PseudoPod

• Authors : Heather N. Thomas, Jen C.A. Morris and Lee Battersby
• Narrators : Nika Harper, Austin Malone and Chloë Yates
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 616: Flash On The Borderlands XLIV: Objectification is a PseudoPod original.

Stalking, Assault

FEINSTEIN: How did you decide to come forward?

FORD: Ultimately because reporters were sitting outside my home and trying to talk to my dog through the window to calm the dog down, and a reporter appeared in my graduate classroom and I mistook her for a student, and she came up to ask me a question, and I thought she was a student and it turned out that she was a reporter.

So at that point, I felt like enough was enough. People were calling my colleagues at Stanford and leaving messages on their voicemails and on their e-mail, saying that they knew my name. Clearly, people knew my address because they were out in front of my house.

The Stripper by Heather N. Thomas narrated by Nika Harper

She was living in squalor. At least, that’s what her friends had said and now she never saw them anymore. Their looks of disapproval with undertones of disgust were displaced, undeserved. It was bullshit.

She’d let some things go. Her apartment certainly needed a clearing of clutter and a good bleaching to get rid of the smell. Empty boxes and rancid food containers piled up along each wall. She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken out the garbage. She couldn’t be bothered. The place had been a shit-hole long before she’d signed the lease.

The pale blue glow of her computer screen was the only source of light. Her shuttered windows covered by thick black curtains blocked out the rest of the world. Her time was consumed with packages. So many packages. All she had to do was point, click, and they’d be taken away.

This had all started with her panties. A friend had once mentioned that she knew of girls that sold theirs for serious money. The idea was so absurd and degrading that they’d just laughed it off. Later her curiosity got the best of her and she searched online. Turns out lots of women did this and they were making serious money indeed.

After she had sold about a dozen pair, the messages poured in.

            Hey baby. u look so sexy in those little panties. do u have anything else to sell?

At first, she was afraid to ask exactly what they were thinking, but again her curiosity won.

            Thanks cutie. What u looking for?

The requests ranged from the mundane to the bizarre, to the downright vile. These men disgusted her. But Jesus, the money was too good.

After she had sold most of her clothes, it wasn’t long before she was scouring through her trashcans to fulfill the orders. Kleenex, sanitary napkins, q-tips, hair shavings, nail clippings, piss, shit; they wanted all of it. Piece by piece, she shipped herself all over the world. The more she sold, the more sickening the orders became. She satisfied every one.

She’d often promised herself that she would stop. Her closets and drawers were bare. Her fingers were bloodied from over-clipping. She was nearly bald. She’d covered every mirror in her apartment, unable to stand the sight of the pallid hairless thing which stared back at her. It had to stop.

One morning, she received a message with the subject of, “how much?”

You have the most elegant white thighs. I’d like to eat your skin. How much for just a small strip of it? Regards, James M.

She read this over several times, becoming more nauseated with each scan of the words. She ran to the bathroom and vomited into a ziplock bag. She stumbled into her kitchen. Her pale, bony hand slid a paring knife from the block. She stared at it for an endless moment.

She sat down at her kitchen table and began to cut.

I AM YOUR DOG by Jen C.A. Morris narrated by Austin Malone

You are really pretty.

You are really smart.

You smell really nice.

My favorite is at the end of the day

When you walk by in your shoes

Sweaty.

Girl sweat.

So nice.

Smile at me, I say hello

And wave.

I am sad when you go.

But I know you will come back

Tomorrow.

I know these things because

I am your dog.

One day you didn’t come in for your cigarettes.

You are _supposed_ to do that.

I waited but you didn’t come.

I was so sad

And my head was so red.

On break I peed some places

Then I felt better.

My boss was mad though.

Said “Don’t throw a weirdo fit again or I’ll call your parole officer”.

I thought: It’s OK, you will come back

Tomorrow.

I just need to wait nicely.

I know these things because

I am your dog.

The best best thing happened the day you

came into the store and said

Your office bathroom was broke.

Asked nice to use.

Boss said okay

Then you left.

You flushed. Too bad!

I still likked the bowl.

Maybe can taste you.

It’s OK because I am your dog.

Dogs do that stuff all the time.

You walked by my work.

I tried to wave.

You waved back but didn’t come in.

So I ran up to you and jumped a bit

So excited!

I said “Don’t you want your cigarettes???”

You were so surprised.

Stepped back

Said “Not today. I quit!” and smiled.

Nice smile.

Then a car came. Picked you up.

A man in the car.

He kissed you.

_He kissed you._

I growld and growld.

You drove away not looking

Look at me!

LOOK

AT

ME

My boss grabbed me

But I am your dog so I bit him

A lot.

Gotta be stray now

I would be sad but

I know it’s just until

I find you

Then we will be fine

I’ll keep you safe

Warm

Satisfied

Because I am your dog

At school I learned you use a phone book

to find where people live.

I knew your name because it is on the sign

At your work.

It is a weird name. I wrote it down.

Wait.

Dogs don’t do this.

Dogs _don’t_.

I just need to find you.

Just that one people thing,

Then I can go back

To being your dog all the time.

2 names in phone book.

First one opened the door

I am sorry was so excited ran in.

There was Someone

Old Lady. I broke her hip

Humping.

She was screaming real loud.

I’m sorry,

Can’t help it.

Wrong house.

Not her dog, just visiting.

I find your house.

Waited. Saw you go inside

From the bushes.

Hooray!

I skrich skrach on the door.

I see in movies when

nice ladies open the door?

They see a puppy all alone

And they let them come in.

Because they are nice.

You are a nice lady right?

and I _am_ your dog.

The House of Jack’s Girls by Lee Battersby narrated by Chloë Yates

The waiting room is full of terrified boys. Their fathers bring them. For most of them, it’s their first time. Boys without even a razor rash, stinking of pomade and sweat, here to face the horror of a woman.

Madame is on form tonight. She’s a gentle introduction to the evening’s festivities: urbane, charming, and cajoling, as long as your money is good and you approach her with respect. I’ve seen men run screaming from her, their pants soaked with piss and eyes rolled back in their sockets. But there’s none of that tonight, not in front of these boys who barely lift their eyes from shyness. Tonight she is all smiles and gentle words. Her message is clear. You are too young, too callow to satisfy me. But you will get a taste of the future tonight. A taste of what may come to be. You are a shadow of your father, as my girls are a shadow of me, and they are all that you deserve. She is intriguing, infatuating: a glimpse of the unfettered sensation to come. The boys can barely resist the urge to run.

We peek at them through the curtain strung between the receiving room and our quarters, giggling at the boys’ nervousness and pointing out choice specimens. Once everyone is as comfortable as possible, Madame will lead us out in ones and twos, to wander amongst the clients and see who responds to our charms. The boys choose us, never the other way around. It’s been that way since the dawn of time: men always select their women. Some of these men were here when they were young, brought unwilling by their fathers, who were brought by their fathers in turn. Some families have been coming for generations, and each has their favourite. Half the youngsters in the room picked their girls before they even walked through the door, wooed by family tradition and the stories of their elders. Still, there are conventions, and rituals to be followed. We are civilised people, in a civilised trade. We must observe the formalities.

As if on cue, Madame raises her head and beckons the first of us forward. Martha is an easy introduction. Tall and restrained, with only a modicum of indecency about her, she attracts the mildest of clientele: those who wish the thrill of contact without fully exploring the depths of their fascination. I see most of the boys visibly relax. Perhaps their emotions are not as sophisticated as older men, or perhaps I have been here so long that even their responses are ritualised. Either way, their thoughts are obvious: perhaps this will not be so bad. Perhaps I will get through this just fine, become a man at last, an equal in my father’s eyes. I can do this. I can do this. Several boys shift in their chairs, straightening spines and doing their best to greet Martha’s chat with what they hope is sufficient wittiness and maturity. An equal number begin to move, only to be restrained by a fatherly hand on their shoulder. Ambitious men, men of importance in the City outside these walls. They know better. They know what prizes come to a boy who quells his impatience and tastes the treats available further down the table.

Martha has it easy enough. Within minutes a nervous, mousey father has matched her with his equally nondescript offspring. The rest of us dissolve into the shadows as she brings him back through the curtain and down the hallway to her room. Then it is the turn of the next girl, and the next. Slowly, the ranks of the uninitiated are winnowed. Slowly, the girls who are chosen become more exotic, more to the tastes of the hard-faced fathers in expensive suits and positions of power who remain.

In under an hour, we are down to five. These are the men who matter, the ones who sit in the highest positions of power. These are the men who have learned just how far they are willing to go in order to sit in the thrones in the shadows of London, and make the City dance to the strings they pull. They had their first lessons here, at the command of their fathers and the bodies of my companions and me. They sit still and quiet, now. Waiting, with their sons still and quiet next to them.

Mary Ann is first, as it was back in the day, as it has always been. Her boy is quiet as she approaches. He stands before she arrives, moves forward and takes her hand. It is an awkward movement, clearly rehearsed at the behest of the man at his back. His father performed the same uncomfortable act of fake gallantry, as did his father. The longer we are here, and I fear we will be here forever, the more things begin to blur.

After Mary, it is Annie’s turn, and after her is Long Liz. Each one is a taste more refined than the last, a story more entrenched in London’s bloody history. Each one represents a greater distillation of the City’s power, its hatred and violence and repression. Each one is a token to be possessed, earning her owner entrance into the alleyways of true power. We melt into the darkness of the corridor and allow each boy to pass without seeing us as we truly are. And in doing so, pass our power and ownership into his possession.

Then two boys remain. Two fathers sit by their side. Men of steel, and concrete, and unforgiving history. Catherine steps through the curtain.

She was never beautiful, Catherine. But what Jack did to her changed her in ways that only the most particular of tastes would desire. Her face is barely a face, her throat nothing more than a ragged hole where flesh once hung. Where her belly sat, full and gassy, a bloody cavern drips and shows glimpses of dark organs. Some men like it. Some men use it. One of the boys stiffens. His father whispers harsh words. I wonder if he was one of those men, and what acts have been murmured on nights when men of his family have gathered. Then Catherine is back, her young beau walking stiffly beside her. There is only one white-faced boy left, and he is mine.

150 women are killed in London every year. Not all of them are prozzies. But some. And not all of them find their way here. But some. Not all who become restless are people. Places can be murdered, too. Buildings can die with their tasks on earth unfulfilled, and become a spirit, trapped in time and purpose. And just as prozzies are more likely to suffer abuse and assault and murder at the hand of a bloody man, so are brothels. So we find each other, and haunt the living, and try to find a way to live with the world that destroyed us but will not let us go.

And of all the prozzies who have died over the centuries, none are as famous as we unhappy five. Jack’s women. Jack’s trulls. Dead as we are, mutilated and destroyed and trapped by our fame. There will always be men who desire us, who will pay to touch us and possess us and smear their skin with our ever-flowing blood. Men who know about this place, and come to taste what they dare not want in the living world.

My name is Mary Jane, who sometimes called herself Marie Jeanette, and what was done to me was beyond the understanding of all women and only most men. When I come through the curtain and accept the hand of the only boy left in the room, I look into the eyes of his father, who once was a boy who came to me and possessed me, and know that he is not most men. His son will, after this night, be forever a member of that small fraternity that understands why such things are done, and will bring his own son to me, in turn.

I take him down the quiet corridor alone, shut the door of my room against the judgment of the world. The boy is almost in tears. I drop my dress, and let him drink in my devastated flesh. Now he does cry, helpless, weak tears of disgust and desire and sacrifice. I take the back of his head in my hand. I have no breasts. Jack put one beneath my head and one between my feet. I pull the boy’s face into the raw meat of my ruined chest. I feel him sob, and whimper, and gasp short, terrified breaths.

Then, slowly, infinitely slowly, with a trembling fear that would break my heart had Jack not ripped it from my chest and burned it in the fire, I feel his lips and his tongue and his fingers begin to explore.

The post PseudoPod 616: Flash On The Borderlands XLIV: Objectification appeared first on PseudoPod.

 

• Author : Cameron Suey
• Narrator : Sandra M. Odell
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 615: The Shrike is a PseudoPod original.

This episode is brought to you by The Darkest Night podcast. Follow them on Twitter and add them to your feed at http://www.darkestnightpod.com/

 

Sound effects used:

https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/400632/

https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/412308/

https://freesound.org/people/Ohrwurm/sounds/64416/

The Shrike by Cameron Suey

By the time she’s thrown herself upright and grasped for the remote with shaking hands, it’s too late. She’s seen it. She’s heard the words. Instead, she stumbles for the kitchen sink, feeling her throat clench with acrid, stinging horror. The vibrant green and brown hues of the nature documentary wash the inside of her darkened apartment, sonorous tones of the narration hanging in the air. She tries not to listen as she hunches over the filthy, dish-choked sink, retching and gasping for air, but the words still come. Thorns. Impale. Butcher.

Coupled with ambien and supermarket gin, the nature documentaries had been the only thing that helped her fall asleep for the last month, but that’s over now. Ruined in a single fusillade of frames and words. She shuts her eyes tight, presses her face to the cracked tile of the kitchen counter as sobs rock her wasting frame. Behind her eyelids, she sees what she always sees. Trinity on the spike, wide and terrified eyes going glassy with blood loss as her little mouth struggles and fails to form a plea for help. But now the jagged spar of rusted iron in the little girl’s throat has a name, christened by the late night documentary on the cruel hunting habits of predatory birds.

Shrike. It repeats in her ears, a ringing bell striking midnight. Shrike. In the cold clarity of the moment, she feels a silver thread of relief. She knows the name of the thing, now. It is no longer just a factor, one link in the chain of her fatal, unforgivable mistake. The Shrike is an entity. It is something outside herself she can blame. Something she can hate.

Her guilt gives way to a cold and searing anger, like ice pressed too-long against skin. She relishes the feeling, letting it hone her, giving her purpose. She wakes early and calls the office. Instead of tearfully requesting one more week’s extension, she tells them she won’t be back. Tells them to fuck off and to choke on their performative sympathy.

The thundering pain in her head relents under the onslaught of coffee and ibuprofen. She gets fully dressed for the first time in a week, and goes downstairs to see the Shrike. It’s not far from her apartment. Across Lake Street, and down the sharply slanted private sidewalk, passing from rows of apartments to the lavish houses of Sea Cliff. At the bottom, tucked between two driveways leading to cavernous garages, there’s the little stairway of reclaimed redwood and the sandy public footpath to the beach.

She slows now, twenty meters from the spot where Trinity died. There’s still a ragged strip of caution tape at the bottom of the stairs, and two bright orange traffic cones that mark the point of separation between past and present. She had expected city maintenance workers would remove the Shrike, now that it had taken a life, but they’ve merely put up a meek warning and let it be.

She can see it as she approaches. The sounds of the ocean on the far side of the rise churn with the lazy Monday morning beach traffic. She follows the meandering footpath that bisects the undeveloped triangle of grassy dunes, where the trickle of Lobos Creek continues its polluted babbling, unaware of her accelerating heartbeat. She stops, ten meters from the spot where her child died.

The Shrike, a rusted thorn of rebar, juts up from the sand in the middle of the path. She doesn’t know if it was part of an old building, or maybe a small retaining wall to keep the hillside from collapsing. Any trace of its previous purpose is gone. It must have been longer once, because the end terminates in a smooth plane, where more of the iron was sheared away. The salt spray and ocean air has pitted and scarred most of it, but the flat, angled blade at the tip glints in the pale morning sun.

She used to wonder why it hadn’t been cut shorter, down by the dirt, when she walked by it with Trinity every morning on the way to daycare. For the first few months, she’d held her daughter’s hand as they passed, a queasy, inarticulate sense of dread welling up as she navigated gingerly around it.

She always considered taking the long way down the hill, walking the cracked sidewalks of 25th Ave, just to avoid the irrational sense of danger the tiny iron rod elicited in her. But the footpath through the dunes saved her five minutes, sometimes ten if Trinity was in full magpie mode, stopping to pick up every bottle cap or discarded trinket. So she swallowed the anxiety, and held her daughter close.

As Trinity sprouted, long and lean, she chafed at her mother’s hand holding. The girl ran ahead on the familiar route, leaving her mother racing to catch up. And when the weeks grew longer, and the money stretched thin, sometimes she was still hazy and headachy from the night before. The whispering dread of the anomalous metal spike subsided in the fog, and she let Trinity run ahead, calling out at her to be careful, but too far away to stop what was coming.

It’s taller now, she realizes. Not by much, just enough so that someone who’d obsessed over its presence would notice. For one oily moment, she imagines that it has grown, fed on the blood of her child. Her knees go soft. It’s more likely the sand beneath it has shifted, the frame of reference changed, but…

She has to take a step back to keep from pitching forward. She can feel the hungry gravity of the Shrike.

A thrill of elation whispers through her endocrine system. She was right. The Shrike is more than old detritus at the hinterlands of city and sea. This is something wrong.

That’s the moment she starts to make the plan.

Her apartment is between the hardware store and the Shrike, so she stops in for a drink of water. When the glass is empty, she fills it with gin, and drains it again.

The two more blocks to the little hardware store slide by in a dizzy glee. Her cheeks hurt from grinning. The utter hopelessness of the last month has evaporated like the late summer fog. She can’t bring Trinity back, but she can fix the mistake. She can balance the scale.

She fills a basket: a metal cutting hacksaw, a pair of bolt cutters with absurdly long handles, a folding shovel, and a box of mints next to the register. She drops it all on the counter, too hard, and it clatters and nearly tips over.

The clerk, the same elderly man with thinning black hair that has manned the register for the past five years, recognizes her despite the sunglasses she’s still wearing. He lights up, his wide smile showing three silver crowns. She grins in response, both from reflexive politeness and the lingering manic glee.

“Ah!” he exclaims, pulling the heavy metal tools out of the basket and passing them in front of the humming scanner. “Got a big project planned?”

She just keeps grinning from behind her mirrored lenses. She doesn’t know what to say. Her teeth grind, the enamel threatening to give, but she keeps grinning. The clerk freezes for a minute, unsure of how to reclaim the script.

