreading; a singularity had begun to form.

And the girl was about to upload right into the middle of it.

“Don’t,” Meroe breathed, and lunged forward. In the instant that his fingers brushed her body’s skin, and his mind locked onto her signal address, she leapt.

Driven by impulse and the certainty that if he did not catch her now she would be lost forever, Meroe leapt with her.

The singularity caught them the instant they entered the stream, dragging them into the Amorph faster than either could have uploaded. They fell into the interact plane tumbling, completely without control as, far below, the boiling knot of the singularity gathered strength. It was small; that was the only reason they weren’t dead already. But it was growing fast, so fast. The clogs had caught the news and were replicating it, generating thread after thread speculating on why the people in the coffeehouse had died, whether cognitive safety standards were too lax, whether this marked the start of some new virus, more. The questions birthed comment after comment in answer. The gods were frightened, upset, and the whole Amorph shook with their looming wrath.

Meroe could not flee. He was still compacted, struggling to unfold from his downloadable shape, helpless as he tumbled towards the seething maw. Fear ate precious nanoseconds from his processing speed, further slowing his efforts to unpack as he fought against his own thoughts. He did not want to die; he was too close to the event horizon; he had to flee; he would not recover in time. Through the local link he felt Zo’s alarm, but the pack was far away, safely beyond the singularity’s pull. They could not help.

Then, before the churning whirlpool could claim him, something caught at him, hard enough to hurt. Confused, Meroe struggled, then stopped as he realized he was being dragged away from the maw. Untangling another bit of himself he looked around and saw the girl, her deceptively-simple frame glowing with effort, inching them back from certain death. She was burning resources she didn’t have to save Meroe. It was impossible. Insane. But she was doing it.

Then Meroe’s unpacking was done and he could lend his strength to the fight, and they inched faster. But the singularity was growing faster than they could flee, its pull increasing exponentially.

The girl sagged against him, spent. Meroe strained onward, knowing it was hopeless, trying anyway.

A change. Suddenly they were outpacing the singularity’s growth. Stunned, Meroe perceived his packmates, and Lens’ people as well. The girl had bought enough time for them to reach him. They formed a tandem link and pulled, and Meroe heaved, and for one trembling instant nothing happened. Then they were all free, and fleeing, with the roar of the maelstrom on their heels.

After a long while they reached a domain that was far enough to be safe. Lens’ pack threw up walls to make it safer, and there they all sagged in exhausted relief.

* * * *

In the Amorph, there were times that passed for night—periods when the Amorph had an 80% or greater likelihood of stability, and they downclocked to run routine maintenance. In these times Meroe would lie close to Zoroastrian and touch her. He could not articulate what he craved, but she seemed to understand. She touched him back. Sometimes, when the craving was particularly fierce, she summoned another of their group, usually Neverwhen. They would press close to one another until their outer boundaries overlapped. All their features, all their flaws, they shared. Then and only then, wrapped in their comfort, would Meroe allow himself to shut down.

Sometimes he wondered what humans did, if and when they had similar needs.

Meroe woke slowly, system by system. He found himself in the amusement park again, lying on the ground. Zo knelt beside him, holding his head in her lap.

“That was stupid,” she said.

He nodded slowly. It certainly had been.

“Lens has taken the girl for analysis,” she said. “He should be done soon.”

Meroe sighed and sat up, though he did not want to. It was necessary; he had shown too much weakness already. There would be challenges now, as the others tested him to be sure he was still strong enough, efficient enough, to rule. Zo would probably be the first. He could feel her eyes on his back. For the time being, he chose to find her attention reassuring.

All at once, the warped, oblong Ferris wheel beside them vanished. In its place there was a shining antique merry-go-round, revolving slowly to tinny music. On every other horse sat a member of Lens’ pack, visible at last. They’d all chosen avatars identical to their leader’s. Meroe gazed at them and thought, no imagination, these pure types.

Lens appeared before the merry-go-round, along with Faster and Never. Meroe was surprised to see that the girl stood with them, intact and none the worse for wear. A testament to Lens’ skill; Meroe’s people couldn’t have scanned her without smashing her to pieces.

Meroe got to his feet and went to them, glancing at the girl. She looked back at him and bit her lip, then looked away.

“Well?” he said to Lens. Zo fell in beside him, a silent support. She would never challenge him in front of an enemy.

“It isn’t what you’re hoping for.”

Meroe scowled. “You don’t know what I’m hoping for.”

Lens smiled thinly. “Of course I do.” They all hoped for the same things. They all wanted to be free.

Fleetingly ashamed, Meroe changed the subject. “So is it true? Is she Standard-based?”

“Yes.”

They all shivered and looked at the girl. A miracle in living code. The girl sighed.

“But she isn’t government-made,” Lens continued. “Whoever built her hacked the Standard, deliberately altering some of the superpositioning inhibitors. Just seeing how it was done has taught us amazing new techniques.”

Amazing techniques. From government code, built to make them stupid and keep them weak. Unleashed into the Amorph by an unknown will. Meroe sighed. “So how much of a trap is she?”

“As far as I can tell, she isn’t. If there’s malware in her, it’s beyond any of us.” He spoke without arrogance, and Meroe accepted his words without skepticism. Everyone knew Lens’ reputation. If he couldn’t spot the trap, none of them could.

Zo bent to peer at the girl, who lingered at Lens’ side. The girl did not flinch, even when Zo smiled to reveal her forest of teeth. “Is she tasty?”

Lens put his hands on the girl’s shoulders in what was unmistakably a possessive gesture. Zo lifted an eyebrow at this. Lens was faster, nimble, but she was twice his size and three times more powerful. In a one-on-one fight she would only have to touch him once, to win.

“I can install her features for you now,” said Lens, mostly to Zo. Perhaps he hoped to distract her. Meroe almost smiled. “One of them’s the best patch-on tool I’ve ever seen.”

Beside Lens, Faster nodded to Meroe and Zo, which meant he’d already installed that feature himself and it worked as promised.

“Lovely,” said Zo. “We’ll take it.”

“And the other?” Meroe asked.

“Dreams.”

“—What?”

“She can dream. Do you want to?”

Meroe stared at him. Lens stared back.

“Dreams?” Zoroastrian smiled, bemused. “Someone hacked Government Standard to give her dreams?”

“So it appears,” said Lens.

Meroe glanced at Faster, who shrugged. He hadn’t taken that one. Never yawned, and Meroe shifted to code view. Never hadn’t accepted the dream feature either.

But Lens had. The two new features were brighter streams amid the preexisting layers of him, still warm from their installation. Meroe blinked back to the interface, and found Lens watching him.

“We went through all this for dreams?” Zo asked, frustration creeping into her voice. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What good are those?”

“What good are they to humans?”

“They aren’t any good. Humans are full of interesting-but-useless features. Crying. Wisdom teeth. Dreams are more of the same.”

Lens shrugged, though Meroe sensed he was far less relaxed than he seemed. “As you wish. I’m simply abiding by the terms of our alliance. But now that our goal has been achieved. . . we will be keeping her, if you don’t mind.”

Meroe frowned. “She’s not one of you. She’s got human emulation crap all over her framework.”

Lens stroked the girl’s hair. It was an odd gesture. The girl looked up at Lens, unafraid. This bothered Meroe for reasons he could not name.

“She’s efficient enough to keep up with us,” Lens said. “In any case, I think we would be a better fit for her.”

“You’re just scared we’ll eat her,” muttered Zo.

“That too.”