“Where’s the little one?” he asks, as he rings up the mints. “Don’t often see the two of you-”

“It killed her.” She blurts it out, the words slippery and half-formed. She regrets saying it the moment she sees his face go slack, but it’s too late. She doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to escape the awkward moment, so she thrusts out her credit card and grins harder.

It’s silent in the store now, as other patrons turn towards her or pointedly away. Near the front of the store, a police officer has stopped shuffling through packages of batteries to turn and look. His brow furrows as his face slides into a theatrical mask of concern, worry, and sympathy. The familiarity of his worthless, insincere expression fills her throat with anger and shame, and she feels her legs tense with a sudden rabbit urge to run.

The clerk is still staring, silvered mouth half agape. It’s the look of a man who has heard an offensive joke he’s not sure if he can let go without comment. She pushes the credit card down into his hands, the feral rictus of the grin feeling like an implicit threat on her own face.

He places the tools in a bag, and slides her the receipt. Neither of them make eye contact again.

She meant to go straight to the Shrike, but the queasy interaction with the clerk has stolen some of the electric current from her limbs. She walks the two blocks east to the little market, and selects a modest sized bottle of gin.

Back at the house she decides it would be wise to go out after nightfall anyway. It’s hot in a way that only September in San Francisco can be. When she moves, she’s covered in a thin film of clinging sweat, and only stillness stops the flow. She draws the blinds and cranks up the air conditioner she never uses. She waits.

An hour later, someone knocks on the door, a sharp authoritative rhythm. She doesn’t even consider answering it.

She hadn’t fallen in love with the infant at first sight, like everyone had told her she would. In the small hours of the first few mornings, the strongest emotions roused in her by the mewling, mindless grub had been an intertwined spiral of guilt and resentment.

But when the hormones had shifted her brain chemistry into timeworn channels, the biological urge to protect her child felt close enough to love. She’d watched Trinity unfurl from a thing into a person, felt a numinous joy as the child blossomed into consciousness right in front of her. A delicate, self-assembling, glass construct of innocence and desire emerging from the fog.

And then she’d watched her die on the thorn. Watched every delicate coil and loop of her daughter’s mind undone all at once, a knot slit open with a sword.

She wakes with a start. The clock bleeds red numbers, 12:51 AM, and her head is throbbing. She fills the dirty glass with water, drains it, and fills it with the last of the gin. Then she pulls on a thin coat, and hoists the hardware store bag over her shoulder, and heads out into the cooling night to kill the Shrike.

The Shrike is lit up as if the night knows well who rules this place. By day it’s just the detritus of decades of careless urban planning, but under the stars, all pretense is gone. It’s the tooth of something malefic beneath the skin of the city, reflecting more amber streetlight than its rust-pitted exterior should allow.

Her manic courage vanishes, splashing against the ground like a punctured amniotic sac. It’s looking right at her. She knows the thought is absurd, even for all the framework she’s built around the finger of rebar, all the hate and anger and guilt she’s projected on it. But it is aware. It sees her.

There is no momentum now. No tug. No feeling of righteousness. She has to pick up each leaden foot and drag it forward. The air grows thick as she approaches. The distant sound of the waves vanishes, as if the tides have stopped to watch. For the first time since she named the Shrike, something cuts through the grief, through the anger at herself and the mindless cruelty of physics. Terror, cold and oily, seeps in through her skin and clenches at her lungs. Her heart skitters. The eyeless face of the Shrike still glares at her, but now it laughs with a lipless mouth. A low, arrogant chuckle like shifting sand and creaking metal.

She shakes her head so hard that her teeth crack together, and stomps the last few meters across the sand path. She starts to hum, a thrust of breath through clenched jaws. An insipid, looping melody from Trinity’s favorite TV show. And then she’s there. Close enough to touch the thing that killed her little girl.

She drops down to her knees to look up close, and to quell the sudden fear that she might pitch forward. The pull of gravity tilts at an angle here. She feels the cold, atavistic hunger radiating from the Shrike like a radio broadcast in her fillings.

She tries the bolt cutters first. When the metal blades encircle the Shrike, she expects a swell of power and satisfaction, but instead she feels clumsy and weak. She can’t find the right leverage, the right angle. She squeezes the long grips but the blades only dig shallow divots into the old iron. She tries again and again, leaving parallel gouges across the base of the Shrike, the rust stripped back to reveal gleaming iron strength.

The blade of the hacksaw won’t bite. It slips and skitters across the surface, barely leaving a mark. She sucks in a deep breath, hums the little tune as loud as she can with her jaw set tight, and presses harder. The blade snaps with a musical twang.

She tries to remove the curled wreckage of the blade, but as her cold hands fumble for the release in the dark, the serrated metal catches on her hands and bites deep. Blood spatters on the sand, tapping out a steady beat. She jerks her hands back, half in instinctual self-protection, half to keep the Shrike from finding any more nourishment in her pain.

She sucks at the sliced fingers until the flow ceases. It’s right next to her as she squats in the sand, just a thin rod of metal. But it seems to tower over her. To dwarf her tiny presence like an ancient tree. It’s not her imagination, she realizes. The thing has grown, even since earlier today. Her blood has watered it, twice now, and it will grow more.

In the silent dark, she dreams of leaving. Standing up, leaving the pile of tools, and walking home to her bed. Tomorrow she has an appointment with a therapist. Tomorrow she can wake up clear, relishing the clarity of a headache and the morning sun. She can forget the Shrike.

But that’s a fantasy. She can’t leave anymore than she can reach her hands into the sand and pull Trinity back from the earth. She unfolds the shovel, and begins to dig.

The cuts on her hands open up, and blood slicks the handle. She knows she’s feeding the Shrike, but what’s a little more blood when it’s already gorged itself on her life. She’s a half meter down, and the iron roots of the Shrike keep going. It stands, erect and mocking in the wet pit, twice as tall now. She wraps her hands around it, feeling an electric frisson of revulsion with the touch, and tries to pull, but it’s rooted too deep in the earth. She continues to dig.

She doesn’t hear the polite call of the officer from behind her, doesn’t see his flashlight as it waves across the sand. She’s too caught in the rhythm of digging, revealing more and more of the Shrike with each thrust into the earth. Each centimeter revealed is a validation. The deeper it burrows into the dirt, the more she knows she’s not crazy.

He reaches his hand out onto her shoulder. She screams, swinging the shovel up in an arc. He jerks back, not far enough, and the sand covered blade slices across his forehead. A flap of skin peels back, blood misting the night air, and he drops the flashlight as he raises his hands in defense. The big, black light rolls into the hollow at the base of the Shrike, backlighting it like some foul monument.

The cop wipes the blood from his eyes and she watches in horror as he flicks it into the pit, straight into the belly of the Shrike. She takes a step back. His eyes lock on hers, rimmed in blood and narrowed in frustration. One hand is on the grip of his service pistol.

“Miss, I need you to drop the shovel and put your hands on your head,” he says. She complies, letting the folding shovel fall. He relaxes, relieved at her compliance, and he half turns towards the pit, eyes casting about for the flashlight. She freezes, the moment on a knife edge, unsure of what comes next.

“I tried coming by earlier today to check on you, after…” he sighs as he steps closer to the Shrike. “Some of your neighbors have been worried about you for a while.”

He bends over, reaching into the pit.

“You can’t be out here in the middle of the night, just-”

He slips, one foot sliding on loose sand, and she knows the gravity of the Shrike has him. She reaches out.

She wants to tell herself that she’s going to grab him, to pull him back.

But that would be a lie.

She pushes. Pushes him down.

The Shrike bites deep into his gut. He’s almost silent as he falls, just a brief, shocked exhalation. The iron glides up inside him. She can see the Shrike twisting, unmistakably alive and sentient, bending to find the cruelest path through his insides. He gasps as it punctures his lung, his body weight and her hands forcing him deeper onto the Shrike’s thorn. It plunges through his heart until the hungering tip grinds to a rest on the bones of his ribs.

He wraps weak and trembling hands around the Shrike as blood cascades down into the maw of the pit. His eyes, glassy and fading like Trinity, tilt up to her. She holds him, pressing him into the Shrike. An offering. A plea.

His last breath is a wet mist in the air, eyes fogging over as they mutely beg her for an explanation. She has none. There is none to give.

She waits with him, kneeling in the pit as the Shrike drinks deep.

She keeps digging.

The dead man balances in the air, on the tip of the Shrike, as she descends beneath him into the mouth of the earth. The iron shaft of the Shrike burrows deep into the ground, and she follows it down, meter after meter.

There are more dead down here, impaled on the great thorn. Centuries of dead. Skeletons with ragged bits of clothing and flesh clinging to bleached bone. Fresh kills that twitch and gasp. She continues downward.

A great iron tower of dead, sunk beneath the ground. Each one a tragedy, a gaping unhealed wound in the world of the living above. Each one a meal for the insatiable Shrike.

She knows what’s coming. This deep, the red walls of the pit breathe, a slow exhalation of the Shrike’s innards. It’s not the bottom. The Shrike has no end, no terminus, but she has come deep enough.

Trinity, as fresh and warm as the day she died, is speared on the thorn. There is no going deeper. She has fed the Shrike, and now it shows her what she wanted to see. She came here to kill the cruel thing, but now, deep beneath the earth, with the devoured all around her, she sees how foolish that thought was. She might as well have tried to kill the sky.

She curls up on the bleeding soil, wrapping her body around Trinity, around the thorn, and struggles to stay awake. Fatigue seeps into her bones. High above, through the narrow aperture, the sky turns the color of a livid bruise as the sun rises. The dawn light silhouettes the dead officer at the tip of the thorn. The hole above is shrinking, the earth closing like jaws. She shuts her eyes. She hoped to feel some measure of relief, some sense of accomplishment before the night ended, but instead she feels nothing. Just an exhaustion like brutal gravity.

As the sky vanishes above, the Shrike swallows her for good. She wraps her arms around the dead child, and hums the simple little tune.

The post PseudoPod 615: The Shrike appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : E. Catherine Tobler
• Narrator : Jen Zink
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Figure 8” originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Gamut

Spoiler InsideSelectShow “A friend and I were talking and he idly wondered where all the Ripleys had gone, and that got me to thinking about Ripley from Alien Resurrection, where she discovers clones of herself. This story was born from that tiny seed.”    

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Figure 8 by E. Catherine Tobler

There were seven before you. You’re number eight, perfect in every way, because they rooted out each imperfection across the seven who came before.

But they left you, your makers. They left you without a hint as to where they’d gone. You were old enough, smart enough, built well enough to withstand anything that might come, so they left you, and you—you hunt.  If you’re perfection, the others cannot stand.

You find the first in the lab where your makers left you. She hangs suspended in a floor to ceiling tank, pale like she’s never seen sunlight. Of course, she never has. Her skin is milk, shot through with veins so blue, they don’t look like rivers, but rather cords of rope.

She sleeps floating in the amniotic fluid that’s as clear as water. You thought it would have gone gray, but you don’t know how to mark the passage of time, and it’s hard to say how much time has passed. She was the first, and you were the last and are grown, so it seems like a good deal of time would have come and gone, but you’ve not spent much time under the sun yet, either.

You drain the tank and she floats to the bottom like a jellyfish, curled in on herself, noodle-like. The bottom of the tank detaches into a narrow saucer shaped vessel and in the cool lab air, she smells like hot custard. You just don’t want her to move, because if she unfurls, she’s big enough to slide right out of the tank.

She unfurls.

Number One stretches like she’s never been allowed to stretch, though you know from the lab logs, she has. But her bones never solidified and her muscles don’t know what to do in the gravity you’ve imposed on her. So she stretches, legs and arms flopping over the edge of the saucer. Her eyes crack open but they’re not eyes—not formed in any case. You wonder if she can see you, if she’s aware of her surroundings, and that everyone who made her also abandoned her.

A low mewl escapes her toothless mouth. She tries to move, but lacks coordination. She cannot move well outside her tank, a jellyfish out of water.

You tell yourself the spike through the back of her soft skull is a mercy, that when her eyes close, she sees you and she smiles to be released.

You find the second in an alley, huddled in a collapsing cardboard box that calls to mind Number One. Two isn’t anything like One; she’s strong enough to stand and walk, but not smart enough to have acquired a job. She’s homeless, but tells you in a broken language that the box is her home. She shows you the canned food, the can opener, the window cut into the box’s side. She doesn’t recognize you.

Her hair is plastered to her skull and cheeks, thin and brown but already going grey at the roots. It’s like a line of silver has been painted down her scalp, right where her hair parts. It’s almost pretty, glinting in the weak sunlight that comes through the box’s window. She wishes she had curtains; she holds up her thin hand to shade her eyes from the sun.

She asks if you know the alley cat, and you say no. Number Two tells you the cat is wandering the streets, that she needs a place to stay. Number Two’s box isn’t big enough for a roommate, and Number Two was thinking if your box was bigger…

You tell her you don’t have a box and she looks at you like she can’t understand. But you can see from the fear in her cloudy eyes that she does. Life without a box, she says, is not life. It is wandering, it is lost. Not lost, you assure her, but the lab was no proper home and she won’t be kept like that, in the confines of four walls, be they cardboard or plaster.

Number Two is asleep when you do your work. She’s tired—it’s hard to sleep on this street, so many people coming and going. So she curls up in the clothing she has wrangled from passersby and falls into an exhausted slumber. You watch her a long time, the uneven up and down of her chest as she tries to draw the rainy spring air in. The day warms, and Number Two’s breathing eases, the air humid like the lab could be.

You cover her mouth and nose with your hand, a broad hand made for such work. Number Two thrashes, but only a little. She’s ready to go, just like all the others. You tell yourself they know themselves unworthy, that they’re ready to leave this world to her and her alone.

Number Three lives in a five-story walkup, and you’re quietly amazed as you walk up the stairs. She doesn’t own the apartment, but rents one room of it. She has a job at the university cafeteria, washing dishes with water so hot, she thinks her skin will peel off.

But the hot water reminds her of another place, the lab’s forming tanks, so she never really minds it. Part of her wants to crawl into the dishwashers and just sleep for a while, but when she tells others about this fantasy, they laugh, saying she really is a college student. She’s taking one class, three credits, Intro to Biology.

There’s no elevator, only stairs, and the stairwell has seen some use. Its wallpaper is scuffed in places and missing in others, but you can see it used to have a pattern. High on the walls, it still does: tiny white diamonds filled with tiny black diamonds filled with tiny white diamonds into infinity. You feel yourself falling if you look at the paper too long.

Number Three lives in 504, and is always home from eleven to one; after that, it’s class, then the late lunch and dinner shifts at the cafeteria. 504 is a corner apartment with three bedrooms; her roommates are never home from eleven to one, but today the door hangs open, like one of them forgot to close it. Probably Kate, you think; Kate’s too preoccupied for life, going in four directions at once all the time.

You step inside and it’s quiet; Number Three isn’t at the breakfast table though a rented laptop is, its screen glowing with pretty young women—three of them, naked but for each other’s arms. You stand captivated for a long moment, these young women radiating an appeal you cannot entirely explain. You want to touch their skins—not flawless, because you can see the sprinkling of freckles and scars; you can see stretch marks and the faint lingering mark of a sunburn. But perhaps these things are why they compel you. Your own skin is without flaw, without even fingerprint; flawless is all you have ever known.

The bedrooms each prove empty, Number Three’s bed made perfectly. A strand of dark hair clings to the pillow and you admire the way it looks in the sunlight flooding through the curtained window. If you grew yours out, it would look like this, brown with red and gold besides.

You return to the front rooms where there is a soft hiss from the kitchen. The roommates do not have a cat, though Number Three has wanted to get one; you’ve watched her at the weekend pet fairs, roaming the cages. But Kate is allergic and won’t see her couch destroyed by claws sharper than her own.

The kitchen stands still, but for the blinking green light on the dishwasher. You move toward it, the dishwasher door radiating heat, steam escaping from the vents. You move the latch and pull the door open, finding Number Three curled inside on the bottom level, glowing pink, cooked from the hot water. Her skin did peel right off and she looks like a shell, fresh and smooth from the sea, her skull a polished pearl.

Number Four was purchased by a wealthy family and lives outside the city. You have to take a train to reach her and you spend three nights sleeping in a sunflower field, waiting for her to be alone. She’s rarely alone—she’s fucking the pool boy. (He thinks he’s fucking her, but you can tell. You know.)

Number Four doesn’t clean pools but tends to the lady of the house, rising before her mistress to ensure her bath is ready, with warmed towels and warmer coffee. The bathroom tiles are heated and Number Four finds a memory in all this warmth, the cocoons she was nestled in when she was newly made.

When she’s finally alone, you hesitate. This hesitation is new and you don’t understand it, but there’s something about the way Number Four walks, about the way she looks at herself in the mirror and applies her mistress’ perfume before she walks outside barefoot to find the pool boy scooping leaves from the water. He’s happy to see her but she’s not happy to see him. She’s hungry.

You let her consume him because you wonder what it is, what it feels like, to have another’s hands on you in that way. Your work is so sterile and you never attempt to get to know anyone outside it. There’s no point. You are the only body that should exist. All others should be purged by your hand because the makers made you perfect. All that came before was a failure.

They told you this, the maker gazing down on you as she wiped the hot amniotic fluid from your cheeks. Perfect, she whispered. This was the first word you knew, the first word you in turn spoke. Number Four is not perfect. Hidden within her strong slim body, you know there is a flaw. She would not have been sold had it been otherwise, so when she is full of the pool boy’s hot ejaculate, you follow her.

Number Four walks inside, into her mistress’ heated bathroom, and stretches naked on the warm tiles as the bath fills. You watch her from the doorway and she is so certain in her forbidden routine that she does not see you; there is never anyone there, so no need to look. She slips into the bath, the bubbles high and vaguely purple.

The scissors are meant for cutting hair, but they’re so precise and sharp, you know they will cut flesh. You slip them from the vanity and come to the edge of the tub, where you sit, looking down at an earlier version of yourself. She stares back, more curious than alarmed. You let her look upon your perfection, the way they made you as they could never make her.