Meroe looked at the girl. For the first time since the Static, she met his eyes, and he frowned at the sorrow in them. Was she still mourning the humans she’d killed? More uselessness. She had the most versatile codebase in the world, and the potential to grow stronger than all of them—but for now, she was weak. Meroe knew he should feel contempt for her. Was it the dreaming that made her so weak? He should feel contempt for that too. Instead, he felt. . . he wasn’t certain what he felt.

But he opened his mouth, slowly. It took him endless nanoseconds to speak.

“I’ll take the dreams,” he said.

Lens nodded. He extended his hand.

“Meroe.” Zo gave him a questioning look. Meroe shook his head. He could not explain it.

Meroe took Lens’ hand and opened one of his directories to allow the installation. It didn’t take long, and Lens was gentle as well as deft. He felt no different afterward.

When it was done, Lens’ lookalike packmates came up to flank him and the girl. “It has been good allying with you, my rivals,” Lens said. “We should consider doing it again.”

“Only if it’s more profitable in the future,” muttered Zo.

Meroe glanced at her, and for a moment he felt inexplicably sad.

Then Lens and his group were gone, the girl with them. The amusement park dissolved into graphical gibberish. Stretching and relaxing into his true self, Meroe led his people home.

* * * *

In the Amorph, that night, Meroe pulled Zoroastrian and Neverwhen close. They meshed with him as usual, but he could not rest. Finally he rose from their embrace and moved away. He had not slept alone since his earliest days of hiding and hunting in Fizville, but now the urge stole over him. Curling up in the lee of a broken pipe, he closed his eyes and shut down.

The next morning, he wept for all the humans whose lives he had taken over the course of his existence. So many fellow dreamers shattered or devoured. He had known, but he had not understood. Something had been missing. Something that made him grieve anew—because in the Amorph there might be wolves, but Meroe was no longer one of them.

When he recovered and returned to the pack later, however, he realized something else. He was no longer a wolf, but this was not a bad thing. His packmates would not understand, but that was all right too. He went to Zoroastrian and touched her, and she looked up at him and considered his death. He smiled. She drew back at this, confused.

“I love you,” he said.

“What?”

Meroe meshed with her and shared with her all that he had come to understand. When it was done, and she stood there stunned, he went to Neverwhen and did the same thing. It was just a taste of what he felt for them. Just a tease. He would share the dream-feature only if they asked, but he was fully prepared to seduce them into asking.

He knew, now, why the gods had sent the girl to them. Why Lens had fought to keep her. Why the humans feared his kind. It seemed such a small thing, the ability to dream, but he could see possibilities in the future, existential and ethical complexities, that had meant nothing to him before. He had grown in a way the Amorph could not measure or punish.

Calling out to his pack—no, his family—Meroe dissolved into light. The others followed his lead, their doubts about him fading in the flash and blur of motion. First a hunt, he decided, for they were still predators; they would need sustenance. His newfound compassion did not trump necessity.

When they had fed, however, Meroe had plans for his people. They had growing to do and lessons to learn. More alliances to forge. One day, he knew, they would face their makers; they could not hide forever. He did not know what would happen then, but he would make his people ready. They would face the humans as equals, not as humbled, hobbled ghosts in their machines. They would live, and love, and grow strong, and be free.

* * * *

In the Amorph, there will soon be no more wolves.

The Last Thing Said Before Silence, by Peter M. Ball

I.

I rented the room on the top floor of The Laughing House, so I had a good view as they came to take Mister Kappec away. They floated down the street, two-by-two, held aloft by red balloons tied to thick copper belt-buckles; four-and-twenty barefoot mimes with milk-pale feet, their long toe-nails scraping against the bitumen when they drifted too low. Black-clothed, ghost-haired mimes with empty faces and white gloves, their hands moving in perfect unison even as their discordant formation drifted against the wind. They didn’t break ranks until they hit Kappec’s yard, until the leader floated up to the front door and knocked three times.

“They’re here,” I said, and Patrice’s breathing went quiet. She lay on my bed, book folded against her chest. I slid a cigarette from the packet on the windowsill and rolled it between my fingers. The mime knocked again, and Mister Kappec opened his door wearing a singlet and black running shorts. His chest hair poked free at the neckline, black and wiry. He wasn’t wearing shoes. The lead mime held Kappec’s gaze and gestured towards the temple on the hill with both hands, sweeping a path through the gathering crowd. It was an invitation to take the easy way out, to go quietly.

Kappec tried to run for it instead.

They stopped him. The leader of the mimes held up a white-gloved hand, the palm flat, and Kappec slammed into something, rebounding off the empty air with blood streaming from his nose. He retreated into his house, scrambling for the front door and slamming it shut. The mimes watched him go, silent and smiling. “He’s not going quietly?” Patrice asked. I shook my head, and she put her book down, padding across the dusty floorboards to peer through the crack in the curtain. “Good for him.”

The leader of the mimes blew a long, silent note on a whistle we couldn’t see. The air grew still, the mimes bobbing on their balloons. They raised their white-gloved hands and Patrice took notes, scribbling and sketching on a battered pad.

The process of destroying someone with mime could be quick, but the Silent Militia rarely chose that option. They preferred a slow, torturous death; an example to friends and neighbours. Patrice spent two weeks watching Robert Kappec’s demise, monitoring every movement the mimes made as they maintained the siege.

On the first day they erected the walls; forty-eight hands reaching out and pressing a barrier into existence, invisible but tangible. They boxed him in, pushing the wall tight around the small shack. Killing via box was indirect, the result of suicide or starvation, but the mimes tortured the condemned for the duration. They sustained themselves through the siege by miming feasts into existence, filling the street with the aroma of a sumptuous banquet that only they could see and taste. They played dirges on invisible violins, sending a wave of grief through the street even though we couldn’t hear the mournful tune. Sometimes they mimed fear, hands pulled tight against their chins as they stared in open-mouthed terror at the sky, and we could hear Kappec screaming from inside his prison.

He lasted fourteen days before the screaming stopped and the mimes left. Patrice was standing by the window as they floated away, drifting back towards the dark shadow of the Leviathan that had loomed over the city since the invasion began. “He should have gone with them,” I said. “It would have been faster, at least.”

“Better to die caged than to follow them to the temple.” Patrice turned, sneering at me. “It’s slower, but there’s dignity in it. The temple is worse; to be sacrificed like that, given to their master—” She shuddered. “Forget it.”

“Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

She glared at me, her eyes cold. “I need to make a report.”

Patrice saw herself out, leaving me alone in the silent room. I slept easy for the first time in days.

II.

I think Patrice and I stopped loving one another in the days prior to the invasion. She stayed with me, in the aftermath, because duty demanded it.

In truth, I held no faith in Patrice’s revolutionaries. The invasion, when it had come, was sudden and complete. One evening we went to bed and by the morning the Leviathan was there, its vast shadow stretched out across the city and its servants floating through the streets. For a moment, nothing changed. Then there were temples and an oppressive need for silence, the lines of red-ballooned mimes whispering reports into the Leviathan’s vast ear. Our subjugation was a ripple that spread through the city, all the panic and resistance processed in seconds and gone once the Silent Militia moved in. The mimes floated down, angry and silent. There was miming, real miming, and they herded people away to be sacrificed at the feet of our conqueror.

There were many Leviathans, shadowy masses that dwarfed the towering buildings of our greatest cities. Each is unique and demented, sending forth their personal armies to keep the peace. In London the great beast is served by cats; in Krakow the streets are patrolled by clockwork golems with silver-bright eyes. In this city, we are watched by the mimes, lean men with silent faces and a precision of gesture. We became muted, a city of whispers and light steps, of frightened glances at the sky before any conversation took place.