“You,” she breathes, and she looks more, finally lifting a wet hand and pressing her fingers against your skin. She’s wearing one of the mistress’ rings, a gaudy stone that you cannot name.

It’s shocking, her touch. She is warm in a way you have never been, thrumming with a pulse that is somehow satisfied. She comes to her knees in the water—water and soap streaming down her breasts and belly. You think of the tangled women on Number Three’s laptop and when Number Four’s fingers tighten against your neck, you understand a little more. Too much, maybe, because something changes inside of you. You were not made for change, because you are already perfect.

The scissors cut neatly into Number Four’s wrist and she is not surprised at the action. She knows because she’s you, and you have always known. Number Four is not the perfect iteration; number eight is. You are twice her number and she knows.

Her head tips back but her eyes never leave you. As the scissors cut upward from wrist to elbow and the soap begins to run pink and then red (blushing, you think), Four smiles at you. She smiles and rocks her body closer, and you know. She wants to know perfection before she dies.

You don’t let her, but you linger long enough to pull the ring from her wet finger before allowing her to slide boneless into the tub.

Returning to the city, you find Number Five on the train. You didn’t expect this and given that the train is packed, aren’t quite sure what to do. You remain in your seat, watching.

Number Five looks like a boy, hair rough cut and hanging slantways across the sharply angled face. He’s wearing eyeliner and lipstick, both blue-black like a thunderstorm, and you are captivated. As much as Number Four was in your arms only two hours before, you feel yourself wanting to sink against him and understand the color of his lips.

The hands are yours though, fine-boned and strong, but for the one finger that sits crooked against his leather-clad thigh. It looks like it was broken, and you find yourself remembering the sharp edges in the lab, how if in the early days one wasn’t careful, one might get injured. Number Seven was injured—no one much talks about that though.

You don’t know much about Number Five; you thought she lived above a bodega, that she didn’t know anyone outside the city, but here he is on a train, coming back from the outskirts like he does it all the time. You wonder which stop he’ll get off at and you watch, rising from your seat when he does. He lingers by the door and you slide up behind, so close you can see the sprinkling of black stars tattooed along the back of his neck. One is larger than the others, but most are so small they remind you of scattered sand.

In the metallic night air that blows up from the tracks, Number Five smells like leather. You probably smell like bubble bath and blood but you don’t linger on it. You follow Number Five off the train amid a jostle of other bodies.

He’s not in a hurry. He slips headphones on, feet moving to the beat of unheard music as he walks away from the train station. You follow him down all the metal stairs and while other people peel off, heading toward cars, restaurants, loved ones, you and he continue up the dusk dark road along the city’s edge. You can see the bodega in the distance, its canopy glowing orange.

Although the two of you seemingly walk alone, there are still too many people in the street. Windows are bright and some doorways hang open. Cars whisper past and alley cats yowl. If Number Five reaches the bodega, you aren’t certain you’ll have an opportunity to do your work. The bodega is open 24/7, and you thought she worked a day shift, but here it is night, and he’s pulling an apron from his jacket.

One glance behind is all it takes. You look, wondering exactly how you can angle him down a darkened alley, and when you look forward again, he’s gone.

You stop walking, only your eyes moving as you scan the street. The doorways, the windows, the distant bodega. Another alley cat calls out, but otherwise the street begins to grow quiet. Did he see you, did he know he was being followed? You watch the bodega, but don’t see him enter. You don’t see him at all, not within the bright windows or under the orange canopy, not even when you walk down and buy a soda you will never drink.

Number Six lies dead in her bed—her full-sized bed that is made with sheets that sport tiny blue flowers. Forget-me-nots, you think.

You sit at her bedside a long time, trying to work it out. It’s not like Number Three; there is no sign of suicide or foul play. You still aren’t sure which Number Three was—but seeing Number Six like this, with her hands crossed over her unmoving chest, you begin to wonder.

It bothers you, that you didn’t consider it when you found Number Three cooked clean. But finding her that way fit with what you knew of her. It wasn’t entirely a surprise—and besides, she was broken. Physically, mentally, in some way, she was not perfection, so of course she could have taken her own life in an extremely foolish way.

She could not have, however, turned the dishwasher on from the inside.

This revelation bothers you, too. You sit and watch Number Six and she’s not breathing at all, posed so perfectly beneath the shadow of the cross that once hung on her wall. You see the cross nowhere; it’s not even in her bedside drawer when you peer inside. (Lotion, a rolled up towel, the second oldest Murikami novel, dog-eared.)

What you see does not fit with what you know of her, but given Number Six is already dead, you are willing to throw what you know out the window. When you open her wallet and look at her ID card, you wonder. She gave herself a name: Tricia.

You realize that Number Three also would have had a name. She was a student, she was employed, and a low shudder runs through you. You feel sick, though you never have before. You turn away from the dresser where the wallet rests and look at the body in the bed. It is you, but it is also not.

You remind yourself she was broken in some way. Maybe her name was where she broke—you are not human and therefore not in need of a name. And yet—she gave herself one. In an effort to become part of the larger world, she named herself.

“You were not made for this world,” you whisper, once again at Number Six’s bedside. “You were made so I could inhabit this world.”

She does not move, even when you give the bed a little shove. You leave her—she is dead and does not matter—but you rifle through her bathroom, searching for drugs, prescription or otherwise, or anything else that might have harmed her. But there’s nothing—she was made well enough she doesn’t need such nonsense, so as you step into the night, you wonder what killed her.

The list is still entirely too long.

Number Seven is also owned, the property of a Mr. and Mrs. Doyle who live in Penthouse 2 near the theater. But Number Seven is also dead and the police have been alerted, because Number Seven appears to have taken a header out the living room window. Number Seven is splattered on the pavement. And the sidewalk. And the park benches.

You were closest to Seven, given she came right before you, and she was closest to you, given you came right after. You remember sharing your earliest days with her, bundled under a blanket in the crèche as she tried to teach you the difference between shadow and light. You never minded the fingers she was missing on her left hand, not until the makers told you it invalidated her entire being, made her flawed and useless to them. Until that moment, you loved her like you loved nothing else. Seven smelled like flowers sometimes, though never again.

The Doyles look as anxious as you feel, but you know there won’t be enough of the body left for it to be identified in any way. Cloned flesh is only a disturbing bedtime story for children, clones don’t actually exist, and the idea that an upright couple such as the Doyles would own one? Absurd.

It’s the death that bothers you and the shadowy form you thought you saw leaving the scene as you approached. You tell yourself you made it up—Seven liked stories, so sometimes, you like stories too. And even if it was true, it could have been literally anyone; residents still ring the site, behind the fluttering yellow tape that will imprint every single one of them, just in case a person of interest happened by.

The person that interests you, however, is dead, nothing more than ground meat in the street.

Beneath the blanket, back at the lab, you place your hand over Seven’s, allowing your fingers to fill in the spaces where hers once were. “There,” you whisper. “Just like that, perfect,” and in the shadow, one can’t tell you from her or her from you.

You should be relieved, because Seven’s death almost completes your list. You will return to the bodega and take care of Number Five. You will be the only remaining body, for this is how it should be, how it was always meant to be. No matter your affection for Seven, she was never perfection. Your long and thankless task is at its end and you wonder: what the fuck do I do now?

You go to the all-night café, because Number Three did this a lot. She liked the low lights and the way the staff doesn’t care how long a person sits in one place, no matter how little they tip. They’re used to students, after all. You used to watch her through the window some nights.

Once, a businessman bought Number Two a hot coffee here, so you order hot coffee, no cream no sugar, and you hold the cup in your hands. It’s the warmth that is compelling, that reminds you of the artificial womb, of the way steam beaded on Number One’s boneless arms, of Number Four’s hand on your neck. The heat makes everything run together.

You’ve never had coffee before and it’s bitter against your tongue. You can’t fathom why people drink it, until you swallow more and find that it warms you like nothing else, and makes you a little more alert. You ask the waitress for cream and sugar after all, and you drink the cream straight before adding some to the coffee. You think you could watch it bloom through the black all night, but this is not what you were made for.

Your makers created you to kill, built you as a weapon none would suspect. You can walk among them, can get through security gates when automatic weapons cannot. You are death made flesh, and used to understand your purpose flawlessly. But now the makers have gone and you are drinking coffee in an all-night café where the lights burn like red-shifted stars. Everything is cold and distant around you, so you sit, wondering what it all means.

Find the makers, you think. Go back to the lab.

You tip all the cash you have in your pocket because you’ve been at the table all night—Marcela has two kids and four sisters and you’ve taken money from two versions of yourself recently. You leave the ring, too, shining bright and blue under the café lights. You wait across the street for Marcela to find it and she sits weeping at the table when she does. There is a pawn shop two doors down.

As the sun rises, splitting with solstice precision between the high rises, you aren’t thinking about Number Five; you’re heading for the lab.

You find the makers where you never thought to look before, in the deepest part of the lab where the freezers line the corridors. They did not leave; they were butchered. They have been stacked like meat, careful and precise, and you stare at them, longing stupidly for the warmth of the coffee you knew only an hour before.

Every single maker is dead; thirteen in total and once you’ve accounted for them all, you start to search the rest of the lab. Your hands are shaking, which is ridiculous, because perfection does not allow space for fear or doubt or sorrow. Perfection acts, and so you act, but every computer you interface with tells you the same thing: all of the files have been destroyed.

In the basement, there is another walk-in freezer where the makers kept the food because it was close to the kitchens, and it’s there you find Number Five, slumped against a wall, fine-boned hands folded in his lap. You stare, disturbed by the idea that you forgot about him. You meant to go back to the bodega, but now you’re here, in the lab, looking at a dead Five, wedged between stacks of ground beef and green beans.

And then, you’re looking at the ceiling. It could use a defrost you think as the face wavers into view above you. She has your face , and you blink, reaching a hand out. Her fingers twine with your fingers, and she’s warm in a way you never were, despite the ice around you.

Her face is as sharp as Five’s, but soft gold in the hollows like Four. She has the jellyfish grace of One and the stature of Six. She has your swiftness and Two’s cunning. She is warmly pink like Three, and more fit than Seven ever hoped to be. She is all things.

“Nine,” you whisper.

There were seven before you. And one after.

The post PseudoPod 614: WEIRD SCIENCE HORROR ISSUE #2: Figure 8 appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, A. Merritt and Frank Belknap Long
• Narrators : Ben Phillips, Marty Perrett, Dave Robison, Elie Hirschman and Peter Piazza
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

The Challenge from Beyond was first published in Fantasy Magazine, September 1935

The Challenge from Beyond a round robin story by C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long

George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were vacation’s most delightful moments, after all — rest, after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night. st Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before him — freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom from —

Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.

But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays upon the thing he held.

All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow — he could not guess the method — it had been wrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.

But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.

George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice — and wedge-shaped cuneiforms — yes, didn’t that sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history’s remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth’s geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere but beat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.

And yet — that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or — might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it —

Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.

But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.

He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.

He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert … and intent upon him.

Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch. Close to one o’clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.

There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger … the markings shifting shapes … the cube was growing … was it illusion brought about by the tiny lightnings….

He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came from the cube….

There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off the flash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning, drew back his hand.

And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There was no sound from it.

He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but steadily becoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were necessary to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?

He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing. It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth’s life. He conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took it into the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would not have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it; then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.

He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will and sight upon the disc as he had the light.

As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing the disc and the markings. Again these began to change, shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They were no longer cuneiform. They were things … objects.

He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed of the mist of diamonds. And the disc itself was growing … the shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been opened and into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright grew the pulsing light.

He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash. The cube had no need now of the ray … and he could not withdraw … could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which was now a globe within which unnameable shapes danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.

There was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist behind which shone the globe…. He felt himself drawn through that mist, sucked through it as if by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.

As the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more intense, the outlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a churning chaos. Its pallor and its motion and its music all blended themselves with the engulfing mist- bleaching it to a pale steel-colour and setting it undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted imperceptibly into the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.

Meanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably, incredibly, cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that any such flight in physical reality would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was — in this strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare — the quasi-visual impression of meteor-like hurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no real points of reference in the grey, pulsing void, he felt that he was approaching and passing the speed of light itself. Finally his consciousness did go under — and merciful blackness swallowed everything.

It was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that thoughts and ideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many moments — or years — or eternities — had elapsed since his flight through the grey void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that he seemed to be at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was the salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less solidly black — suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of perception. He could think sharply and quickly — almost preternaturally so — yet could form no idea whatsoever of his situation.

Half by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he might have awaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet he knew this was not so. There was no camp cot beneath him — he had no hands to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlight that ought to be around him — there was no sensation of cold in the air — no flap through which he could glimpse the pale night outside … something was wrong, dreadfully wrong.

He cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had hypnotised him — of that, and all which had followed. He had known that his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back. At the last moment there had been a shocking, panic fear — a subconscious fear beyond even that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from some vague flash or remote recollection — just what, he could not at once tell. Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube — and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the terror were.

Little by little it came to him. Once — long ago, in connection with his geological life-work — he had read of something like that cube. It had to do with those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern England thirty years before. Their shape and markings were so queer that a few scholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist on the globe — but their contours and figurings were damnably puzzling. That was how they got their name.

It was not, however, in the writings of any sober scientist that Campbell had seen that reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The source was far less reputable, and infinitely more vivid. About 1912 a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings — the Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall — had professed to identify the markings on the Eltdown Shards with some of the so-called “pre-human hieroglyphs” persistently cherished and esoterically handed down in certain mystical circles, and had published at his own expense what purported to be a “translation” of the primal and baffling “inscriptions” — a “translation” still quoted frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this “translation’ — a surprisingly long brochure in view of the limited number of “shards” existing — had occurred the narrative, supposedly of pre-human authorship, containing the now frightening reference.

As the story went, there dwelt on a world — and eventually on countless other worlds — of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their own galaxy – killing off the races they found.

Beyond the limits of their own galaxy — which was not ours — they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects — strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance — which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.

These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds in outside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the intelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and rivet attention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was sufficient to set its special properties working.

The mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of the disc, and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place whence the disc had come — the remote world of the worm-like space explorers across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in one of the machines to which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would remain suspended without body or senses until examined by one of the dominant race. Then it would, by an obscure process of interchange, be pumped of all its contents. The investigator’s mind would now occupy the strange machine while the captive mind occupied the interrogator’s worm-like body. Then, in another interchange, the interrogator’s mind would leap across boundless space to the captive’s vacant and unconscious body on the trans-galactic world — animating the alien tenement as best it might, and exploring the alien world in the guise of one of its denizens.

When done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its disc in accomplishing his return — and sometimes the captured mind would be restored safely to its own remote world. Not always, however, was the dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons — using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

In other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a trans-galactic planet – destroying the captured minds and wiping out the remaining inhabitants preparatory to settling down in unfamiliar bodies. Never, however, could the parent civilization be quite duplicated in such a case; since the new planet would not contain all the materials necessary for the worm-race’s arts. The cubes, for example, could be made only on the home planet.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world – since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third — and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system — had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since in mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos, hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from the sky and certain individuals had suffered mental change after gazing at it.

Realising that the changed individuals represented invading minds, the race’s leaders had them destroyed — even at the cost of leaving the displaced minds exiled in alien space. They had had experience with even stranger transitions. When, through a mental exploration of space and time, they formed a rough idea of what the cube was, they carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They did not wish to destroy a thing so rich in later experimental possibilities. Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences — but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

Of this evil meddling the only bad result was that the worm-like outside race learned from the new exiles what had happened to their explorers on earth, and conceived a violent hatred of the planet and all its life-forms. They would have depopulated it if they could, and indeed sent additional cubes into space in the wild hope of striking it by accident in unguarded places — but that accident never came to pass.

The cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a special shrine as a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons it was lost amidst the chaos of war and the destruction of the great polar city where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a nameless peril of inner earth, the whereabouts of the sinister cube from space were unknown.

This much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had said. What now made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was the minute accuracy with which the alien cube had been described. Every detail tallied — dimensions, consistency, heiroglyphed central disc, hypnotic effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the darkness of his strange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole experience with the crystal cube — indeed, its very existence — were not a nightmare brought on by some freakish subconscious memory of this old bit of extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, the nightmare must still be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had nothing of normality in it.

Of the time consumed by this puzzled memory and reflection, Campbell could form no estimate. Everything about his state was so unreal that ordinary dimensions and measurements became meaningless. It seemed an eternity, but perhaps it was not really long before the sudden interruption came. What happened was as strange and inexplicable as the blackness it succeeded. There was a sensation – of the mind rather than of the body — and all at once Campbell felt his thoughts swept or sucked beyond his control in tumultuous and chaotic fashion.

Memories arose irresponsibly and irrelevantly. All that he knew — all his personal background, traditions, experiences, scholarship, dreams, ideas, and inspirations-welled up abruptly and simultaneously, with a dizzying speed and abundance which soon made him unable to keep track of any separate concept. The parade of all his mental contents became an avalanche, a cascade, a vortex. It was as horrible and vertiginous as his hypnotic flight through space when the crystal cube pulled him. Finally it sapped his consciousness and brought on fresh oblivion.

Another measureless blank — and then a slow trickle of sensation. This time it was physical, not mental. Sapphire light, and a low rumble of distant sound. There were tactile impressions — he could realise that he was lying at full length on something, though there was a baffling strangeness about the feel of his posture. He could not reconcile the pressure of the supporting surface with his own outlines — or with the outlines of the human form at all. He tried to move his arms, but found no definite response to the attempt. Instead, there were little, ineffectual nervous twitches all over the area which seemed to mark his body.

He tried to open his eyes more widely, but found himself unable to control their mechanism. The sapphire light came in a diffused, nebulous manner, and could nowhere be voluntarily focussed into definiteness. Gradually, though, visual images began to trickle in curiously and indecisively. The limits and qualities of vision were not those which he was used to, but he could roughly correlate the sensation with what he had known as sight. As this sensation gained some degree of stability, Campbell realised that he must still be in the throes of nightmare.