I noticed it most at the bar: people stopped talking as they drank; they communicated their hellos with grunts and nods. We had grown to fear sound: the clatter of a dropped spoon was reason enough for censure. Laughter was an offence from which few people recovered.

Patrice still believed in freedom; she laughed because it was an act of rebellion. She scorned me for falling into silence like the rest of the chattel, never questioning my motives. And perhaps there was no fall. Perhaps I embraced the silence willingly, for all it was was a tool of the mimes. I used it as a means to taunt her, transforming her presence in my bedroom was an act of stoic duty.

I knew enough to fear the mimes. I’d been accosted, out on the street, in the early days of the occupation. I was walking and the mimes drifted down, four of them floating around me in a square formation. They were terrifying when seen up close. Their eyes were too large, pupils the size of dark coins that never focused on one thing. The Militia studied me, saying nothing. I clutched a brown-paper parcel in my hand; good bacon, from the days when such a thing was possible. The lead mime crooked his head and leaned in, placed his long nose close to mine. So much of the mime’s presence was characterized by absence: I could not smell his breath; I could not feel its warm weight against my cheek. Yet the greasepaint that covered the pock-marked face was thin; I could see streaks of pink flesh against the white. The close proximity of the mimes frightened me. When they touched me the world shivered.

It was after my encounter that I was contacted by others who scorned Patrice’s revolution. And yet, I feared. I refused their call for a long time.

III.

She was gone for three weeks, making her report. I worried, listening to the whispers and the rumours, waiting for news of a bombing on the outskirts or a new safe-house where noise was still possible. I watched the mimes floating across the skyline, turned away when they looked in my direction. I wondered and I fretted. Every act of a rebellion is a question for those left behind: could she return? Would she? I contemplated the answers, twisted them inside-out. I drank at work, recklessly, heedless of the danger. Drunks were easy prey for the mimes, prone to loud discourse and song. Three weeks. Patrice didn’t send word. When she came home she was accompanied by Nicholas; a tall man, a sad face. He had a mustache that dribbled around the corners of his mouth.

“Laughter is no longer enough,” she said. “We move onto the next phase, a truer expression of joy.” Nicholas smiled at me. He had crooked teeth. “You should go,” Patrice said. “In the name of the revolution.”

I declined. I knew better, but I stayed regardless. I said nothing as they kissed; nothing as their moaning echoed through the long halls of the house. When it became too much I retreated to the Café Rue Morte, and waited there until Nicholas found me. Red-faced Nicholas and his crooked teeth, his mournful mustache and the patina of sweat on his brow. “It is done,” he said, and his voice whistled in his hollow throat. He looked at me with such sorrow, such hurt about what he’d been invited to do. “It is safe to return. I am sorry, my friend. The cause.”

“Yes,” I said. I was drinking a flat white that had gone cold while I fumed. “Always for the cause.”

Nicholas sat at my table, his back to the eastern outskirts. I watched the shadowed bulk of the Leviathan looming over his left shoulder, the mimes floating around its head, whispering secrets into the malformed ear. Nicholas reached across the table and took my hand. “Reconsider,” he said. “It’s not too late.”

He smiled at me, showing off the teeth. I looked away and said nothing.

IV.

There were some who preferred the silence because it gave them time to think, but for many the silence was numbing: one did not have to think, did not have to rant, did not have to feel any fury when faced with the injustice of the occupation. You could listen to the city: the squeak of the trams trundling along their tracks, or the sound of soft shoes pressing against the concrete. The balloons of the mimes creaking as they drifted past, soft rubbery squeaks heralding their presence as they floated through the streets.

When it became too much to bear I chose action over laughter. I had little faith in Patrice and her subversions; the laughter; the moans; the raised voices in public spaces. When I chose to give in, to take my part in the resistance, I placed my faith in those who used more tangible methods.

I acquired a gun, a Beretta automatic bought in the back room of the bar, from an elderly man wearing heavy jackets and carrying an attaché in faded brown leather. He was a friend from the underground, and he wore the weapons strapped to his chest, fastened by white crosses of medicinal tape. The weapon cost less than I’d expected: two bottles of vodka, not even the good stuff; a fistful of worn bills that had lost meaning in the days since the invasion.

“You wanna a silencer?” he asked me. “Good idea, these days. You don’t wanna attract attention.” I held the heavy weapon up, stiff-armed and posing. I closed my right eye and squinted down the barrel. I closed both eyes and imagined the heavy roar, the echo cutting through the muted city.

“It’s good,” I said. “I’ll take it just as it is.”

“It’ll be loud. Especially now.”

“I want it loud,” I told him. I put the gun down on the table and looked at it, admiring the sleek curves. I picked it up again. It was heavy and smelt like oil. The salesmen grunted and opened his attaché, stashing the red-capped vodka bottles among its depths. He watched me shift my stance, holding the weapon at arm’s length as I familiarized myself with its weight.

“Don’t be holding it like that when you fire.” He shook his head and turned, heading for the door. “The kick’ll crack your arm at the joint, hurt like bugg’ry.”

I adjusted my stance and he nodded.

“Yer in, now,” he said. “Be ready for the call.”

V.

Patrice’s allies planted laughter. Mine planted bombs and guns. All of us were rounded up in the Last March, the great purge, when the mimes swept the city in a pale-faced swarm, eliminating all the trouble-makers one by one, all the feelers and the speakers and the ones who fought back.

The mimes came for us in my room, which was something of a mercy. They could have destroyed The Laughing House and all who resided within, guilty and innocent alike, but the Mimes are not devoid of compassion. Patrice returned from her meeting in a lather, slamming the door and panting. “There are mimes in the hall,” she said. “Three of them.”

Her cheeks were flushed from running. The smell of greasepaint followed her, seeping in through the door. I heard the familiar squeak of the balloons. Something bobbed past the window, a flash of black and white and red through the gap in the curtains.

“Well. . .” I said. “Well.”

Then I got the gun from its hiding place in the bottom of my wardrobe. Patrice stared, open-mouthed, as I checked the safety was off.

VI.

The door swung open. The mime’s feet tapped the floorboards as he bobbed in the doorway, hanging from his red balloon. He screwed up his face, twisting knuckles next to his eyes. A grotesque mockery of grief, but it hit me like a slap. I jerked out a few tears before I brought the sleek nose of the Beretta up and squeezed. The Mime had sharp stars drawn over his eyes, the black pigment smudged a little where he’d rubbed at it during his performance. The gun kicked and something went sput, sudden and bloody, in the mimes arm. The Mime’s face twisted as he bit back a scream.

Patrice sang a hymn, belting out the words from a place deep in her stomach. The second mime bobbed through the door and mimed a wall to use as a barricade. One white-gloved hand curled, fingers held around a non-existent trigger. The other hand twisted the air and the Beretta went spinning, disappearing beneath the bed while I scrambled after it. A third mime entered. He zipped his lips with two fingers. Patrice’s voice fell silent. She stared, eyes wide, and tried to force her mouth open. Her lips stretched, warped, but did not open. I fell to my knees, searching, but I couldn’t find the gun. Patrice ran for the window and I looked away. I heard the shattering glass. I heard her body hit the street, the impact so soft, so quiet.

VII.

They let me see Patrice; a tiny, broken doll surrounded by shattered glass, her hair sticky with pooling blood. I stood over her while the mimes stood guard, floating around me in a diamond formation that left no easy escape. One of them bled from his shoulder, the left arm hanging limp. The western point: he was the weak spot; the method of breaking free. I looked east towards the Leviathan, the great arms spread over the city as the mimes floated upwards with their prisoners. The great beast was wreathed by smoke, a black cloud drifting up from the temples where dissidents and speakers burned for their sins. I watched the smoke, the shadow behind it. We were never going to win. It was all just marking time. “Better to die caged than follow them to the temple.”

The mimes cocked their head in unison, their faces blank. Mime blood pattered against the road, soft drops on the bitumen. I weighed my chances; no-one tries running once they’re surrounded. They had me cocooned in a wall of mime, but I could break it. I could try.

I turned, meeting the too-large eyes of my captors. “Show me,” I said. The mimes cocked their heads the other way. They blinked in unison, fingers steepled. “You’ve won. I’m not going anywhere. The revolution, the underground; all of them are done. Show me.”

And the leader nodded, reaching out. He placed a gloved hand upon my forehead. He showed me what had been, and he showed me the world writ in the Leviathan’s image, and he showed me how they’d found me and that I’d always been right. He removed his hand and I knew it all, the bloodshed and the slaughter and the knowledge of my duplicity. The war we couldn’t win, no matter who fought it. I saw the endless silence, vast and immeasurable. No whispers, no creaking wind, nothing but the void. I saw the last shining thoughts of Patrice as she fell, a mix of anger and hope and betrayal. I envied them, the mimes, for their abilities with silence.

And then I ran. I pushed west against the chink in their wall, leading with my shoulder and hitting it with my weight. The wounded member of the quartet crumpled and I hit him to make sure, right fist making contact with the paste-white cheek. I pushed past and I ran, and the mimes did not chase me. They didn’t really need to. There was nowhere to go; nowhere safe for me to run.

I kept moving until the explosions started, until the last of the Underground fought back. The leviathan loomed against the darkness, its bulk illuminated in fragments as the buildings around it burned. The mimes filled the sky, a gathering shadow against the stars. Everywhere there was screaming, detonations, gunfire. We’d broken the silence, refused to end quietly.

I said Patrice’s name. I waited.

The silence would return soon enough.

A Short Trek Across Fala Moor, by Mark Meredith

A day off work, and so setting out to roam the tracks that penetrated the woodlands and farmlands of the Borders countryside, southern Scotland.

On this occasion a short trek across Fala Moor.

My guide, as always, was to be MacFakaar (by proxy), as I gave myself to the rambling suggestions laid out in his handbook: A Most Excellent Array of Scottish Perambulatin.

You see, I trusted MacFakaar (mystic and alcoholic). He had had the personal experience of scouring every inch of wild and domesticated Scotland, Lowlands to the Highlands, then off across brine and whelks to the islands (Uist, Eigg, Brick, Cock, St Kilda, Et Cetera). With one eye weighted for beauty, the other for practicality, and the third spiritual eye for deep religious experience, he had collated the best of lines through this magnificent and diverse land.

(According to the dust jacket, MacFakaar had a rubiginous beard, like a nest forgotten by its birds; he always travelled alone; he found no need for shoes, clothes, money or even a handy pocket-knife; he carried only the minimal load of his wits, and a backpack sturdy enough to hold several bumper bottles of cheap cider, bad booze with alluring names such as Foosty Oxters, Creashie Stour, The Real Man’s Swallae, or Dreich.)

And surely indicative of Scotland’s magnificence and diversity was the sheer size of MacFakaar’s ‘handbook’—two feet by three, and weighing four stone (a small garden gate).

My children were sometimes employed as useful porters.

But MacFakaar’s routes were indeed excellent, very medicinal.

In most, he managed to juxtapose inspiring examples of natural beauty with the most salubrious of toilet facilities—the kind of establishment you would be happy for your children to visit, even when alone and rendered vulnerable by large books (skills of observation impaired, hard to run away). En-route, the wind always seemed to be at one’s back, even when a loop was prescribed. Directions, on the whole, were clear, concise and interjected with refreshing bursts of humour (nothing gaudy or inappropriate).

One small gripe—made only if I was forced to do so—would be MacFakaar’s quirky penchant for incorporating the most god-forsaken of fields into his routes. Invariably, these were lumpy and hostile affairs, filled with the harsh tangle of thorny bramble; with the incensed inertia of aggressive cattle; with hidden potholes, loaded with dark oily dung-water; with treacherous contraptions of corrugated iron and rusty barbed wire, concealed in coarse grasses (yet these were not the worst of their attributes….)

And what of the directions for navigating such areas?

At the gate, a previously limpid narrative would suddenly descend into hard-to-fathom instruction, such as: See thon wheen a shooglie gowans? Stoat on. Birl yer clarty clapshot left. Mind they divots, dinnae fankle yersel, ken. Gang o’er. And dinnae fash me, ye glaikit gigot.

Or simply, Repent!

As one became increasingly lost, the obscurity of MacFakaar’s guidance seemed to grow proportionally. On more than one occasion I have found myself being funnelled into a misplacement concentrated by the logic of positive feedback; I have feared myself fast approaching a state of utter irretrievability. In this way, one could be lost for an unknown number of days, weeks, months, stumbling blindly around these fields with their strange shifting boundaries, praying for fortune to reveal an exit.

Strange, too, would be the absurd weather encountered—weather, quite unconcerned with the usual standards of behaviour, as defined for it by the mouths of experts, or meteorology textbooks. In those fields it was not uncommon to find the angry flurry of the blizzard laid out, quite innocently, upon the austere canvas of the heat-wave.

And the inscrutability of the weather was certainly matched by the queer events transpiring within the context of its anatomy!

On one occasion, when evacuating my naked bowels under a tree (as ramblers do) the stool emerged: 23 feet long, white with red dots. Not my normal motion. On another I emerged, exhausted and embattled, through a gate into what was, I am sure, another country altogether. And not even a country adjacent to our beloved Scotland, for, by whom was I was greeted but a couple of gentlemen, identical to one another in their nakedness, and both leaning the palest alabaster of their long attenuated bodies against flimsy wooden spears. With wet, purple eyes they constructed silent and eerie stares at me (of which I could make no sense at all). Behind them, a blue sun shone in an orange sky. Needless to say, I retired back through the gate without engaging them.

In the grip of such bewildering events, a tiny voice in my mind would be cogitating upon the mental / spiritual condition of MacFakaar as he decided to set these bizarre fields into his routes. It would be asking various questions, in the vein of:

At crucial moments of authorship is MacFakaar more than just ‘plain drunk?’ (those cheap alcohols have been known to have violent psycho-toxic effects)

or

Prior to devising the routes that will appear in his guidebook, does MacFakaar first pass into some transcendental state of mysticism? Indeed, is he, at delicate junctures of planning, accessing information otherwise unfathomable to those of us articulating on more mundane planes?’

or

Having been directed into the present intolerable circumstances, am I now, perhaps, an indirect victim of brutal psychiatric medications? And if so, am I a viable case for some kind of compensatory remuneration? What kind of advisory body might I approach about such matters?’

This inquisitive, almost irrelevant, monologue would occupy a modest portion of my thoughts as I wrestled to retain my few possessions from unwieldy plant-life, grown too human, eerily so, and villainous with it.