He seemed to be in a room of considerable extent — of medium height, but with a large proportionate area. On every side — and he could apparently see all four sides at once — were high, narrowish slits which seemed to serve as combined doors and windows. There were singular low tables or pedestals, but no furniture of normal nature and proportions. Through the slits streamed floods of sapphire light, and beyond them could be mistily seen the sides and roofs of fantastic buildings like clustered cubes. On the walls – in the vertical panels between the slits – were strange markings of an oddly disquieting character. It was some time before Campbell understood why they disturbed him so — then he saw that they were, in repeated instances, precisely like some of the hieroglyphs on the crystal cube’s disc.

The actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It began with the living thing which presently entered through one of the slits, advancing deliberately toward him and bearing a metal box of bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thing was nothing human — nothing of earth — nothing even of man’s myths and dreams. It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically — the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms.

Here, indeed, was outré nightmare at its height — capricious fantasy at its apex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing — one final, unbearable touch — to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet — horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations — it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.

From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality.

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.

What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more — much more.

With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of all conventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet, free of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With grim amusement he thought of his body moving in earth’s business and society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that were George Campbell’s eyes on people who would flee if they knew.

Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous accumulation of conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die in his sordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not death, but re-birth — the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a new-found freedom that made little of physical captivity on Yekub.

He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known? Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied- Tothe. Memory, deep grooved in Tothe’s brain, was stirring in him – shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave would he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordly empires.

For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the centipede man stood before him, holding the polished metal object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell knew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.

But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so alien to the ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth’s comprehension and caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was only a scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell’s earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving Tothe’s body into movements no man of Yekub had ever made before.

Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward. Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing, exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical sensations.

As he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe’s physical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate consciousness in his legs. Tothe’s body was bearing him along a route it had traversed ten thousand times when animated by Tothe’s mind.

Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in mid-air — a sphere that shone like translucent ivory.

This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood in frozen horror until Campbell’s shard ripped the life out of him.

On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out in blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the superstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm men would dare deny him nothing, when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand for the ball — no longer ivory-hued, but red as blood….

Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet scented pine needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora Borealis splashed streamers of fire.

The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posture altered. His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.

In a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was George Campbell clasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood, and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall and out through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.

Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the awkward loping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse of gleaming water.

In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George Campbell moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted avenues holding aloft the round red god.

There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on earth where the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted. Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved towards the waters of the lake.

As the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.

A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent where the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness enveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.

But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.

Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft energized his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.

On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black ichor poured.

“He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an unresponsive tenement,” said the red god. “No spawn of Yekub can control the body of a human.

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely, kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

The post PseudoPod 613: WEIRD SCIENCE HORROR ISSUE #2: The Challenge from Beyond appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Grady Hendrix
• Narrator : Ant Bacon
• Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Karen Bovenmyer
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“Mofongo Knows” was first published in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

“We at Pseudopod would like to dedicate this story to all of them: Cheetah, Lancelot Link, Mojo Jojo, Monsieur Mallah, Bobo the Detective Chimp, Gorilla Grodd, Comrade Dmitri-9, Cornelius & Zira, Konga, Mighty Joe Young…and all the rest…and most of all, of course, to Kong…whom we all owe an apology…he must have been a great bloke.”

Please check out Grady’s next novel — a Faustian bargain signed with heavy metal power chords — We Sold Our Souls.

Mofongo Knows by Grady Hendrix

Off the muddy tracks between the House of Shadows, the Freak Out and the Gravitron, where passengers are pummeled with physics until they puke, behind the generators that push power to the Top Spin, the Zipper and the Rainbow, back where the night air is so thick you can chew it–stale cotton candy, old dough fried in rancid oil, the ripe aroma of the IQ Zoo with its pathetic poultry who plink pianos with their beaks–here in the jumble of shooting galleries and hoopla trailers, next to skeet ball concessions leaning against Crystal Lil’s Refreshment Emporium lies the secret heart of the fair: MOFONGO: GORILLA OF THE MIND.

The pulsating brain of the mighty ape is no longer as powerful as it once was, but even its passive presence subtly alters atoms. Read the subconscious signs. Hear the tiny fanfare. For all roads lead to Mofongo. Drop a slice of pizza, and it lands pointing towards his cage. The Wheel of Luck favors its Mofongo side. Lost children are always found in the litter-choked muck outside his tent.

On one side: the Ten-in-One. On the other: Saddam’s Spider Hole featuring “The Marine who took DOWN the BUTCHER OF BAGHDAD!” In between: Mofongo. Buy a ticket. Part the canvas. Turn the corner. Stare at the stage. See his cage. This is where they come – the the Scatch n’Win junkies, the astrology freaks, the overcompensating rednecks and their greasy haired dates, the sullen and drunken, the viciously hip, the middle-aged losers with no more illusions, the unwed mothers broken by debt, the credit card crucified, the ghetto schemers, twelve-year-old thug life dreamers, public housing divas, squad car preachers, barroom philosophers, professional television watchers, expert beer can emptiers, bastard babymakers who don’t return calls, bail bond skippers, dream destroyers, home wreckers, art school zeroes, the angry, the humiliated, the tired, the downtrodden, the hate crazed and all the unappreciated secret geniuses who will die still waiting for their big break – they all come here for his wisdom–for he is Mofongo, Gorilla of the Mind. And Mofongo knows.

“Mommy, the monkey is stinky.”

Mofongo bows his mighty head. Yes, he knows that his jungle musk is too heady for humans.

“Mommy, the monkey smells like poop.”

Mofongo’s head droops lower. A soul-rattling sigh leaves his massive chest.

“Ew, Mommy, his breath smells like dog doo. He’s wearing a hat.”

Yes, this is his Power Turban, possessing the ability to part the veils of time and peer into the future. A spangled head wrap with an enormous jewel pinning a peacock feather to its center.

“He looks dumb and dirty like Mee Maw.”

Tokens rattle. Mofongo sighs and picks up one of the “Mofongo Knows” cards from the table and writes on it with a pen. Then he pushes the card through the slot and into the hand of the adult female, standing with its mate and spawn. The card reads: “Mofongo Knows…that you will overcome all obstacles. This is a bad month for financial decisions.”

The humans snort in derision: for this they paid five tokens? For this sad ape with his heavy brow and his matted fur they used tokens which could have been employed in the pursuit of gravity-defying thrills over at the Hi-Flyin’ Swings? This monkey would not get their gratitude, this monkey would get their backs as they walk out the door, mocking him in their high, reedy voices. The young, golden-haired child hangs back from its parents to hurl a final insult at Mofongo, hawking a loogie into its soft throat, expecting to expectorate on the great ape.

But Mofongo knows his reach, and with one leathery hand he seizes the tiny child and lifts it from the floor, pinching off its cry, pulling its red, bulging face close to the bars.

“Human,” Mofongo growls, “your days are numbered. I remember your scent. I will come to your home as you sleep and break your bones and drink your blood. I will crush your kidneys. I will split you in half, human, and you will die of pain. Go, and tell your friends: Mofongo is coming.”

He turns his back on the bars. The human child flees. The room is empty. Mofongo adjusts his Power Turban to better conceal his giant, pulsating brain, the enormous thinking engine that has deformed his skull, this overgrown tumorous organ swollen to the size of a beach ball.

A beer bottle shatters against the bars of Mofongo’s cage, misting his back with glass and beer.

“You fucking touch a customer?” an angry voice slurs. “You fucking touch a customer, you jungle fuck?”

Mofongo tries to use his mind rays to kill Steve Savage, Hero of the Jungle, but these days his mind rays are weak. Steve Savage is also weak, but Mofongo’s mind rays are weaker still. Mofongo tries to kill his old nemesis with contempt instead.

“Drunk again,” he says. “How original.”

“Oh, fuck you. Fuck you right between your beady eyes, you fucking hairy fuck,” Steve Savage says. “What do I tell you? Don’t touch the customers. Don’t speak to the customers. Don’t take your turban off in front of the customers. You know what would happen if I called the Feds? One phone call and they’d fucking incinerate you. They’d fucking cut out your giant fucking brain and put it in a jar and they’d stuff you in a trash incinerator and turn it up to eleven and turn you into seven hundred pounds of ape-flavored ashes.”

Steve Savage is a Man of Adventure, and Men of Adventure age slowly, their lives dragging on long after the actual adventures are over. Together, Mofongo and his ancient enemy are almost two hundred years old but neither of them looks a day over eighty.

Steve sways, filling himself up with Budweiser and rage. This is their fight, one that they used to perform with wondrous weapons that pushed the boundaries of science so far that they shattered. These days they have nothing left to fight with but paltry profanity. But it is a fight that never ends.

“Steve Savage,” Mofongo says. “One day I will get out of this cage and on that day I will rip your head from your puny human body AND WASH MY FACE IN YOUR BLOOD!”

“If you could do that, you would’ve by now,” Steve screams back. “I beat your Science Army, I blew up your Danger Trees, I fucked up your Femme-Apes and Gibbon Guerillas, and I tore off Comrade Carnage’s Anti-Gravity boots and beat the shit out of his Commie ass with them. So keep on threatening me, monkey!”

“You didn’t defeat the Femme-Apes!” Mofongo yells, jumping up and down and shaking the bars. “You didn’t defeat them! I saw photographs! You had SEX with them!”

“They were shaved! I had a concussion!” Steve Savage screams. “You can’t prove anything!”

“I can still smell their love musk on you,” Mofongo cackles. “All these years later and you still stink of ape sex!”

Steve Savage climbs onstage and starts kicking the bars of the cage and Mofongo reaches out and tries to grab his legs. They slap at each other, locked in puny combat, man and gorilla, each with death in his eyes.

Then they fall back, panting, gasping, hearts pounding, on the verge of stroke. Steve throws a plastic shopping bag down, just outside the bars.

“There’s your newspaper and your Dutch Masters,” he says. “But no more books until you stop touching the customers.”

Mofongo’s muscles ache so badly that he can barely raise his arms, but with a heroic effort he manages to get them up and he shoots Steve the bird with both hands.

“That your IQ or your sperm count, cancer brain?” Steve shouts over his shoulder as he leaves the tent.

Mofongo opens the plastic bag and his enormous brain twitches painfully with humiliation. Anger, rage, hate, death. Steve knows he reads the Wall Street Journal, but inside the bag, beside his pack of natural wrapped cigarillos, is a copy of USA Today.

“House full a got I,” Barry the Backwards Man says, throwing down his hand.

“Jesus, Barry, you’re making Herman look bad tonight. What’re you doing? Counting cards?” Gretchen the Two Ton Beauty says.

Barry laughs.

“Lucky naturally I’m,” he says.

“Everyone knows you can’t count cards in poker,” Herman the Human Calculator grouses. “Too many variables, not enough data points.”

“Everwhat,” Barry says.

“What he said, but vice versa,” Gretchen says. “You wanna’ play the next hand, Mofongo? We’ll push the table over.”

Mofongo presents them with his back.

“Holeass an what,” Barry says.

“We come here to keep you company,” Herman says. “The least you could do is act civil.”

“Buy me a Wall Street Journal,” Mofongo says.

“This is South Carolina,” Herman answers. “They don’t carry the Wall Street Journal.”

“Then give me your copy.”

“I read it online,” Herman says. “And you know that Steve doesn’t want you near a computer. The last time you got near a computer the space shuttle crashed.”

“I forgot you humans stick together,” says Mofongo.

“Oh, come on. None of us thinks you still want to take over the world,” Gretchen says. “But Steve would freak.”

“Stick a cake in it, Gretchen,” Mofongo snarls. “This conversation is for superior intellects only.”

“Hey,” she says, hurt.

“Gretchen, personally it take not do,” Barry says. “Business Brainiac strictly is this. Us to are they superior how themselves reminding keep to have they.”

“One day, you will die,” Mofongo growls.

“We’re dying every day, ‘fongo,” Gretchen says. “But it doesn’t mean we have to be rude to each other in the meantime. Besides, if you’re such a superior intellect then how come we’re all down here and you’re up in that cage?”

Yes. Why is Mofongo up in that cage? The Genius Gorilla of Ghana, the Warrior of Wagadou, the Monster Who Shook the World, aka Professor Silverback, Science Ape and Eater of Europeans, what is he doing in this cage in a filthy, stinking, fly specked, weary, rundown, water stained, used up, played out, cheapjack funfair? Bad luck, mostly. And hanging around with the wrong people.

When Mofongo sleeps he dreams of his glorious past, of his first desperate pilgrimage to Opar, the Hidden Jungle City, with its wondrous Atlantean geo-technology. His first Revolutionary Gorilla Army! The piezoelectric death rays! The anti-gravity granite! The neural enhancers that raised an army of thinking apes who rode anti-gravity platforms down the Daka River to crush the British imperialist pigs. The day they burst into the hall at Accra and turned the Big Seven into the Big Six, the head of Kwame Asanti dangling from his hand and dripping onto the expensive carpet.

He dreams of his first Ape Empire whose borders were drawn in the blood of white men whose spines he happily ripped out and used to beat their women to death. The lady gorillas. The monkey love. His primate harem. And then the coming of Steve Savage, American adventurer and Grade-A asshole.

At first, Savage was just a jumped-up poacher with a flashy public image to peddle. Mofongo should have ignored him, but he didn’t and his attempts to kill the little twerp lent the creep legitimacy. Then, over the years, it turned personal. When Mofongo had taken in the refugees of the Third Reich, Savage had been there to destroy his Diamond Dome. When Mofongo had dug the Death Mines of Yendi, Savage had appeared and the ensuing Radar War had seen the floating Science City of If plunge into Lake Volta, its mathematics burning. The decades were a heady blur of fists connecting with jaws, ray guns melting screaming faces, the ozone tang of jetpack exhaust, the click-whir of supercomputers calculating the unsane, the oily stink of robot death squads.

It all ended when Mofongo allied himself with the Communist freedom fighter, Comrade Carnage: half man, half clockwork terror ruled by an atomic brain. Their dreams of domination died in the nuclear fires unleashed by Steve Savage in his cowardly sneak attack. Mofongo’s hover plane had risen up out of the glowing rubble of his Necro-Palace, another hairsbreadth escape, another last minute dodge that left him at large to go on to greater and more grandiose schemes, and then the cold push of Steve Savage’s sten gun against the back of his skull, the poaching bastard having hidden in the co-pilot’s seat until Mofongo was distracted. Mofongo knew he should have whipped around with his lightning fast reflexes and punched Savage in the face, but he was so tired, his limbs were filled with lead, he just couldn’t do it and so, in a split second, Mofongo’s days of freedom came to an end.

Trapped in a cage, Mofongo traveled with Savage, his parole officer, his warden, his captor, his keeper. He became Savage’s meal ticket, the highlight of his road show. But the venues got smaller, the crowds got thinner, Savage got older, Mofongo’s mental rays got weaker and twenty-five years ago they became a single-o show, a traveling psychic ape and his owner floating from one redneck carnival to another, endlessly spinning through the Southeastern United States, crossing paths and sharing midways with the same bunch of increasingly marginalized attractions as the big conglomerates took over the funfairs pushing the sideshows further and further to the side.

There were a few years, though, when things might have gone differently. Savage had knocked up Nancy the Snake Girl and they had a daughter. Nancy was a woman of infinite practicality and limited patience for the male ego. She was in love with Steve, however, and gave him eight years to get his life in order and to give up the carnie life. While Steve was busy wasting every single one of those years, little Theresa Savage discovered Mofongo.

What little girl wouldn’t want to listen to a talking gorilla? And what talking gorilla wouldn’t welcome a captive audience? And when Theresa went missing and everyone assumed she was hiding near the teacups or gorging on cotton candy it was Mofongo who used his mental rays to locate her and it was Mofongo who sent Dogtag Donald racing over to Bombo’s Baby Show trailer to drag her out in the nick of time. It was Mofongo who identified that the drug in her system was nothing more than vodka, and it was Mofongo who planted a phobic aversion to children under 18 deep inside Bombo’s mind. Not that anyone ever said “thank you.”

Three months later the eight years were over and on the dot Nancy Savage ditched the carnie life without a backwards glance. She didn’t even hear Steve’s weak protests and pathetic rationalizations. She just picked up Theresa, got her real estate license and vanished into an alternate America where people lived in houses, went to school and paid their taxes, leaving Steve Savage and Mofongo to return to their interminable bickering and to try to forget the eight-year interruption as best they could.

Now, every year Mofongo gets fewer visitors, and every year his mental powers fade, and every year he and Steve find new insults for old injuries, and every year he smokes his Dutch Masters and reads his paper and dreams about revenge until it is an abstraction worn smooth and featureless by constant fantasy.

It’s been thirty years without a whiff of Theresa Savage, yet here’s her smell again like a golden oldie.

“We need to talk,” she says, standing outside Mofongo’s cage with three men in dark suits.

“Let me guess,” Mofongo says, sitting up. He is excited to have some new playmates, especially ones who wear suits. None of his visitors ever wear suits, and he hasn’t seen a human being in forty hours. He can mentally dampen his hunger and thirst but his boredom knows no bounds. He points to them in order. “CIA, FBI, NSA.”

“CIA, FBI and Animal Control,” the youngest says to him.

“I am not an animal,” Mofongo says.

“You’re not a human either,” the man says.

Mofongo’s nostrils flare.

“What is this, Theresa?” he asks. “Why did you come back?”

“Dad’s dead,” she says.

“What?”

“He’s dead,” she repeats.

“Who did it?”

“A bottle of Southern Comfort and a handful of Vicodin,” she says. “Day before yesterday.”

“Wrong,” Mofongo says. “One of his enemies, returned for revenge.”

“Mo, I appreciate that you’re upset but this isn’t part of you guys’ soap opera. He killed himself.”

“No,” he says, and he feels fear because he really does not know who did it. Old allies can turn into new enemies, old friends can become new foes. Men of Adventure are no stranger to psychosis. “One of his enemies is here. I may also be in danger. You must free me so I can defend myself.”

“I can’t let you come to the funeral,” she says, ignoring him. “People will want to know why a talking ape is there and you’re kind of hard to explain.”

“I don’t want to go to his funeral,” Mofongo snarls. “I want to defend myself.”

“I’m sorry,” Theresa says. “I really am. On the plus side, we’re getting you out of here.”

“You are setting me free?” Mofongo asks. The concept is alien to him.

“There’s a Primate Refuge outside Austin,” the Animal Control man says. “They’ve agreed to take you. You’ll fit right in. That chimpanzee who did all those Geico ads is there.”

“Chimpanzees? Chimpanzees! Masturbating, shit-flinging, pants-wearing attention whores! I am Mofongo: Gorilla of the Mind. I am a threat to mankind! I’m on the UN watch list!”

“You’ve been off that list for twenty-six years,” the CIA agent says. “No one remembers you anymore.”

“If men do not still feel fear,” Mofongo snarls, “why do they send the CIA? Why the FBI?”

The FBI agent shrugs. “I just wanted to see a talking monkey,” he says.

The CIA agent takes a picture of Mofongo. “You’re just one more thing on my To Do list,” he says.

“I’m sorry to dump all this on you at once,” Theresa says. “I really am. I’ll come visit you in Austin. We can catch up. I’ve got friends I can stay with and we can just hang out. Like we used to, right?”

“You are making a grave mistake,” Mofongo says. “I still have my secret Science Bases hidden throughout your country. You put me in this refugee camp and I will break out and go to them and manufacture a cloned army of super-apes and together we will grind your country beneath our paws!”

“There are no more secret Science Bases,” the CIA agent says. “We got them all back in ’51.”

“But what if I have one location locked away in my subconscious?” Mofongo says. “What if it’s buried down so deep only my mental rays can find it? What then? Will you risk humanity’s future if you’re wrong?”

But Mofongo can’t even convince himself.

“Mofongo,” Theresa says, “You’ll be out in the sun again, able to live a normal life. I’ll check in on you and make sure you have everything you need.”

“I should have snapped your neck when you were a child,” Mofongo says.

“I’m sorry I left you alone for so long, Mo,” Theresa says, then she turns and walks out of the tent with the government men.

“Don’t be sorry,” he shouts at her back. “Be afraid! Afraid of my wrath!”

But she is already gone.

It takes Mofongo all the cash hidden inside his power turban to convince Herman to let him out of his cage.

“If Theresa finds out I did this, I’m dead meat,” Herman says.

“Pathetic,” Mofongo spits. “The power of a computer in your skull and yet you tremble like a chimp.”

“The power of a million brains in your skull and yet a Yale lock has kept you prisoner for thirty some odd years,” Herman says.

“I will have my revenge,” Mofongo says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Herman says. “I only let you out because it’s cruel to keep you locked up if some old arch enemy’s come back to bump you off.”

Mofongo enters Steve Savage’s trailer. It’s dingy and stained, depressing and undersized with no room to walk around. Mofongo expected wall-to-wall photos, Steve Savage shaking the hands of presidents, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, scrapbooks, posters from the old movies, the radio shows. But there’s nothing here except McDonald’s wrappers and empty bottles.

Mofongo lets his mental rays scan the space. They strain to detect a trace of any number of old enemies and allies: The Cat, Red Charlie, The Beast with Five Thousand Fingers, Two Gun Chang and all the rest.

Nothing.

There is no trace of murder. No hint of death. No whiff of vengeance. No deathtraps, no mantraps, no exotic poisons or mechanical ants. The only psychic residue in this trailer is despondency, despair and the deep ache of a man who wanted to die long before he got this old.

Mofongo’s nose begins to bleed and he feels a headache throb deep within his brain. He wipes the heavy black blood running from his nostrils with the back of one hairy paw.

The chair in front of the 13” TV is worn down to fit Steve’s body. Mofongo sniffs it and detects something familiar. He reaches underneath and pulls out a dried leather scrap, black with age: Shaira’s leather headband. Passed down the generations, it was made of the hide of a thirty-foot Mokele-Mbembe lizard living on a riverbed near Boyoma Falls, a great beast that had a taste for Oparian flesh. The Third Blind Prince of Opar killed it, fashioning armor from its hide and three thousand years later the final surviving piece was passed to Shaira, the most valuable of her possessions. It once commanded the respect of thousands, and now it is lying on the floor of Steve’s trailer.

Mofongo runs his finger along it, but it crumbles at his touch and the brittle pieces fall to the linoleum. He and Steve Savage had fought a bitter war over Shaira the Jungle Empress, each of them in love with the seven-foot warrior queen who ruled the city of Opar. Their battle reduced her city to cinders, and she died in the crossfire. Mofongo hadn’t thought about her in years. He always wondered which of them had loved her more, and now he knows.

There are only two of us left who remember Shaira even existed, he thinks, then corrects himself: With Steve gone, now Mofongo is the only one.

There are no enemies here, only bad memories. Let them come and put him in the primate refuge. He deserves to be with the bad monkeys now. The chimps will be his new companions and he will not speak of revolution or revenge. He will just pray each day to remember less and less until finally he dies.

Transporting a non-human primate over state lines is complicated business. There are protocols, procedures, shipping container regulations, squeeze box quarantines, OSHA guidelines, permits to be displayed, licenses to be stamped and the least important thing in all of this is the non-human primate himself. Mofongo sits, not eating, not drinking, staring off into space.

“You are a giant pain in my ass,” the Animal Control agent says. “Seriously. It’s a relief to get you out of my hair.”

He clanks out of the tractor-trailer, leaving Mofongo alone. Theresa Savage walks up the metal ramp.

“Hi, Mo,” she says.

Mofongo says nothing.

“I was just with those weird collectors. They’re buying all the old advertising canvases and one sheets. It’s not a lot, but it’ll pay for some of this, you know, getting you down to Austin and all.”

A fly lands on Mofongo’s nose. He doesn’t notice.

“I’m glad you’re not fighting or anything,” Theresa says. “But would you just talk to me?”

But Mofongo will not talk to anyone anymore.

“I want you to be happy,” she says. “I want you to think of this as a vacation. It’s not a punishment, it’s a time when you can relax. Like retirement. People really look forward to retirement. I’m already looking forward to mine! You’ll have fun. You’ll have a really fun time.”

Mofongo does not care.

“It’s pretty hot down in Texas,” she says. “I really will come to visit. I want to talk to you about stuff, my dad and things. You were the only person he was close to. The only gorilla, I guess, not really person.”

The air is thick and heavy.

“After we moved, I pretended you could still hear me. I’d lie under my bed and talk to you like you could still hear me through your mind rays or something. You couldn’t really hear me though, right? I mean, you never actually heard me,” she says. “Could you?”

It’s getting hot in the tractor-trailer.

“Mom sold Dogtag Donald a split level outside Atlanta. He’s a born again Christian now, with two little boys and everything,” she says. “He told me what you did, about the baby show guy.”

Mofongo will not look at her.

“You saved my life,” Theresa says. “All my good memories from when I was a kid are about you.”

A ten-year-old girl with an iPod jammed in her ears, pink tennis shoes and a denim miniskirt stands at the bottom of the ramp.

“Mom!” she hollers. “Are we going?”

“That’s Chrissy,” Theresa says. “My daughter.” She yells back. “Come up here and meet Mofongo.”

The girl gracelessly tromps into the trailer.

“It stinks,” she says.

“I didn’t even notice,” Theresa says. “Do you want to talk to her, Mofongo? Say ‘hi’ to my daughter?”

There’s silence.

“He used to talk all the time,” Theresa says. Then, thoughtfully, “Mostly cussing.”

“Mom,” Chrissy says. “You’re so dumb. He can’t talk. He’s a monkey. It was a stupid carnival trick.”

“He’s a gorilla,” Theresa says.

Chrissy rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

“Hey,” the Animal Control agent says, standing at the bottom of the ramp. “Come sign these final permits and let’s get this show on the road.”

Theresa turns to go.

“I’ll be right back,” she says and she leaves Mofongo and Chrissy alone.

Chrissy contemplates Mofongo. She goes outside and comes back with a few small rocks. She tosses them at Mofongo. One bounces off his chest, one bounces off his forehead, then she aims one at his crotch.

“So do you talk or anything?” She asks. “Or do you just sit around and smell like shit?”

She takes a step closer, and pings Mofongo on the beaner with another rock, but Mofongo doesn’t notice. Because deep within Mofongo’s mind a door has opened and he sees a future where everything Theresa says is true. He will have friends. He will relax. It will be like it was, and he will astonish Theresa’s spawn with stories of the marvels he saw in Africa and Theresa will thank him for helping him raise her daughter, for being an inspiration, and the spirit of Mofongo will live on.

“Will you come to Austin?” he asks, throat rusty with disuse.

Chrissy stares at him. Mofongo repeats himself.

“Will. You. Come. To. Austin?”

Chrissy’s high-pitched screams bring everyone running, and she crashes into them as she barrels out of the trailer, sobbing.

“Thanks, Mofongo,” Theresa says when she comes back a few minutes later and Mofongo grins. Then he realizes that she’s being sarcastic and his grin fades.

“You’re all signed off, sport,” the Animal Control agent snarls.

Theresa is jabbing her signature on a final form. Mofongo wants to say something but he’s too confused. Did he do something wrong? He doesn’t think so. Theresa marches over to the bars of his cage.

“What did you say?” she snaps. “Did you say something gross? I know how you can talk. Did you say something ugly to my little girl? Because she’s sitting in my car sobbing.”

Mofongo can’t think of an answer, his brain is so sluggish and confused and the words float to the top one at a time, like bubbles in syrup. It takes forever to put them together. Theresa’s expression softens.

“Why do you have to make everything so hard, Mo?” She rests one hand on the bars. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”

Mofongo wets his lips to say something, but Theresa doesn’t notice. She just shakes her head and turns and walks out of the trailer. Men drop the metal ramp with a clang and slam the doors shut and Mofongo speaks too late.

“Don’t go,” he says.

But no one hears.

Flat as a putting green, Arlington National Cemetery stretches out to the horizon, interrupted only by the bone white dot, dot, dot of headstones. Theresa wishes she could have a glass of wine. A thin, tinny, pre-recorded version of “Taps” has just finished drilling its way into her skull and now two pimply soldiers in dress blues are folding up the American flag from her father’s coffin.

They march over to her like clockwork dummies and present her with the folded flag.

“As a representative of the United States Army,” one of them chants in a shrill voice that is still breaking, “It is my high privilege to present you this flag…”

He squeaks on and Theresa remembers how much her dad hated the military. He thought men in uniform were chumps, that’s why he killed so many of them in the war. He would have died twice if he knew he’d wind up being buried with so many of them. Theresa uses a Kleenex to blot the sweat off her forehead.

A wild scream cuts through the hot noon air. Human blood instinctively freezes in its veins.

It is the wild scream of the great ape.

“Hoo hoo hoo!” Comes the terrifying, jungle hoot. “Haa haa! Huh huh huh!

And they look up in the sky. Hanging by one arm from the robed figure on top of the Monument to the Confederate War Dead is Mofongo. His head looks bigger than Theresa remembers, as if his brain has turned malignant. His skull looks sick and dark, like rotten fruit.

Confusion and chatter, and Mofongo shoulders some kind of rifle and one of the clockwork Marines dissolves into bones and dust. Everyone screams and scatters, as a SWAT team, who were waiting for just this kind of incident, run forward. They outnumber the mourners two to one.

The FBI agent grabs Theresa’s arm and drags her behind a round concrete memorial where men in black are doing frantic things. The Animal Control agent is here. He says. “I’m so fired,” and lights a cigarette off an eternal flame.

“I am holding you personally responsible for this travesty,” the CIA agent yells at the Animal Control agent.

“I blame you people, too,” the FBI agent joins in. “We’ve monitored this monster for almost fifty years, we turn him over to you and he busts out of that big rig like it was nothing in less than seventy-two hours.”

“He used his mind rays!” the Animal Control agent says. “We didn’t think they still worked. We thought they were supposed to be killing him!”

“Does he look dead to you?”

Mofongo leaps off the Monument to the Confederate War Dead and charges Steve Savage’s freshly dug grave, tossing aside fleeing mourners like ten pins. The SWAT Team sets up a skirmish line.

The SWAT Team opens fire. They shoot to kill. Their automatic weapons chop the still summer air. Mofongo doesn’t slow down. He barrels through them like they’re a bunch of crippled children. One of the Marines in full dress makes a patriotic last stand. He locks eyes with the charging gorilla, he aims his rifle at Mofongo’s overflowing skull and fires. The air around Mofongo shimmers and the bullet falls to the ground. Mofongo plucks the rifle from the soldier’s hands and bashes him over the head with it.

The SWAT Team fires again, but the air around Mofongo keeps shimmering and their bullets keep falling. Theresa realizes that she’s relieved. She thought Mofongo was committing suicide by SWAT, trying to go out in a blaze of glory, but Mofongo is smarter than that.

More firing. More shimmering. More bullets fall.

“What the fuck is that?” the CIA agent screams.

“It’s his Kinetic Suspenders,” Theresa says. “He invented them a long time ago. I would tell your flamethrower guys not to bother.”

A Flamethrower Team is trotting through the headstones, then they stop and unleash a black and orange column of fire at Mofongo. No effect.

“Kinetic Suspenders,” the CIA agent moans. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Where the hell did he get them?” the FBI agent asks. “We closed down all his stupid Science Bases.”

“I guess you missed one,” Theresa says.

Mofongo jumps down into the grave. SWAT snipers take a few more useless shots. A CNN helicopter appears on the horizon, zooming closer.

“Listen, Savage,” the CIA agent says. “We only gave your old man a plot in Arlington because he shot up a bunch of Nazis back in the day. See that helicopter? That’s CNN. America is going to see this desecration of our country’s most sacred site live on cable TV and you will have good, clean children throwing up into their breakfast cereal and it’s all going to be your fault.”

There’s the distant sound of something breaking and pieces of plasticized wood are tossed out of the hole. Suddenly Mofongo is clambering up from the grave, and in his arms is the corpse of Steve Savage.

“Holy shit,” the FBI agent says. “He’s taking the body!”

“Will you people show some respect!” the CIA agent yells impotently at the CNN helicopter.

Theresa just watches.

A few more shots ring out. She flinches. Mofongo raises his middle finger at the SWAT team and then touches a control on his chest and a cloaking device clicks off and a hover plane materializes behind him. He lopes over to it, climbs on board, puts Steve Savage’s corpse in the co-pilot’s seat and gets in. The ship lifts off.

They watch it rise into the air. It hangs there for one unnatural moment, every swooping, graceful curve of its Atom Age engineering sneering at the 21st Century. Then it’s gone, screaming for the horizon.

“Which direction is that?” shouts the CIA agent.

“East,” the FBI agent says. “Towards Africa.”

“Wow,” Theresa says.

“Wow?” the CIA agent says. “Our nation’s most hallowed resting place is vandalized by an obscene baboon and you say wow? Are you sick?”

Hearing it like that, Theresa wonders if she is sick.

“I just wanted to protect people from dangerous animals,” the Animal Control agent whines. “I’m going to lose my job. What am I going to tell my family?”

“Come on, people,” the CIA agent says. “Let’s find out where they’re going and shoot them down. Anyone know where they’re going?”

But no one knows, because suddenly the hover plane vanishes off the radar. Expensive satellites blink in amazement. Where did Mofongo go? No one knows.

Tight-lipped, agents of the United States government stuff Theresa into the back of an armored SUV and question her severely. They want her to know just how angry they are, and so they take turns sitting backwards in the front seat, yelling questions at her. Where did Mofongo go? Why did he steal her father’s body? Did Mofongo have contact with Islamic fundamentalists or with members of Al Qaeda? What does she know and when did she know it?

What can she tell them? She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t even know where Mofongo has taken her father. A Viking funeral in Antarctica? A memorial on the moon? A secret base buried deep beneath Saharan sands? In a way, it feels more natural to not know where her father is. He was out there, somewhere, the way he’d been out there somewhere all her life. No known phone number. No known address. Maybe in the Himalayas, maybe in a bar, but as long as she never knew for sure, he could be anywhere.

She smiles again, and they ask her what’s so funny? Why is she smiling? She doesn’t answer them. But Mofongo knows.

In the hover plane, Mofongo wipes more blood from his face and feels his ultra-brain collapsing into mush. He was still smarter than five thousand men, but that number was falling fast. His push to escape the tractor-trailer, his push to locate his last science base, his push to open its doors – three pushes too far.

“Feels like old times,” Mofongo says to Steve’s dead body. “Except I’m not punching you in the face.”

Then he turns around and punches Steve’s corpse in the face.

“That’s better,” he says, and smiles.

Mofongo flies, finally free. America is behind him, shrinking with every second and Africa is up ahead, getting bigger all the time.

The post PseudoPod 612: WEIRD SCIENCE HORROR ISSUE #2: Mofongo Knows appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Clark Ashton-Smith
• Narrator : Dr. Hal
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producers : Chelsea Davis, Kiko Aumond and Shawn Garrett
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An edited version of “The Vault of Yoh Vombis” appeared in Weird Tales, May 1932.

This is the restored version of “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” including nearly two thousand words of atmospheric description excised by Smith (at the insistence of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright), while preserving the envelopment of the story.

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis by Clark Ashton Smith

Preface

As an interne in the terrestrial hospital at Ignarh, I had charge of the singular case of Rodney Severn, the one surviving member of the Octave Expedition to Yoh-Vombis, and took down the following story from his dictation. Severn had been brought to the hospital by the Martian guides of the Expedition. He was suffering from a horribly lacerated and inflamed condition of the scalp and brow, and was wildly delirious part of the time and had to be held down in his bed during recurrent seizures of a mania whose violence was doubly inexplicable in view of his extreme debility.