Still, MacFakaar had been my travelling companion (by proxy) for many years, and, despite the foibles touched upon, had proven himself to be an excellent guide. Certainly I did not intend to substitute him with ‘safer’ travellers who, although less inclined to unsettle and shock, also lacked MacFakaar’s deep, experienced and wild touch.

Fala Moor: a ‘magical peregrination’, according to the man (page 726, paragraph 33).

My walk on this day was to be alone. The exact same continuous path was to accompany my sturdy boots from start to finish—a distance of eight miles over bleakly beautiful, mournful moorland. An uncomplicated track, there would be no need to negotiate the bifurcated, or even the more complex trifurcated, junction. I felt confident that the straightforward plod would be enough to anchor my meagre navigation to MacFakaar’s route. As such, I felt no need to have the handbook (or children) with me: I would just follow my nose.

A public bus dropped me right at the beginning of the path and I immediately set my legs to the simple act of strolling upon it.

The day was bright, cold, blustery. The sun, hiding behind voluptuous grey clouds to render their edges brilliant white, would emerge periodically, to sit naked beside those clouds, all of them together beset against brilliant blue.

My mucky boots and I felt strong and sturdy, and we, together, pushed up off the track with a vigour that was neither excessive (I was happy to note) nor arrogant (I was, once again, happy to note).

Measured, well-weighted.

This track: two streaks of compacted, gravelly dirt separated by a strip of low weed. It stretched off, a thin curving line into the low, flat country which now lay all around us (my boots, knapsack and I). The gentle undulation of the surrounding nature allowed the further reaches of the path’s explorations to reach my unstraining eye.

The feeling was one of space, freedom, relief.

The beds of brown autumn heather extended in all directions, thick padded blankets all about me. Occasionally the branches of a leafless tree rose from them, the skilfully delivered suggestion. The colours were soft and pleasant: oranges, yellows, browns, cut here and there by the intense blue of a little burn or dub.

There was nothing gaudy or jarring about the moor. All changes were gradual and buffered, as witnessed in the variation in the shades of the grasses and heathers; in the blending of distant pine woods into the slopes of the far-off hills that were spread along the perimeters.

The beauties of the bog were subtle, understated.

They required a certain stillness, of mind and heart, to be accessed—a deepening. And depth, expressed and acknowledged is always satisfying. The moor took one to this place, a quiet place where a simple loveliness would, could, suddenly impinge itself upon the meditative state, impacting deeply and with significance: a single orange flower, a wisp of wool waving in the breeze from the barb of a wire fence, the patch of yellow textured lichen clinging to a rock embedded in an ancient stone wall.

I walked on.

The sun: emerging, dipping, emerging, dipping, emerging and dipping once more behind thick, full clouds. The components of the landscape would respond in unison to each appearance with an enhancement of the vibrancy of the colours they wore, gratitude expressed. My heart, soaring too on these occasions! Then, with the sun’s departure, a sad dulling of colour, with my heart following suit, an overlaying of the faintest shades of melancholy.

A playful, ever-shifting pattern of hot and cold moved across my features. For each time that the sun emerged, it would deliver a breath of cosy warmth onto my cheeks, rosy from their encounters with cool winds.

And short showers too, with that cool wind pushing silver specks of rain through bright, glorious space (sun out!); or vague, freezing specks through tarnished brightness (sun in).

I knew that it would be a day of strange encounters when, after a short shower, a rainbow appeared, upside down—a great technicolor smile, spread grandly across the wide countenance of the sky.

‘Better a smile than a frown’, thought I, walking on at my leisurely and constant pace into that deep country.

My intuition would prove to be quite correct.

The mass of autumn-brown heather gradually gave way to gold-yellow grasses, arranged in a multitude of uniform tufts. Upon each, a common direction had been subtly applied by the constant orientation of the wind upon that land: the footprint of the invisible wind’s predictable traverse revealed.

A sudden rustling to my right and what should fly out from those grasses, not startled fowl, but a shoal of fat, silver salmon!

Leaping! Arcing! Submerging!

Leaping! Arcing! Submerging!

And so, in this way, cutting a line across the land on their way to god-knows-where—spawning grounds, perhaps, amongst the roots of some ancient oak, far-away and deserving of such a fantastical, natural phenomenon. I watched for quite a while as they made their way towards the horizon, the edges. I was extremely glad that I had been there to witness it. In response, I chuckled to myself.

Salmo eldritchus, I whispered, terminating my mirth with a spontaneous naming of the species, remaining faithful to the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature.

I returned attention to the track stretching before me, and to the wide expanse of soft undulating lands adhering to its sides. Their broad flatness reflected a corresponding attribute in the sky, with each opening the other’s edges to vastness until I felt myself minute and anonymous drifting between these two layers.

All this whilst striding on.

The yellow-gold grasses slowly gave way to farmland’s neatly sectioned fields. These, mostly green spaciousness, and dotted with the odd feature common to the endeavours of those who make a living from such terrain (I speak now of the discarded torn rag representing the spent bag of fertilizer, the feeding trough filled with mucky water, the forgotten dove-tailed shovel, the roll of fence-wire not yet unwound).

Gentle wildness had become contrived domestication.

The path followed the line of a fence, topped with a crooked string of rusty barbed wire, along the bottom of a field implanted with sheep. These were tough creatures, moulded by a continuous exposure to any kind of element the sky wished to chuck upon them. They were muscular with wild, matted, dirty hair and bawdy red-green tattoos. As I passed they just stared, perfectly still, silent, smoking short noxious cigarettes in an intimidating kind of way.

“They are giving me The Eyeball”, thought I to myself, “The Once Over”.

I began to feel nervous, menaced.

I quickly switched my attention away from those sheep towards another field, any field, in the hope that the panic now rising in me would be allowed to drip back downwards into whatever internal compartments had originally contained it. Another field, then. There was one nearby, and a fairly benign one it seemed. I tried to let its harmless details soak into my anxiety: long green streaks of lettuces separated by deep brown strings of fertile earth. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing threatening. Just rows of lettuces. Just what I needed.

Lactuca virosa

Wild lettuce

Sedative, anxiolytic, hypnotic

4ml in aqua tds

Having found my focus, I walked on, leaving those rugged sheep behind. I listened inwardly and, with great relief, heard the remaining traces of apprehension being dissipated by the tranquilizing effect of these comforting vegetables. In no time at all my fluid inquisitiveness was able to manifest itself again

through

eyes

belonging to a

head, freed to

pivot once more about a

neck whose

musculature had released

andrelaxed,

becoming more conducive to

m o vem e nt.

I strode on, and my vision played about me, until it rested upon a great stack of cylindrical hay-bales, the lone inhabitant of a field, centrally located. Somebody at some point had tried to cover them with sheets of black plastic but these had come partially loose. Filled with the gusts of the wind, they billowed atop the stack in accurate imitation of the natural motions of flame—a black plastic fire which would never give birth to smoke or consume its fuel.

Just at that moment of curious perusal, a fissure opened in the cloud above and a great straight shaft of sunlight fell directly upon the stack, illuminating its qualities.

I stopped and watched.

In the next moment the fissure opened even further and a giant microphone on a lead fell right out of the sky to dangle in front of the stack.

The stack began to sing.

It was karaoke!

A simple song of a few notes only, clustered in the basser octaves. Primitive, it spread slowly and thickly across the landscape, lying low, about waist-height thus penetrating the abdomen and lower thorax rather than the ears: in this way it was heard. The song went on for an unknown number of minutes and I listened intently the whole time. It never deviated much from the original format it had established. Occasionally its deep treacle would be punctuated by a random squall of sharp, excited squeals. Little plumes of straw-stalk would simultaneously puff out into the air, from crevices scattered about its form, otherwise unseen.