The lacerations, as will be learned from the story, were mainly self-inflicted. They were mingled with numerous small round wounds, easily distinguished from the knife-slashes, and arranged in regular circles, through which an unknown poison had been injected into Severn’s scalp. The causation of these wounds was difficult to explain; unless one were to believe that Severn’s story was true, and was no mere figment of his illness. Speaking for myself, in the light of what afterwards occurred, I feel that I have no other recourse than to believe it. There are strange things on the red planet; and I can only second the wish that was expressed by the doomed archaeologist in regard to future explorations.

The night after he finished telling me his story, while another doctor than myself was supposedly on duty, Severn managed to escape from the hospital, doubtless in one of the strange seizures at which I have hinted: a most astonishing thing, for he had seemed weaker than ever after the long strain of his terrible narrative, and his demise had been hourly expected. More astonishing still, his bare footsteps were found in the desert, going toward Yoh-Vombis, till they vanished in the path of a light sand-storm; but no trace of Severn himself has yet been discovered.

The Narrative of Rodney Severn

If the doctors are correct in their prognostication, I have only a few Martian hours of life remaining to me. In those hours I shall endeavor to relate, as a warning to others who might follow in our footsteps, the singular and frightful happenings that terminated our researches among the ruins of Yoh-Vombis. Somehow, even in my extremity, I shall contrive to tell the story; since there is no one else to do it. But the telling will be toilsome and broken; and after I am done, the madness will recur, and several men will restrain me, lest I should leave the hospital and return across many desert leagues to those abominable vaults beneath the compulsion of the malignant and malevolent virus which is permeating my brain. Perhaps death will release me from that abhorrent control, which would urge me down to bottomless underworld warrens of terror for which the saner planets of the solar system can have no analogue. I say perhaps . . . for, remembering what I have seen, I am not sure that even death will end my bondage . . . .

There were eight of us, professional archaeologists with more or less terrene and interplanetary experience, who set forth with native guides from Ignarh, the commercial metropolis of Mars, to inspect that ancient, aeon-deserted city. Allan Octave, our official leader, held his primacy by virtue of knowing more about Martian archaeology than any other Terrestrial on the planet; and others of the party, such as William Harper and Jonas Halgren, had been associated with him in many of his previous researches. I, Rodney Severn, was more of a newcomer, having spent but a few months on Mars; and the greater part of my own ultra-terrene delvings had been confined to Venus.

I had often heard of Yoh-Vombis, in a vague and legendary sort of manner, and never at first hand. Even the ubiquitous Octave had never seen it. Builded by an extinct people whose history has been lost in the latter, decadent eras of the planet, it remains a dim and fascinating riddle whose solution has never been approached . . . and which, I trust, may endure forevermore unsolved by man. Certainly I hope that no one will ever follow in our steps . . . .

Contrary to the impression we had received from Martian stories, we found that the semi-fabulous ruins lay at no great distance from Ignarh with its terrestrial colony and consulates. The nude, spongy-chested natives had spoken deterringly of vast deserts filled with ever-swirling sand-storms, through which we must pass to reach Yoh-Vombis; and in spite of our munificent offers of payment, it had been difficult to secure guides for the journey. We had provisioned ourselves amply and had prepared for all emergencies that might eventuate during a long trip. Therefore, we were pleased as well as surprised when we came to the ruins after seven hours of plodding across the flat, treeless, orange-yellow desolation to the south-west of Ignarh. On account of the lesser gravity, the journey was far less tiring than one who is unfamiliar with Martian conditions might expect. But because of the thin, Himalaya-like air, and the possible strain on our hearts, we had been careful not to hasten.

Our coming to Yoh-Vombis was sudden and spectacular. Climbing the low slope of a league-long elevation of bare and deeply eroded stone, we saw before us the shattered walls of our destination, whose highest tower was notching the small, remote sun that glared in stifled crimson through the floating haze of fine sand. For a little, we thought that the domeless, three-angled towers and broken-down monoliths were those of some unlegended city, other than the one we sought. But the disposition of the ruins, which lay in a sort of arc for almost the entire extent of the low and gneissic elevation, together with the type of architecture, soon convinced us that we had found our goal. No other ancient city on Mars had been laid out in that manner; and the strange, many-terraced buttresses of the thick walls, like the stairways of forgotten Anakim, were peculiar to the prehistoric race that had built Yoh-Vombis. Moreover, Yoh-Vombis was the one remaining example of this architecture, aside from a few fragments in the neighborhood of Ignarh, which we had previously examined.

I have seen the hoary, sky-confronting walls of Macchu Pichu amid the desolate Andes, and the teocallis that are buried in the Mexican jungles. And I have seen the frozen, giant-builded battlements of Uogam on the glacial tundras of the nightward hemisphere of Venus. But these were as things of yesteryear, bearing at least the memory or the intimation of life, compared with the awesome and lethiferous antiquity, the cycle-enduring doom of a petrified sterility, that seemed to invest Yoh-Vombis. The whole region was far from the life-giving canals beyond whose environs even the more noxious flora and fauna are seldom found; and we had seen no living thing since our departure from Ignarh. But here, in this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation.

I think we all received the same impression as we stood staring in silence while the pale, sanies-like sunset fell on the dark and megalithic ruins. I remember gasping a little, in an air that seemed to have been touched by the irrespirable chill of death; and I heard the same sharp, laborious intake of breath from others of our party.

“That place is deader than an Egyptian morgue,” observed Harper.

“Certainly it is far more ancient,” Octave assented. “According to the most reliable legends, the Yorhis, who built Yoh-Vombis, were wiped out by the present ruling race at least forty thousand years ago.”

“There’s a story, isn’t there,” said Harper, “that the last remnant of the Yorhis was destroyed by some unknown agency—something too horrible and outré to be mentioned even in a myth?”

“Of course, I’ve heard that legend,” agreed Octave. “Maybe we’ll find evidence among the ruins, to prove or disprove it. The Yorhis may have been cleaned out by some terrible epidemic, such as the Yashta pestilence, which was a kind of green mould that ate all the bones of the body, starting with the teeth and nails. But we needn’t be afraid of getting it, if there are any mummies in Yoh-Vombis—the bacteria will all be dead as their victims, after so many cycles of planetary desiccation. Anyway, there ought to be a lot for us to learn. The Aihais have always been more or less shy of the place. Few have ever visited it; and none, as far as I can find, have made a thorough examination of the ruins.”

The sun had gone down with uncanny swiftness, as if it had disappeared through some sort of prestigitation rather than the normal process of setting. We felt the instant chill of the blue-green twilight; and the ether above us was like a huge, transparent dome of sunless ice, shot with a million bleak sparklings that were the stars. We donned the coats and helmets of Martian fur, which must always be worn at night; and going on to westward of the walls, we established our camp in their lee, so that we might be sheltered a little from the jaar, that cruel desert wind that always blows from the east before dawn. Then, lighting the alcohol lamps that had been brought along for cooking purposes, we huddled around them while the evening meal was prepared and eaten.

Afterwards, for comfort rather than because of weariness, we retired early to our sleeping-bags; and the two Aihais, our guides, wrapped themselves in the cerement-like folds of grey bassa-cloth which are all the protection their leathery skins appear to require even in sub-zero temperatures.

Even in my thick, double-lined bag, I still fell the rigor of the night air; and I am sure it was this, rather than anything else, which kept me awake for a long while and rendered my eventual slumber somewhat restless and broken. Of course, the strangeness of our situation, and the weird proximity of those aeonian walls and towers may in some measure have contributed to my unrest. But at any rate, I was not troubled by even the least presentiment of alarm or danger; and I should have laughed at the idea that anything of peril could lurk in Yoh-Vombis, amid whose undreamable and stupefying antiquities the very phantoms of its dead must long since have faded into nothingness.

I remember little, however, except the feeling of interminable duration that often marks a shallow and interrupted sleep. I recall the marrow-piercing wind that moaned above us toward midnight, and the sand that stung my face like a fine hail as it passed, blowing from desert to immemorial desert; and I recall the still, inflexible stars that grew dim for awhile with that fleeing ancient dust. Then the wind went by; and I drowsed again, with starts of semi-wakefulness. At last, in one of these, I knew vaguely that the small twin moons, Phobos and Deimos, had risen and were making huge and spectral shadows with the ruins and were casting an ashen glimmer on the shrouded forms of my companions.

I must have been half-asleep; for the memory of that which I saw is doubtful as any dream. I watched beneath drooping lids the tiny moons that had topped the domeless triangular towers; and I saw the far-flung shadows that almost touched the bodies of my fellow-archaeologists.

The whole scene was locked in a petrific stillness; and none of the sleepers stirred. Then, as my lids were about to close, I received an impression of movement in the frozen gloom; and it seemed to me that a portion of the foremost shadow had detached itself and was crawling toward Octave, who lay nearer to the ruins than we others.

Even through my heavy lethargy, I was disturbed by a warning of something unnatural and perhaps ominous. I started to sit up; and even as I moved, the shadowy object, whatever it was, drew back and became merged once more in the greater shadow. Its vanishment startled me into full wakefulness; and yet I could not be sure that I had actually seen the thing. In that brief, final glimpse, it had seemed like a roughly circular piece of cloth or leather, dark and crumpled, and twelve or fourteen inches in diameter, that ran along the ground with the doubling movement of an inch-worm, causing it to fold and unfold in a startling manner as it went.

I did not go to sleep again for nearly an hour; and if it had not been for the extreme cold, I should doubtless have gotten up to investigate and make sure whether I had really beheld an object of such bizarre nature or had merely dreamt it. I lay staring at the deep ebon shadow in which it had disappeared, while a series of fanciful wonderings followed each other in antic procession through my mind. Even then, though somewhat perturbed, I was not aware of any actual fear or intuition of possible menace. And more and more I began to convince myself that the thing was too unlikely and fantastical to have been anything but the figment of a dream. And at last I nodded off into light slumber.

The chill, demoniac sighing of the jaar across the jagged walls awoke me. and I saw that the faint moonlight had received the hueless accession of early dawn. We all arose, and prepared our breakfast with fingers that grew numb in spite of the spirit-lamps. Then, shivering, we ate, while the sun leapt over the horizon like a juggler’s ball. Enormous, gaunt, without gradations of shadow or luminosity, the ruins beetled before us in the thin light, like the mausolea of primordial giants, that abide from darkness-eaten aeons to confront the last dawn of an expiring orb.

My queer visual experience during the night had taken on more than ever a fantasmagoric unreality; and I gave it no more than a passing thought and did not speak of it to the others. But, even as the faint, distorted shadows of slumber often tinge one’s waking hours, it may have contributed to the nameless mood in which I found myself: a mood in which I felt the unhuman alienage of our surroundings and the black, fathomless antiquity of the ruins like an almost unbearable oppression. The feeling seemed to be made of a million spectral adumbrations that oozed unseen but palpable from the great, unearthly architecture; that weighed upon me like tomb-born incubi, but were void of form and meaning such as could be comprehended by human thought. I appeared to move, not in the open air, but in the smothering gloom of sealed sepulchral vaults; to choke with a death-fraught atmosphere, with the miasmata of aeon-old corruption.

My companions were all eager to explore the ruins; and of course it was impossible for me to even mention the apparently absurd and baseless shadows of my mood. Human beings on other worlds than their own are often subject to nervous and psychic symptoms of this sort, engendered by the unfamiliar forces, the novel radiations of their environment. But, as we approached the buildings in our preliminary tour of examination, I lagged behind the others, seized by a paralyzing panic that left me unable to move or breathe for a few moments. A dark, freezing clamminess seemed to pervade my brain and muscles and suspend their inmost working. Then it lifted; and I was free to go on and follow the others.

Strangely, as it seemed, the two Martians refused to accompany us. Stolid and taciturn, they gave no explicit reason; but evidently nothing would induce them to enter Yoh-Vombis. Whether or not they were afraid of the ruins, we were unable to determine: their enigmatic faces, with the small oblique eyes and huge, flaring nostrils, betrayed neither fear nor any other emotion intelligible to man. In reply to our questions, they merely said that no Aihai had set foot among the ruins for ages. Apparently there was some mysterious tabu in connection with the place.

For equipment in that preliminary tour, we took along only a crowbar and two picks. Our other tools, and some cartridges of high explosives, we left at our camp, to be used later if necessary, after we had surveyed the ground. One or two of us owned automatics: but these also were left behind; for it seemed absurd to imagine that any form of life would be encountered among the ruins.

Octave was visibly excited as we began our inspection, and maintained a running-fire of exclamatory comment. The rest of us were subdued and silent; and I think that my own feeling, in a measure, was shared by many of the others. It was impossible to shake off the somber awe and wonder that fell upon us from those megalithic stones.

I have no time to describe the ruins minutely, but must hasten on with my story. There is much that I could not describe anyway; for the main area of the city was destined to remain unexplored.

We went on for some distance among the triangular, terraced buildings, following the zig-zag streets that conformed to this peculiar architecture. Most of the towers were more or less dilapidated: and everywhere we saw the deep erosion wrought by cycles of blowing wind and sand, which, in many cases, had worn into roundness the sharp angles of the mighty walls. We entered some of the towers through high, narrow doorways, but found utter emptiness within. Whatever they had contained in the way of furnishings must long ago have crumbled into dust; and the dust had been blown away by the searching desert gales. On some of the outer walls, there was evidence of carving or lettering; but all of it was so worn down and obliterated by time that we could trace only a few fragmentary outlines, of which we could make nothing.

At length we came to a wide thoroughfare, which ended in the wall of a vast terrace, several hundred yards long by perhaps forty in height, on which the central buildings were grouped like a sort of citadel or acropolis. A flight of broken steps, designed for longer limbs than those of men or even the gangling modern Martians, afforded access to the terrace, which had seemingly been hewn from the plateau itself.

Pausing, we decided to defer our investigation of the higher buildings, which, being more exposed than the others, were doubly ruinous and dilapidated, and in all likelihood would offer little for our trouble. Octave had begun to voice his disappointment over our failure to find anything in the nature of artifacts or carvings that would throw light on the history of Yoh-Vombis.

Then, a little to the right of the stairway, we perceived an entrance in the main wall, half-choked with ancient débris. Behind the heap of detritus, we found the beginning of a downward flight of steps. Darkness poured from the opening like a visible flood, noisome and musty with primordial stagnancies of decay; and we could see nothing below the first steps, which gave the appearance of being suspended over a black gulf.

Octave and myself and several others had brought along electric torches, in case we should need them in our explorations. It had occurred to us that there might be subterranean vaults or catacombs in Yoh-Vombis, even as in the latter-day cities of Mars, which are often more extensive underground than above; and such vaults would be the likeliest place in which to look for vestiges of the Yorhi civilization.

Throwing his torch-beam into the abyss, Octave began to descend the stairs. His eager voice called us to follow.

Again, for an instant, the unknown, irrational panic froze my faculties, and I hesitated while the others pressed forward behind me. Then, as before, the terror passed; and I wondered at myself for being overcome by anything so absurd and unfounded. I followed Octave down the steps, and the others came trooping after me.

At the bottom of the high, awkward steps, we found ourselves in a long and roomy vault, like a subterranean hallway. Its floor was deep with siftings of immemorial dust; and in places there were heaps of a coarse grey powder, such as might be left by the decomposition of certain fungi that grow in the Martian catacombs, under the canals. Such fungi, at one time, might conceivably have existed in Yoh-Vombis; but, owing to the prolonged and excessive dehydration, they must have died out long ago. Nothing, surely, not even a fungus, could have lived in those arid vaults for many aeons past.

The air was singularly heavy, as if the lees of an ancient atmosphere, less tenuous than that of Mars to-day, had settled down and remained in that stagnant darkness. It was harder to breathe than the outer air: it was filled with unknown effluvia and the light dust arose before us at every step, diffusing a faintness of bygone corruption, like the dust of powdered mummies.

At the end of the vault, before a strait and lofty doorway our torches revealed an immense shallow urn or pan, supported on short cube-shaped legs, and wrought from a dull, blackish-green material which suggested some bizarre alloy of metal and porcelain. The thing was about four feet across, with a thick rim adorned by writhing indecipherable figures, deeply etched as if by acid. In the bottom of the bowl we perceived a deposit of dark and cinder-like fragments, which gave off a slight but disagreeable pungence, like the phantom of some more powerful odor. Octave, bending over the rim began to cough and sneeze as he inhaled it.

“That stuff, whatever it was, must have been a pretty strong fumigant,” he observed, “The people of Yoh-Vombis may have used it to disinfect the vaults.”

The doorway beyond the shallow urn admitted us to a larger chamber, whose floor was comparatively free of dust. We found that the dark stone beneath our feet was marked off in multiform geometric patterns, traced with ochreous ore, amid which, as in Egyptian cartouches, hieroglyphics and highly formalized drawings were enclosed. We could make little from most of them; but the figures in many were doubtless designed to represent the Yorhis themselves. Like the Aihais, they were tall and angular, with great, bellows-like chests; and they were depicted as possessing a supplementary third arm, which issued from the bosom: a characteristic which, in vestigial form, sometimes occurs among the Aihais. The ears and nostrils, as far as we could judge, were not so huge and flaring as those of the modern Martians. All of these Yorhis were represented as being nude; but in one of the cartouches, done in a far hastier style than the others, we perceived two figures whose high, conical craniums were wrapped in what seemed to be a sort of turban, which they were about to remove or adjust. The artist seemed to have laid a peculiar emphasis on the odd gesture with which the sinuous, four-jointed fingers were plucking at these head-dresses; and the whole posture was unexplainably contorted.

From the second vault passages ramified in all directions, leading to a veritable warren of catacombs. Here, enormous pot-bellied urns of the same material as the fumigating-pan, but taller than a man’s head and fitted with angular-handled stoppers, were ranged in solemn rows along the walls, leaving scant room for two of us to walk abreast. When we succeeded in removing one of the huge stoppers, we saw that the jar was filed to the rim with ashes and charred fragments of bone. Doubtless (as is still the Martian custom) the Yorhis had stored the cremated remains of whole families in single urns.

Even Octave became silent as we went on; and a sort of meditative awe seemed to replace his former excitement. We others, I think, were utterly weighed down to a man by the solid gloom of a concept-defying antiquity, into which it seemed that we were going further and further at every step.

The shadows fluttered before us like the monstrous and misshapen wings of phantom bats. There was nothing anywhere but the atom-like dust of ages, and the jars that held the ashes of a long-extinct people. But, clinging to the high roof in one of the further vaults, I saw a dark and corrugated patch of circular form, like a withered fungus. It was impossible to reach the thing: and we went on after peering at it with many futile conjectures. Oddly enough, I failed to remember at that moment the crumpled, shadowy object I had seen or dreamt the night before.

I have no idea how far we had gone, when we came to the last vault; but it seemed that we had been wandering for ages in that forgotten underworld. The air was growing fouler and more irrespirable, with a thick, sodden quality, as if from a sediment of material rottenness; and we had about decided to turn back. Then, without warning, at the end of a long, urn-lined catacomb, we found ourselves confronted by a blank wall.

Here, we came upon one of the strangest and most mystifying of our discoveries—a mummified and incredibly desiccated figure, standing erect against the wall. It was more than seven feet in height, of a brown, bituminous color, and was wholly nude except for a sort of black cowl that covered the upper head and drooped down at the sides in wrinkled folds. From the three arms, and general contour, it was plainly one of the ancient Yorhis—perhaps the sole member of this race whose body had remained intact.

We all felt an inexpressible thrill at the sheer age of this shrivelled thing, which, in the dry air of the vault, had endured through all the historic and geologic vicissitudes of the planet, to provide a visible link with lost cycles.

Then, as we peered closer with our torches, we saw why the mummy had maintained an upright position. At ankles, knees, waist, shoulders and neck it was shackled to the wall by heavy metal bands, so deeply eaten and embrowned with a sort of rust that we had failed to distinguish them at first sight in the shadow. The strange cowl on the head, when closelier studied, continued to baffle us. It was covered with a fine, mould-like pile, unclean and dusty as ancient cobwebs. Something about it, I know not what, was abhorrent and revolting.

“By Jove! this is a real find!” ejaculated Octave, as he thrust his torch into the mummified face, where shadows moved like living things in the pit-deep hollows of the eyes and the huge triple nostrils and wide ears that flared upward beneath the cowl.

Still lifting the torch, he put out his free hand and touched the body very lightly. Tentative as the touch had been, the lower part of the barrel-like torso, the legs, the hands and forearms all seemed to dissolve into powder, leaving the head and upper body and arms still hanging in their metal fetters. The progress of decay had been queerly unequal, for the remnant portions gave no sign of disintegration.

Octave cried out in dismay, and then began to cough and sneeze, as the cloud of brown powder, floating with airy lightness, enveloped him. We others all stepped back to avoid the powder. Then, above the spreading cloud, I saw an unbelievable thing. The black cowl on the mummy’s head began to curl and twitch upward at the corners, it writhed with a verminous motion, it fell from the withered cranium, seeming to fold and unfold convulsively in mid-air as it fell. Then it dropped on the bare head of Octave who, in his disconcertment at the crumbling of the mummy, had remained standing close to the wall. At that instant, in a start of profound terror, I remembered the thing that had inched itself from the shadows of Yoh-Vombis in the light of the twin moons, and had drawn back like a figment of slumber at my first waking movement.

Cleaving closely as a tightened cloth, the thing enfolded Octave’s hair and brow and eyes, and he shrieked wildly, with incoherent pleas for help, and tore with frantic fingers at the cowl, but failed to loosen it. Then his cries began to mount in a mad crescendo of agony, as if beneath some instrument of infernal torture; and he danced and capered blindly about the vault, eluding us with strange celerity as we all sprang forward in an effort to reach him and release him from his weird encumbrance. The whole happening was mysterious as a nightmare; but the thing that had fallen on his head was plainly some unclassified form of Martian life, which, contrary to all the known laws of science, had survived in those primordial catacombs. We must rescue him from its clutches if we could.

We tried to close in on the frenzied figure of our chief—which, in the far from roomy space between the last urns and the wall, should have been an easy matter. But, darting away, in a manner doubly incomprehensible because of his blindfolded condition, he circled about us and ran past, to disappear among the urns toward the outer labyrinth of intersecting catacombs.

“My God! What has happened to him?” cried Harper. “The man acts as if he were possessed.”

There was obviously no time for a discussion of the enigma, and we all followed Octave as speedily as our astonishment would permit. We had lost sight of him in the darkness, and when we came to the first division of the vaults, we were doubtful as to which passage he had taken, till we heard a shrill scream, several times repeated, in a catacomb on the extreme left. There was a weird, unearthly quality in those screams, which may have been due to the long-stagnant air or the peculiar acoustics of the ramifying caverns. But somehow I could not imagine them as issuing from human lips—at least not from those of a living man. They seemed to contain a soulless, mechanical agony, as if they had been wrung from a devil-driven corpse.

Thrusting our torches before us into the lurching, fleeing shadows, we raced along between rows of mighty urns. The screaming had died away in sepulchral silence; but far off we heard the light and muffled thud of running feet. We followed in headlong pursuit; but, gasping painfully in the vitiated, miasmal air, we were soon compelled to slacken our pace without coming in sight of Octave. Very faintly, and further away than ever, like the tomb-swallowed steps of a phantom, we heard his vanishing footfalls. Then they ceased; and we heard nothing, except our own convulsive breathing, and the blood that throbbed in our temple-veins like steadily beaten drums of alarm.

We went on, dividing our party into three contingents when we came to a triple branching of the caverns. Harper and Halgren and myself took the middle passage; and after we had gone on for an endless interval without finding any trace of Octave, and had threaded our way through recesses piled to the roof with colossal urns that must have held the ashes of a hundred generations, we came out in the huge chamber with the geometric floor-designs. Here, very shortly, we were joined by the others, who had likewise failed to locate our missing leader.

It would be useless to detail our renewed and hour-long search of the myriad vaults, many of which we had not hitherto explored. All were empty, as far as any sign of life was concerned. I remember passing once more through the vault in which I had seen the dark, rounded patch on the ceiling, and noting with a shudder that the patch was gone. It was a miracle that we did not lose ourselves in that underworld maze; but at last we came back to the final catacomb, in which we had found the shackled mummy.

We heard a measured and recurrent clangor as we neared the place—a most alarming and mystifying sound under the circumstances. It was like the hammering of ghouls on some forgotten mausoleum. When we drew nearer, the beams of our torches revealed a sight that was no less unexplainable than unexpected. A human figure, with its back toward us and the head concealed by a swollen black object that had the size and form of a sofa cushion, was standing near the remains of the mummy and was striking at the wall with a pointed metal bar. How long Octave had been there, and where he had found the bar, we could not know. But the blank wall had crumbled away beneath his furious blows, leaving on the floor a pile of cement-like fragments; and a small, narrow door, of the same ambiguous material as the cinerary urns and the fumigating-pan, had been laid bare.

Amazed, uncertain, inexpressibly bewildered, we were all incapable of action or volition at that moment. The whole business was too fantastic and too horrifying, and it was plain that Octave had been overcome by some sort of madness. I, for one, felt the violent upsurge of sudden nausea when I had identified the loathsomely bloated thing that clung to Octave’s head and drooped in obscene tumescence on his neck. I did not dare to surmise the causation of its bloating.

Before any of us could recover our faculties, Octave flung aside the metal bar and began to fumble for something in the wall. It must have been a hidden spring; though how he could have known its location or existence is beyond all legitimate conjecture. With a dull, hideous grating, the uncovered door swung inward, thick and ponderous as a mausolean slab, leaving an aperture from which the nether midnight seemed to well like a flood of aeon-buried foulness. Somehow, at that instant, our electric torches appeared to flicker and grow dim; and we all breathed a suffocating fetor, like a draft from inner worlds of immemorial putrescence.

Octave had turned toward us now, and he stood in an idle posture before the open door, like one who has finished some ordained task. I was the first of our party to throw off the paralyzing spell; and pulling out a clasp-knife—the only semblance of a weapon which I carried—I ran over to him. He moved back, but not quickly enough to evade me, when I stabbed with the four-inch blade at the black, turgescent mass that enveloped his whole upper head and hung down upon his eyes.

What the thing was, I should prefer not to imagine—if it were possible to imagine. It was formless as a great slug, with neither head nor tail nor apparent organs—an unclean, puffy, leathery thing, covered with that fine, mould-like fur of which I have spoken. The knife tore into it as if through rotten parchment, making a long gash, and the horror appeared to collapse like a broken bladder. Out of it there gushed a sickening torrent of human blood, mingled with dark, filiated masses that may have been half-dissolved hair, and floating gelatinous lumps like molten bone, and shreds of a curdy white substance. At the same time, Octave began to stagger, and went down at full length on the floor. Disturbed by his fall, the mummy-dust &rose about him in a curling cloud, beneath which he lay mortally still.

Conquering my revulsion, and choking with the dust, I bent over him and tore the flaccid, oozing horror from his head. It came with unexpected ease, as if I had removed a limp rag: but I wish to God that I had let it remain. Beneath, there was no longer a human cranium, for all had been eaten away, even to the eyebrows, and the half-devoured brain was laid bare as I lifted the cowl-like object, I dropped the unnamable thing from fingers that had grown suddenly nerveless, and it turned over as it fell, revealing on the nether side many rows of pinkish suckers, arranged in circles about a paIlid disk that was covered with nerve-like filaments, suggesting a sort of plexus.

My companions had pressed forward behind me; but, for an appreciable interval, no one spoke.

“How long do you suppose he has been dead?” It was Halgren who whispered the awful question, which we had all been asking ourselves. Apparently no one felt able or willing to answer it; and we could only stare in horrible, timeless fascination at Octave.

At length I made an effort to overt my gaze; and turning at random, I saw the remnants of the shackled mummy, and noted for the first time, with mechanical, unreal horror, the half-eaten condition of the withered head. From this, my gaze was diverted to the newly opened door at one side, without perceiving for a moment what had drawn my attention. Then, startled, I beheld beneath my torch, far down beyond the door, as if in some nether pit, a seething, multitudinous, worm-like movement of crawling shadows. They seemed to boil up in the darkness; and then, over the broad threshold of the vault, there poured the verminous vanguard of a countless army: things that were kindred to the monstrous, diabolic leech I had torn from Octave’s eaten head. Some were thin and flat, like writhing, doubling disks of cloth or leather, and others were more or less poddy, and crawled with glutted slowness. What they had found to feed on in the sealed, eternal midnight I do not know; and I pray that I never shall know.

I sprang back and away from them, electrified with terror, sick with loathing, and the black army inched itself unendingly with nightmare swiftness from the unsealed abyss, like the nauseous vomit of horror-sated hells. As it poured toward us, burying Octave’s body from sight in a writhing wave, I saw a stir of life from the seemingly dead thing I had cast aside, and saw the loathly struggle which it made to right itself and join the others.

But neither I nor my companions could endure to look longer. We turned and ran between the mighty rows of urns, with the slithering mass of demon leeches close upon us, and scattered in blind panic when we came to the first division of the vaults. Heedless of each other or of anything but the urgency of flight, we plunged into the ramifying passages at random. Behind me, I heard someone stumble and go down, with a curse that mounted to an insane shrieking; but I knew that if I halted and went back, it would be only to invite the same baleful doom that had overtaken the hindmost of our party.

Still clutching the electric torch and my open clasp-knife, I ran along a minor passage which, I seemed to remember, would conduct with more or less directness upon the large outer vault with the painted floor. Here I found myself alone. The others had kept to the main catacombs; and I heard faroff a muffled babble of mad cries, as if several of them had been seized by their pursuers.

It seemed that I must have been mistaken about the direction of the passage; for it turned and twisted in an unfamiliar manner, with many intersections, and I soon found that I was lost in the black labyrinth, where the dust had lain unstirred by living feet for inestimable generations. The cinerary warren had grown still once more; and I heard my own frenzied panting, loud and stertorous as that of a Titan in the dead silence.

Suddenly, as I went on, my torch disclosed a human figure coming toward me in the gloom. Before I could master my startlement, the figure had passed me with long, machine-like strides, as if returning to the inner vaults. I think it was Harper, since the height and build were about right for him: but I am not altogether sure, for the eyes and upper head were muffled by a dark, inflated cowl, and the pale lips were locked as if in a silence of tetanic torture—or death. Whoever he was, he had dropped his torch; and he was running blindfolded, in utter darkness, beneath the impulsion of that unearthly vampirism, to seek the very fountain-head of the unloosed horror. I knew that he was beyond human help; and I did not even dream of trying to stop him.

Trembling violently, I resumed my flight, and was passed by two more of our party, stalking by with mechanical swiftness and sureness, and cowled with those Satanic leeches. The others must have returned by way of the main passages; for I did not meet them; and I was never to see them again.

The remainder of my flight is a blur of pandemonian terror. Once more, after thinking that I was near the outer cavern, I found myself astray, and fled through a ranged eternity of monstrous urns, in vaults that must have extended for an unknown distance beyond our explorations. It seemed that I had gone on for years; and my lungs were choking with the aeon-dead air, and my legs were ready to crumble beneath me, when I saw faroff a tiny point of blessed daylight. I ran toward it, with all the terrors of the alien darkness crowding behind me, and accursed shadows flittering before, and saw that the vault ended in a low, ruinous entrance, littered by rubble on which there fell an arc of thin sunshine.

It was another entrance than the one by which we had penetrated this lethal underworld. I was within a dozen feet of the opening when, without sound or other intimation, something dropped upon my head from the roof above, blinding me instantly and closing upon me like a tautened net, My brow and scalp, at the same time, were shot through with a million needle-like pangs—a manifold, ever-growing agony that seemed to pierce the very bone and converge from all sides upon my inmost brain.

The terror and suffering of that moment were worse than aught which the hells of earthly madness or delirium could ever contain. I felt the foul, vampiric clutch of an atrocious death—and of more than death.

I believe that I dropped the torch; but the fingers of my right hand had still retained the open knife. Instinctively—since I was hardly capable of conscious volition—I raised the knife and slashed blindly, again and again, many times, at the thing that had fastened its deadly folds upon me. The blade must have gone through and through the clinging monstrosity, to gash my own flesh in a score of places; but I did not feel the pain of those wounds in the million-throbbing torment that possessed me.

At last I saw light, and saw that a black strip, loosened from above my eyes and dripping with my own blood, was hanging down my cheek. It writhed a little, even as it hung, and I ripped it away, and ripped the other remnants of the thing, tatter by oozing, bloody tatter, from off my brow and head. Then I staggered toward the entrance; and the wan light turned to a far, receding, dancing flame before me as I lurched and fell outside the cavern—a flame that fled like the last star of creation above the yawning, sliding chaos and oblivion into which I descended…

I am told that my unconsciousness was of brief duration. I came to myself, with the cryptic faces of the two Martian guides bending over me. My head was full of lancinating pains, and half-remembered terrors closed upon my mind like the shadows of mustering harpies. I rolled over.. and looked back toward the cavern-mouth, from which the Martians, after finding me, had seemingly dragged me for some little distance. The mouth was under the terraced angle of an outer building, and within sight of our camp.

I stared at the black opening with hideous fascination, and descried a shadowy stirring in the gloom—the writhing, verminous movement of things that pressed forward from the darkness but did not emerge into the light. Doubtless they could not endure the sun, those creatures of ultramundane night and cycle-sealed corruption.

It was then that the ultimate horror, the beginning madness, came upon me. Amid my crawling revulsion, my nausea-prompted desire to flee from that seething cavern-mouth, there rose an abhorrently conflicting impulse to return; to thread my backward way through all the catacombs, as the others had done; to go down where never men save they, the inconceivably doomed and accursed, had ever gone; to seek beneath that damnable compulsion a nether world that human thought can never picture. There was a black light, a soundless calling, in the vaults of my brain: the implanted summons of the Thing, like a permeating and sorcerous poison. It lured me to the subterranean door that was walled up by the dying people of Yoh-Vombis, to immure those hellish and immortal leeches, those dark parasites that engraft their own abominable life on the half-eaten brains of the dead. It called me to the depths beyond, where dwell the noisome, necromantic Ones, of whom the leeches, with all their powers of vampirism and diabolism, are but the merest minions . . . .

It was only the two Aihais who prevented me from going back. I struggled, I fought them insanely as they strove to retard me with their spongy arms; but I must have been pretty thoroughly exhausted from all the superhuman adventures of the day; and I went down once more, after a little, into fathomless nothingness, from which I floated out at long intervals, to realize that I was being carried across the desert toward Ignarh.

Well, that is all my story. I have tried to tell it fully and coherently, at a cost that would be unimaginable to the sane . . . to tell it before the madness falls upon me again, as it will very soon—as it is doing now . . . Yes, I have told my story . . . and you have written it all out, haven’t you? Now I must go back to Yoh-Vombis—back across the desert and down through all the catacombs to the vaster vaults beneath. Something is in my brain, that commands me and will direct me . . . I tell you, I must go . . .

The post PseudoPod 611: WEIRD SCIENCE HORROR ISSUE #2: The Vaults of Yoh Vombis appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Katharine Duckett
• Narrator : Larissa Thompson
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 610: Beneath Their Hooves is a PseudoPod original.

Beneath Their Hooves by Katharine E.K. Duckett

We go to Grandmère’s house to ride the unicorns.

We only go once or twice a year, and it’s never enough. Riding the unicorns is the most fun a person could have, and I don’t know why we can’t do it every day. Mom never gives us a good reason. It’s not like ice cream, where it’ll give you a stomachache if you have too much. You could ride the unicorns for hours and hours. They never get tired. They prance and they fly a little, just a foot or two, and they’re blue and pink and green and purple, and their horns shine in the sun like candy canes, like candy canes after you’ve licked off all the red and made them white and sharp with your tongue.