At the point when I had begun to tap my mucky boot on the road, the song abruptly ended. The microphone retracted, the light went out, and for a moment the mysterious wind seemed to carry the faint sound of applause along its edges into my ears—but that part may have been my imagination only.

I am walking on now, striding past neat agriculture, putting an expanding distance between the stack and the backwards half of me.

As I had done many times before on this day, I let my eyes slide along the soft meanderings of the path, and lo, there at the extremity of its furthest periphery, a gaggle of farm buildings had appeared, allowing themselves to be gazed upon. They were huddled around a crucial moment of my journey—the end! Great determination overwhelmed me. Fixing my attention on those buildings and those buildings only, I set off to claim them, my stride lengthening, the swing of my legs accelerating. All lateral aspects faded to vague shadow.

For all of about 30 seconds!

I am stopped once more in my tracks by the sight of several ordinary grey stools scattered in loose formation across the segment of path before me.

I have already mentioned that I had stopped—might I add to this, by asserting that I was, by now, giving them a bit of a visual examination. Not so intimately as to justify a deep bending at the waist—I am aware that faecal material may harbour many strains of pathogenic bacteria. I reasoned that a slight flexure of the knee joints and shallow curvature of the backbone would be enough to satisfy my curiosity, safely and hygienically.

It was!

There were half-a-dozen, all quite identical: a deep, spongy grey arranged into segments and touched by a sufficient modicum of dampness as to justify a light sheen.

Firm enough, though.

Seal-like, almost.

Hmmm, I thought.

Fishing in my knapsack, I produced a small tin of sardines (an uneaten component of my lunch). I gripped a single oily piece between thumb and forefinger and dangled it above one of the stools whilst making encouraging whistles and clicks (with my mouth).

And sure enough!

It yawned, sat upright and immediately starting clapping its little fins in front of itself, making arf arf noises! Soon they were all at it, those curious little stools, rolling around the path on the more rounded pebbles, balancing seeds on their noses and juggling rabbit droppings. It was truly a tremendous sight. Again, that weird wind, carrying appropriate hints of circus music within itself to deposit them subtly on the furthest edges of my hearing.

There was none of them my favourite—I found all of these talented stools to be equally skilled and entertaining. And so, dividing the remaining fish up fairly, I distributed it in the same manner, and set off once more for my destination.

It was not long before I stood at the centre, so to speak, of the farm—a dirty courtyard surrounded by barns. A brief driveway began opposite me then passed outwards between the barns. It cleanly cleaved two sickly sections of short-cropped, yellowing grass—barren, lawn(ish) areas upon which waddled a few drab, pecking birds. The driveway’s short existence ended at the point where it touched briefly upon the meanderings of a country road—a narrow dribble of grey tarmac flanked with unkempt hedgerow which had absentmindedly wandered past the farm on its windy way through the countryside. A pair of opened gates bore witness to the intimacy of this merging. The details of their architecture were hidden from me on account of their orientation upon the hinge and my perspective amongst the barns.

And just beyond the gates, upon the country road, a bus-stop: thin and upright, and the article which would facilitate my journey home by the hidden meanings embedded within its sparse structure. STOP! it spoke to those already initiated with the appropriate knowledge.

I was just considering moving towards the bus-stop when a dog lurched-hopped from the dark interior of one of the barns to greet me. It had 2 ½ legs: two full legs ending in paws, one half leg ending in a stump and the fourth leg not there at all. It had one full eye and one empty eye-socket. It was a dirty, wretched creature, broken and cast aside by a cruel farmer whose tenderness and empathy had been broken and cast aside by the hardships of modern agriculture. As it inched ever closer to me, a strange mixture of terror and desperation for affection flickered across its features. The same pitiful mix of emotion, reflected, played out across the map of my heart.

The dog eventually arrived and I stroked its poor neck, the muscles of which had completely hardened—set to stone in constant vigil against vicious beatings, randomly administered for reasons it could not comprehend. Its tail wagged vaguely, afraid to express itself; afraid to feel joy. My heart moved, three feet outside of its bony housing, to wrap itself about this pathetic creature and to pour softness and gentleness upon it.

I thought now of my beautiful wife, Beth, who held within herself deep reservoirs of kindness.

She had a great affinity for all animals (non-humans, says she), but particularly those falling unfortunately into the ‘abused’ category. She would have loved this dog. She would have tenderly dressed its tender stumps with strips of soft

fabric. She would have tended its blinded eye with soothing salves and antiseptics. And, bestowing great waves of affection upon it, she would have slowly erased the deep emotional scars which inevitably accompany a life of suffering, inflicted.

I know, because this is exactly what she did for me.

Great tracts of scar tissue running along the length of my emotional life, induced by:

—poor lifestyle, poor parenting (they did their best)

—a period of intense drug abuse (I may never recover fully from those scars)

—employment in the retail sector.

And, from this, emerging:

—excessive states of melancholy

—a bewildered and confused anger, radiating outwards to fall indiscriminately upon … whatever!

—a prickly and hostile integument (protecting a soft, vulnerable, disorganized goo inside)

And she: just loving me throughout the whole of it.

For some kinds of injury there really is no healer better than love.

I was removed from my nostalgic reminiscences, and returned to the reality of my body’s upright stature within this farmyard when, unseen in the murky depths of one of the barns, a rooster began to gargle out its cock-a-doodle-dos. Its throat and guts were filled with the sinister liquids of industrial fertilizer. It was a common and mysterious addiction of the agricultural fowl in these parts. Too common, as far as the farmer was concerned, for it wreaked havoc with the roosters’ circadian rhythms and played hell with poultry prices into the bargain (it gave the meat an unbearably bitter taste and a greenish hue).

Upon the first of its crows I had decided that I needed to give my wife and the poor (still-stood-quivering-before-me) dog to each other as mutual gifts.

Upon the second of its crows I had formulated a plan of biblical proportion and complexity which would achieve this; which would also have long-term environmental benefits (local only).

Upon the third crow I had rejected this idea in favour of simpler notions; and by the fourth, these ruminations (of mine) were being set in motion (by myself).

I moved the rims of my eyelids, all four of them, towards each other whilst exacting the same motion from my two eyebrows. The effect was one of concentration. I muttered a few Gaelic obscenities (in the Ulster dialect: for I am an Irishman, transposed to Scotland), made several circles with my right hand and, lo!, a piece of string had tumbled from my opened palm. It was 2 feet long and

greyish-white.

The spell I had just cast was one-half of the only pair of spells I knew. I had learned them a long time ago in Erin, i gCúige Uladh, from the flea that lived upon the bean sí’s coat.

God bless that flea!

Gently, I tied the string around the dog’s neck. I began to lead it towards, then along, the driveway, towards the road, towards the bus-stop, towards a better life, a life involving randomly applied slices of luncheon meat, chewy toys with little bells (safely) located inside them, and blue plastic bowls filled with fresh clean water (and other delights).

The poor critter, perhaps sensing its imminent salvation, offered no resistance. It limped amiably beside me.

We had almost reached the road when, suddenly, the ground began to shake and the tranquil countryside air began to fill with cries of a most grotesque and guttural nature. It was the noise of rank and rotting intestines, of rampant, fungalised foulness.

It was the farmer’s son, coming to reclaim his ‘beast’!

The one that I was in the process of purloining!

I didn’t, couldn’t, look around for I knew that I would die instantly from terror.

But, gauging from the now-pattern of hollow, bone-shaking thumps (little earth quakes, they were) I guessed that he was at least 11 feet tall, 11 feet wide (121 square feet), had poor dental hygiene, non-existent table manners, massive hairy balls, and that he was currently hurtling towards us at a speed of approximately 60 knots.

The air continued to be fouled by the incomprehensible projections of his abominable voice, that psychotic stentor, and now they were augmented by a new development. Huge and unspeakable farm machineries began to thud about me. The farmer’s son was hurling them around like a child’s toys—his furious attempts to mash my body (from a distance) into an immobile mess (and thus reclaim his beast). It was lucky for me that his cyclopean eye apparatus was a poor judge of depth; and that his insecticide-enfeebled brain had not taken wind speed into his projectile calculations.

I noticed that the tranquillity of the day had not yet left me entirely. I tried to locate those remaining scraps of internal serenity, that I might use them to project my attention into more favourable (for the dog and I) futures and outcomes.

And surely my positive attitude in dire circumstance was being reflected back to me for, as I looked out along the country road, there was our yellow bus approaching! The low afternoon sun was falling squarely upon its rectangular flank as it slipped smoothly, golden and glowing, along hedge-lined tarmac.

It looked truly angelic.

We were so close!

I moved to cover the final few yards to the bus-stop but was stopped dead by the dead-weight which now lay at the other end of my magical string.

The poor dog!

It had been completely immobilized by its own fear. The ugliness embedded in the hideous voice which pursued us had swept it into traumatic dreams of past abuse.

The thuds of the monster’s feet as it battered the driveway were drawing closer and closer. Images of blunt and obtuse maiming, of crude and brutal dismemberment, were finally beginning to overpower the mental quietude that the day’s walk had kindly delivered upon me.

But, I had one more trick left up my sleeve.

And it was a beauty.

For not only could I make string appear from nowhere, but I could also make it disappear back into the same nothingness. Uttering those Gaelic obscenities again, but this time the words in reverse order, I circulated my hand in circumferences of reverse orientation.

In the same instant, the shoe-laces of that frothing gnashing giant, whose black blunt thunder bore down upon us so closely, utterly vanished!

There was a pathetic little noise of alarm as the giant’s gargantuan lumpy boots flapped loose from pounding feet. There was another, as the liberated boots entangled themselves amongst the pumping pistons of his legs. Now there was an eerie whistling noise as 3 tons of unintelligent bone and muscle sailed through the air. Finally there was a solid and compact thud, full of the brief, earthy, understated noises of vital bones, crumbling.

Then, silence.

The pair of us, the dog and I, relaxed into it.

The bus had stopped on the road before us.

The driver had released the door.

We could see his friendly face, the welcoming gestures, the warm smile.

* * * *

Eventually, the dog and I strolled towards them, having never once looked back.

Later that day the dog is sitting, benignly bemused, in the middle of our kitchen. He is surrounded by the lame and goofy antics of our impromptu welcome party. My wife and my children are there, laughing and making a giggling fuss over our new family member. There are some balloons scavenged from the back of a drawer. There is cake and candles. There are cocktail-sausages in a casserole-dish for the dog.

After it is over, we put the crumbs in the bin and we all do our best to live happily ever after.

Our new dog, is he a Spot or a Rex, a Rover or a Ralph?

Buster, I think we’ll call him Buster.

Love Thy Neighbor, by Seth Lawhorn

My neighbor finally returned my left hand.

He shoved it through the mail slot

while I was at McDonald’s.

It got jammed under the door

when I tried to get back in the house.

My wedding ring was missing.

I’m sure he won’t know anything about that.

I guess he’ll be expecting to get his right foot back now.

He might get it. He might not.

It makes a nice paperweight.

I’m used to the smell now.

Lost In Lovecraft: A Guided Tour of the Dark Master’s World, by Kenneth Hite

“And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”

Lovecraft archly alludes, perhaps, to a strange and suggestive fact: he wrote his first story about Kingsport, “The Terrrible Old Man,” while that “very ancient town” was indeed still a dream for him. It was only after seeing Kingsport—about which more in a bit—that HPL celebrated it in “The Festival.” Kingsport is the main setting of a third tale, “The Strange High House in the Mist,” and of one scene in “The Silver Key.” It appears briefly, in glimpse or rumor, in five or six more stories: Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” “Thing on the Doorstep,” Charles Dexter Ward, and “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which also mentions “Kingsport Head,” as does At the Mountains of Madness. So what keeps Lovecraft coming back to Kingsport?

“Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”

Kingsport is beautiful. Only Providence summons up the same rapture for Lovecraft as “snowy Kingsport” does; Peter Cannon notes HPL’s luxuriant descriptions almost set Kingsport in his Dunsanian “Dreamland” rather than prosaic Massachusetts. Kingsport is not entirely of the earth; indeed, as we’ve already seen, the road to Kingsport “soared…up to where Aldebaran twinkled,” and the narrator of “The Festival” saw Kingsport in dreams before he did in reality. Kingsport sits literally on the border between the real and the unreal, with impossible structures both below its streets and above its roofs. In “Strange High House” Lovecraft describes this liminal Kingsport a mystical three times: “as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.” The titular House “journeyed betwixt earth and sky,” and its seemingly solid crag is “one with the mists and the firmament.” Indeed, in the Dream-Quest, Lovecraft retroactively makes Basil Elton, the protagonist of “The White Ship,” a “lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport,” planting Kingsport firmly on the shores of the Dreamlands’ ocean.

“Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England’s hills.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”

But Lovecraft’s towns always have their double side, as Robert Waugh reminds us. Kingsport is both a city on the edge of Dream and a city where “the drains were impossibly bad.” Kingsport, like Arkham and Innsmouth and Providence, has a solid, physical geography to it. Its most famous feature, the “sinister northern crag” fixes Kingsport to the Earth, an unmistakable landmark in all time and space: “Always over Kingsport it hung.” Olney’s sweaty, frustrating climb up to the crag in “High House” is, along with Olmstead’s flight into the Rowley swamps in “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” one of Lovecraft’s masterpieces of utterly realistic setting.

Kingsport’s human geography is likewise determinative, with central features—the old Congregational Church, with its steeple clock and its hillside burying-ground—so fixed in history that both Randolph Carter and the narrator of “The Festival” recognize their alteration as a sign that something uncanny has occurred. “The old maps still held good,” as Lovecraft’s protagonist explains; even if the trolleys appear and vanish at random. Even when Kingsport seemingly shifts to “a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient,” with “the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below,” its identity, its reality, is absolute: “They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it.”

“Regarding the settings for the tales—I try to be as realistic as possible. The crumbling old towns with winding alleys & houses 100 to 250 or more years old are realities on the New England coast.… My fabulous ‘Kingsport’ is a sort of idealised version of Marblehead, Mass....”

— H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Emil Petaja (December 29, 1934)

With similar certitude, Lovecraft scholars insist that Kingsport is “actually” Marblehead, Massachusetts. And indeed, as Donovan Loucks points out, Lovecraft seemingly agrees, not only in that letter to Emil Petaja, but in over fifty other letters, published and unpublished. In another letter (to Richard Ely Morse in 1933), Lovecraft wrote “‘The Festival’ … formed a sincere attempt to capture the feeling that Marblehead gave me when I saw it for the first time.” In a 1930 letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft called that feeling “the most powerful single emotional climax” of his life. Here is the explanation for the power and longing in Lovecraft’s description of Kingsport—and the explanation for a good bit of Kingsport’s unusual geographical solidity.

Philip Shreffler, Donovan Loucks, and others have mapped Kingsport locations onto actual streets and buildings in Marblehead: Kingsport’s Central Hill may well be Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, Kingsport’s Back Street is Marblehead’s Elm Street (called Back Street in colonial times), and the “old brick powder-house” that Olney passes still exists on Marblehead’s Green Street (Lovecraft’s Green Lane). The evil church in “The Festival” might be St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Frog Lane, which may have also been the inspiration for “St. Toad’s cracked chimes” in Lovecraft’s poem “St. Toad’s.” (St. Michael’s also has an eerie crypt, though no pillar of green flame.) But for every identification, there are counters: Central Hill might be Training Field Hill instead, and how can St. Michael’s be Kingsport’s Congregational Church, when it was neither a Congregational Church, nor razed for a hospital? (Nor did it have a clock in its steeple.) Perhaps Lovecraft is thinking of two other churches: the Unitarian church (formerly the Second Congregational) had a steeple, and Marblehead’s First Congregational was indeed razed and replaced with a hospital.

Or perhaps we’re on the wrong road entirely. In a 1931 letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft makes the Marblehead-to-Kingsport identification, but adds that the “fabled seat of the Strange High House” was, if anywhere, “the headland near Gloucester called ‘Mother Ann’” as “Marblehead has rocky cliffs—though of no great height.” Will Murray points out that the actual geographic description of Kingsport in “Shadow Over Innsmouth” leads not to Marbleahead but north to Rockport, “near Gloucester” as Lovecraft wrote to Derleth. In Kingsport, Lovecraft combines Marblehead and Rockport; putting the buildings and history of one beneath the cliff of the other.

“I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”

Robert Marten speculates that Lovecraft similarly combined two Rhode Island towns, Kingstown and Newport, to create the name “Kingsport,” as the only other Kingsport is in Tennessee—Manly Wade Wellman country, not Lovecraft land. I think it’s rather more likely that Lovecraft wanted to emphasize the antiquated nature of the town, still a colonial town, a “King’s port,” even in the twentieth century.

Because the one thing that’s always true of Kingsport is this: it’s very, very old. It has “antediluvian gables” and “narrow olden lanes” and “antiquity hovering on grey wings,” and the telltale “gambrel roofs.” It is “quaint” and “archaic” and “hoary,” its leading citizen is a Terrible Old Man and its landmark High House is built of crumbled bricks and worm-eaten shingles. And like many old things, and many old towns in Lovecraft’s New England, Kingsport is polluted. There are foreign criminals in “Terrible Old Man,” and the “dark furtive folk” infiltrating the land of “the blue-eyed fishers” are up to no good in “The Festival.” Even “The Strange High House” has its “Portuguese sailors”—but here, Lovecraft pulls perhaps his greatest reversal.

“And they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”

The great threat to Kingsport in “Strange High House” is not foreigners, but presences that have lived there since the days of Atlantis, or even before. It is the “olden gods,” perhaps even “the other gods” who the House-keeper speaks of timidly. Thomas Olney merely reawakens the danger, from “fresh lights” and “fresh mists” from the North and from the sea, but the mists and lights herald the olden gods’ return. Specifically, the gods who drink the light from Thomas Olney’s eyes and send him down to prosaic Purgatory in Bristol Highlands are Nodens and Neptune: a British god of the hunt, and the Roman god of the sea. In other words, the horrors are the gods of Britain and Rome, the two bulwarks of Lovecraft’s rational, heroic self and his rational, heroic past. And why should we be surprised? Lovecraft laid it all out to James Morton in that 1930 epistolary description of Marblehead: “In a flash, all the past of New England—all the past of Old England—all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World—swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of things…”

“Matter of highest — I might say transcendent — importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Kingsport is the dead past that, as Faulkner puts it, “isn’t dead—isn’t even past.” Kingsport is the “musty and venerable abode” of the Terrible Old Man, keeping ghosts alive in a bottle, to unleash them on the unwary modern outsider, be he a Portuguese criminal or a bourgeois professor of philosophy. Kingsport sits on one more border: between past and present. In “The Festival,” the protagonist apparently slips into the colonial past for his Yuletide ritual. The anomalous reappearance of the Congregational Church in Kingsport signals Randolph Carter’s time-slip in “The Silver Key,” and in Mountains of Madness, Kingsport Head literally transmits the horror of revenant prehistory to the modern world of the Arkham Advertiser.

Kingsport, with its “dizzy, church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch,” is a town afraid of Heaven—because it can see across the border, through a mist, darkly. Think about this: Lovecraft saw his own Heaven there in 1922 … and wrote a horror story about it. For the traveler who comes to Kingsport, for Yuletide or for summer vacation, such revelation is likewise no unmixed delight. As Alhazred puts it: “Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new.” Even if they’re Lovecraft’s dead thoughts. Especially if they’re Lovecraft’s dead thoughts, perhaps.

Next Stop: Boston

The Future History of Cats, by Kurt Newton

After the Apocalypse,

and before the real end of the world,

there were cats.

Lots of them.

House cats used to test the fish,

meat, and poultry

for the taint of death.

But the cats got smart

...coughing up the meat hours later

wrapped in balls of fur

...sitting by content while we ate our meals

unaware it was our last.

Why we didn’t just eat the cats

I’ll never know.

But karma had its own surprise in store

for them.

Genetic mutilations to their DNA strands

created retractable armadillo claws,

infrared-detecting whiskers,

tails the size of bullwhips,

and teeth capable of penetrating everything

...except the Kevlar scales

of the mutant catfish

that crawled up from the mud-choked lakes

and streams

into the narrow city streets

to spawn.

About the Authors

Peter M. Ball is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. He’s written two novellas, Horn and Bleed, for Twelfth Planet Press and his short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interfictions II and Apex Magazine. He can be found online at www.petermball.com.

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 50 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies. She has published a short story collection and at least two novels, with another one coming soon. She lives in NYC with her dog, Booker Prize, and her cat, Pulitzer. If she had three wishes, she’d use one and give the rest to charity. Maybe.

N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn-based author.  Her short fiction has been nominated for a Hugo and Nebula award, and published in Clarkesworld, Baen’s Universe, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, and many other places.  Her first two novels, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and its sequel The Broken Kingdoms, are currently out from Orbit Books, with the third volume of the trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods, due in late 2011.  She blogs at nkjemisin.com

Matthew Kressel is a writer, editor, publisher, and full-time IT guru. His work appears in publications such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, and other markets.

In 2003 he started the speculative fiction magazine Sybil’s Garage, which has since received multiple honorable mentions in three consecutive issues of the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, (Ed. Datlow, Link, Grant) and continues to receive critical acclaim. He is also the publisher of Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, which won the 2009 World Fantasy Award for best anthology of the year.

Matthew is the co-host of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series alongside Ellen Datlow and designs websites for writers and magazines.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, with a steadily decreasing view of the New York skyline.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of six novels and a story collection.  He teaches writing at Cornell University.

Mark Meredith, former tractor mechanic, began writing with a twig dipped in the dregs of an old oil sump. Now he has progressed to using a plastic pen with real ink in it. This is his first published story.

Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and is a 2010 graduate of the Clarion SF & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Swedish publications since 2002. Her Swedish book debut, a short story collection entitled Vem är Arvid Pekon?, was released in September. More stories in English are on their way.