Grandmère watches us from the veranda as we ride. She never touches the unicorns herself. They’re here for us. They’re here because she loves us, and she wants us to have fun. She watches, and sometimes she waves with her hand cupped like she’s a queen, the big diamonds on her necklace sparkling across the lawn, and Robin and I go around and around until we’re dizzy and Mom yells at tell us it’s time to go home.

Grandmère is not mean.

She is “imposing.” That’s what Mom says. But Mom always looks a little afraid every time we leave Portland to go to Connecticut. “Home” when we go to Connecticut is the hotel six miles from Grandmère’s house, which is an estate. An estate is a big house I guess, and Grandmère’s house is the biggest I’ve ever seen in real life, stretching out across acres and acres of thick green grass. When Grandmère was young her mother raised horses here, but now there are only the unicorns.

We call Grandmère “Grandmère” because she wants us to, even though my parents don’t seem to like it. “There’s not even French in your family. She’s putting on airs,” Dad always says to Mom at the hotel as we’re getting ready, but he never says that at Grandmère’s house. At Grandmère’s house he laughs and laughs, and his cheeks get pink, like when he’s been drinking. He’s so happy, and I wish we could stay there always, but we always leave, and as soon as we’re a mile away both Mom and Dad have sad looks on their faces, like they’ve left something they love behind. I don’t understand why they don’t want to stay longer. I don’t understand why we never stay the night.

Robin, my brother, is three years older than me. He just turned eleven last month. My mom had a brother too, but he died when she was young. Robin says he hung himself, though Robin says things just to scare me sometimes, and I can’t be sure when he’s telling the truth. I asked Mom about it, and she got quiet and scary and told me never to ask her about that again, so I don’t ask anymore.

For his birthday, Robin got a book of facts about the world, a real atlas. Now that we’re at Grandmère’s house and everyone’s happy, he keeps trying to ruin everything by telling me the worst things he can find in the book. We’re sitting at dinner with Mom and Dad and Grandmère, and all the adults are talking, about what I can’t follow, and Robin keeps trying to talk to me even though I keep trying to munch my salad as loudly as I can so I can’t hear him.

“They eat horses in Kazakhstan,” Robin whispers to me as he gives me the mashed potatoes.

I kick him under the table, but the sentence keeps running through my head as the roast beef is passed around. They eat horses in Kazakhstan. They eat horses in Kazakhstan. Do they really? I know we eat cows, and pigs, and chickens and clams and fish, but those are different. Aren’t they? When the bowl of steaming brown meat gets to me, I only put a little bit on my plate, and bury it under my mashed potatoes when no one’s looking, so that I don’t have to put it in my mouth, don’t have to think about whether or not it tastes differently than horses do.

Robin starts to poke me in the ribs. I ignore him, but he keeps doing it. I don’t want to hear what he’s going to say. I don’t want to know what else people eat or think about all the animals we eat, either. Finally he stops poking and leans in close to my ear.

“Grandmère’s necklace isn’t real,” he says in a low, low voice.

I look at him out of the side of my eye. Grandmère is talking to Mom, but I don’t want her to hear us. “What?”

“It’s not real,” he hisses. “The house, the unicorns, none of it is real. There’s a ghost in the attic and he told me everything. He told me if we destroy her necklace, we can see everything clear. He told me, Izzy, he told me that we—”

I see Grandmère’s eyes sweep across the table. The light glints off the diamonds on her necklace, which I’ve never seen her take off. I drop my fork, and Robin stops talking. She keeps staring at us, and Mom and Dad stop talking too. Her eyes are very, very blue. Her eyes look like her mother’s, though I’ve only ever seen her mother’s eyes in black and white. I think she was dead before they invented color cameras.

Grandmère’s mother, my great-grandmother, was named Emilia Allison Ayre, and she was a movie star. She starred in a movie everyone’s seen, a love story that plays all the time on the channel with all the old movies. She made a lot of money and she built this estate with her third husband, who was not Grandmère’s dad, because Grandmère’s dad left when Grandmère was small. Soon Emilia’s third husband left too, and then it was just her and Grandmère and Grandmère’s big sister Isabelle, and all the horses, which Emilia loved more than anything. She had a stable of them, and she brushed their coats until they shined, and she took them to shows where they won all the ribbons.

I didn’t learn about the horses from Grandmère or from Mom. I learned about them in a book. Emilia used to be really famous, even though no one at my school has heard of her. No one but the librarian anyway, who helped me find this book some guy wrote about her life. The guy talked to people who knew Emilia, even though she wouldn’t cooperate with him. She wasn’t very nice, I guess. She liked horses more than she liked people, or at least that’s what her third husband said in the book.

Other than the ribbons for the horses, all Emilia wanted was for her daughter Isabelle to be a movie star too. Isabelle was beautiful and talented, and she made one movie, which they talk about in the book. But one day when she was nineteen she was riding her mother’s horses, and she fell and broke a lot of bones in her body. She couldn’t be a movie star anymore. She had to use a wheelchair, and they only let you use a wheelchair in a movie if you’re faking it.

It says in the book that Emilia got very angry when Isabelle fell. There’s even a story that she kicked her while she was there on the ground, but it also says that’s probably an exaggeration.

Grandmère is kind. It doesn’t say that in the book, because it barely talks about her at all, except to call her “homely” and say that Emilia always told people she could never be a movie star, but Mom says it’s true. She made the house easy for Isabelle to live in after their mom died, put in ramps for her and everything. Grandmère just wants everyone to be happy, which is why she made the unicorns in the first place, and why she helped Isabelle until she passed away. Isabelle died the year before I was born, and that’s why I’m named for her, though everybody calls me Izzy.

Not so long after Isabelle fell, all the horses died. No one could say exactly why. It seemed like poison, but nothing was detected in their blood, even though everyone suspected the third husband. Emilia buried all their bodies on the estate. Not so very long after that, Emilia died herself. It doesn’t say where they buried her body, but from then on it was just Grandmère and Isabelle, until Grandmère had Mom and her brother.

I don’t know if Mom has a dad. I asked her about it once, and she got real quiet about that too.

Robin falls off the unicorn the next day.

I’m not riding with him. Grandmère tells me to sit with her on the veranda, and Mom and Dad are inside. Robin is on the pink unicorn, the plump one. There are four unicorns. I never thought to count them before. I’m trying to remember more things now, to notice details, like a spy would. I know that how I think at Grandmère’s house is different from how I think at the hotel, from how I think back in Portland, but it’s hard to concentrate there. I want to write things down on my hand, or in a notebook, but I’m afraid Grandmère would see. So I focus as hard as I can. I focus, and I count, and I feel all the objects that I pass with my fingers, and everything feels solid and firm beneath my touch. Robin is wrong. The house is real. The unicorns are unicorns. Grandmère loves us as much as she always did.

We watch Robin go around, around and around, and I notice he’s going faster. Faster than he’s ever gone before. The unicorns always move in the same circle, one after the other, never stopping, but they usually clop along, nice and bouncy and safe, with little flying hops. Now they’re speeding up. I look at Robin’s face, and see he’s making an “O” with his mouth, even though I can’t hear him screaming. I’m frozen. I try to speak. I try to reach for Grandmère’s hand. I can see it there next to her, papery and white and just out of reach.

My eyes flick back to Robin, and his face is bright red. His hands are tight on the unicorn’s mane. Hold tight, Robin, I think, hold tight, but then the unicorn bucks, and Robin flies off, crashing headfirst on the ground.

There is screaming now. There is screaming, lots and lots of it, and Mom and Dad come running. Grandmère isn’t moving. Her blue, blue eyes are fixed on Robin, who is red and splattered on the ground. I can see, even from this far away, his leg bone, which is outside of him now.

“It stuck up just that way.”

My neck swivels. I can move it again. “What?”

Grandmère’s voice is wavery. I realize I’ve never heard her talk much. She always talks to Mom and Dad, never to Robin or me. “When Isabelle fell. It stuck up just that way, right up through her skin.”

I start to throw up. Mom and Dad are still helping Robin and so only Grandmère is there to help me. She holds my hair back, and when I’m done she takes me inside to brush my teeth and lie down.

I’m afraid of the unicorns now. I don’t want to ride them the next day. But I have to pretend, because otherwise Grandmère will know something’s wrong.

The unicorns don’t feel like horses. I know, because I rode a horse at camp. When you put your hands on their neck, it feels rubbery, and a little cold. I never noticed it before. When I try to look at their hairs, at the small ones defined in their mane, they all blend together. I can’t look at them too closely, because Grandmère will see, from where she watches me on the veranda.

I’m alone with Grandmère at the house because Mom and Dad are at the hospital with Robin. I don’t know what they told the doctors happened to him. I don’t think they told them about the unicorns. Every night Dad comes and picks me up, later and later each time, and brings me back to the hotel. Mom stays with Robin. They don’t say it, but I know things are very bad. I know not to ask how very bad they are.

Grandmère takes her nap that afternoon, and I go up to the attic. All by myself, even though I’m holding my breath between every creaky stair. “Ghost?” I say, when I get up there and turn on the light. “Ghost?”

No one replies. Maybe since he’s a boy-ghost, only boys can hear him. It doesn’t seem fair, but then the world isn’t fair. Mom and Dad say that a lot, anyway.

Robin is the hospital four days, and then five, and then a week. We were supposed to go back to Portland three days ago. Dad doesn’t say anything about it, and I don’t even have to remind myself to ask. I try not to talk anymore.

Grandmère does the same thing every day. I notice it now, now that it’s only me around. She takes her nap every afternoon, and a bath every evening, just before dinner, just as the sun is starting to go down. Before she does, I can see through the open door of her bedroom that she always takes off the necklace, and leaves it on the table beside her bed. The bathroom is attached to the bedroom, but I don’t think you can see the table when you’re soaking in the big bathtub in there.

I walk by her bedroom door a few days in a row, but I can’t make myself go in. Not until the ninth day, when I know Robin and I should be back in school. Summer break is over. Mom and Dad always say education is the most important thing in the world. If I haven’t gone back for school, I don’t know what I’ll go back for.

I stand a little bit down the hallway and wait until I hear Grandmère stop running the water to creep up to the door. The necklace looks real from the doorway, and even when I get up close, when I’m sure Grandmère can’t see me, it looks so shiny and beautiful that I think Robin must have been wrong. But then I get really really close, bending as low as I can, and I realize there are air bubbles in the jewels. Diamonds don’t have bubbles, because they’re rocks. And the edges of the metal on the necklace are all brown and flaky, and the clasp is old and rotting. It looks more like the fake jewelry Mom would buy me for a dumb princess costume than something Emilia Allison Ayre would ever wear.

Robin was right. The necklace isn’t real. Maybe unicorns aren’t real. Maybe the unicorns hurt Robin: or Grandmère did.

I start to reach for the necklace, but I hear the bathwater rippling. I turn and run down the hall, down the stairs, and out to the lawn and the hills. I go about as far away as I can, and I find a rock, the heaviest one that I can find but still fit into my pocket. Even if Grandmère can change how things look, the way they are, she’d have no reason to change one rock, all the way out here.

I keep the rock under my pillow at the hotel that night, and in my pocket at Grandmère’s the next day.

I ride the unicorns for hours. I ride them because I don’t want to be in the house. I’m still afraid of them, but I’m more afraid of inside. It’s too quiet there. Grandmère only ever tells me to go out to play, or to eat my lunch. I wonder if the food is real.

Robin has been in the hospital for two weeks. I have to help him, somehow. If the unicorns hurt him, I’m the only one that knows. I don’t want to do it, but Mom and Dad can’t help. Not unless they see.

Grandmère is watching me from the veranda. I make my unicorn slow down and stop, and get off of it. They won’t slow unless you tell them to. They all start at once, and stop at once, and when I get a few feet away they start going again, their hooves pounding the ground as I walk back to the house, toward Grandmère.

Emilia’s famous movie is on Netflix at the hotel. I’ve watched it over and over again while Robin’s been in the hospital, every night while Dad’s at the bar. I know how to make my eyes big, my lips pouty. “Grandmère, I just love your necklace,” I say, making my voice sweet and soft, like the ladies in the movies do. “Can I try it on? Please?”

She looks at me for a long time. A very long time, but I remember Emilia and how she looked in the one scene where she had to convince the Nazi she’s not lying and she loves him, and I keep my smile very still. Grandmère rises, and motions for me to turn. I do, my breath going faster, and she pushes my hair to one side of my neck.

I feel the weight of the necklace come down on my collarbone. I slip my hand into my pocket, and curl my fingers around my big rock as she fastens its clasps. As soon as she’s done, I slam the rock to my chest, right on the jewels. It knocks the wind out of me, and I stumble back, into Grandmère’s legs, but I push myself forward, out of her reach. Bits of the necklace are already on the ground. I pull it from my neck, hard, and it hurts, but I need to see. I need to see the unicorns. I need to see if they’re real, so I smash the necklace on the stone of the veranda, stomping it beneath my foot, and look out to the lawn.

The unicorns are still going around. The unicorns are there. But the unicorns are not unicorns. The unicorns are dead horses. Regular horses, white and brown and black. Their coats are streaked with dirt and blood. Long strings of jelly hang from their mouths. I can see pink-purple muscle peeking through their skin as they gallop and gallop and go.

The horses’ eyes have fallen out. The manes are gone from their heads and I can see patches of their skull, but chunks of meat flap from their cheeks as they run. I can’t stop hearing Robin in my head. They eat horses in Kazakhstan. They eat horses in Kazakhstan.

I can remember all the things my parents were saying to Grandmère all those times we came to visit now. I remember every conversation, every dinner, every afternoon. They were never saying anything at all. Their mouths were moving, but they were saying nonsense. All those times they were talking to Grandmère, my parents were speaking gibberish.

The dead horses aren’t unicorns, but they still have horns. Their horns look the same. The horns are bone, carved to spiral points. What kind of bones would you need, I hear Robin asking in my head, to make horns like those?

I am realizing the horses having been running for years and years, pounding the dead grass beneath their hooves. I am realizing I have nowhere to run. And then I feel her hand on my shoulder, and I turn to face Grandmère.

The post PseudoPod 610: Beneath Their Hooves appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Jon Padgett
• Narrator : Dagny Paul
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

A Little Delta of Filth was first published in Walk on the Weird Side

A Little Delta of Filth by Jon Padgett

to the memory of Conrad Aiken

I

It could make her invisible. Untouchable.

The thought came back years later like the distant melody of church bells, familiar and comforting. The moment she found the thing, she knew it was indescribable. Remote from parents, lovers and friends alike. It was her own, held close from other eyes, from other fingers.

Invisible. Untouchable.

The impossible thing tied itself into pleasing, intricate knots within her as she sat in the conference workshop hall. She was attending a seminar on disaster response. The speaker, a Mr. Cardin, twirled his laser pointer in lazy circles upon the chandeliered ceiling. The synthetic crystals twinkled with red, refracted light above the crowd. The question and answer part of the presentation had begun. Mr. Cardin explained why hosting servers should have the capacity and power to be used by dozens if not hundreds of simultaneous users. A man with a bright green shirt and a thicket of white hair raised a hand like a small shovel. He argued that a simple disaster-related directory sufficed in a mid-scale emergency.

Mr. Cardin shook his head, salt and pepper curls dancing, and his sparkling eyes squinted as if in pain.

“They are a nightmare to maintain as the crisis continues, despite their creators’ best efforts. So no, no. I’m sorry. Bad idea.”

The green shirted man’s neck turned crimson. An unconscious, collective wince rippled throughout the audience.

She did not notice, though. She was thinking of the labyrinthine, concrete ditch that ran next to her childhood home. It wound around and underneath the entire neighborhood and beyond. Mr. Cardin brought up a raging, desert wildfire that sent millions of residents fleeing their homes.

But she only half listened to him, absorbed in the memory of her secret as if easing into a hot spring. Now Mr. Cardin brought up terrible floods in the heartland. There was flooding that spring long ago too. The ditch that ran beside her parents’ white, brick ranch-style roared with rushing water.

She listened, closing her eyes, huddled in the mildewed carport with the cats and the spiders. Afterwards, for days, the ditch ran with brown, clogged water. She spent the following overcast afternoons walking up and down above the length of the ditch, watching the manmade river recede, soaking by degrees into the unknown, subterranean spaces below.

The next Saturday–yes, it was a Saturday, she recalled–the ditch-way was dry once again. But the recent flooding had transformed it. The light gray concrete was stained a scintillating copper as if sprinkled with glitter. A magical, high-walled highway opened to her as she slid down into it on her bare feet.

(Mr. Cardin said, “Surviving the chaos of disaster related Information and Referral.” The back of the green shirted, shovel-handed man’s thicket of white hair bobbed up and down like a boat on choppy waters.)

It was noon when she found it. She was resting from her ditch-exploration in front of the round O of a drainage pipe. Her father had warned those pipes might contain dangerous bugs, toxic chemicals, practically anything. She closed her eyes, breathing in the tunnel’s dankness. The cooler air trickled out to spill upon her warm face and bare legs. Then she decided to play a game with herself: exploring the nearby ditch floor with her eyes still closed. She would determine–by touch alone—what her hands found there. Almost immediately, she encountered a small triangle of muck on the ditch floor.

The thing, she imagined in her mind’s eye, was small and black and red. It felt like dozens of wet, tiny rocks or shattered beads or bones–perhaps multi-colored pieces of the ditch itself. The condensed leftovers of the recent flooding. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed her right index finger down into the muck. It slid into cold ground below it.

(Mr. Cardin said, “…able to input information received from local authorities into the product.”)

It wasn’t just a mound of trash and rocks on the ditch floor–it was a crack within the floor of the ditch itself! Who knew how deep the crack might reach? She giggled and pushed her finger down further, leaning over the filth. She experimented with inserting additional fingers. Then her whole hand. Then her forearm all the way down to her elbow. Her eyes clenched closed with a delicious horror as she realized she couldn’t feel her submerged limb at all. She imagined the little delta of filth and the hungry soil below it stretching out her skin, her bones, her bloody parts, drawing them into itself. To be consumed by the ditch–by the ditch beneath the ditch. But when, with a spasm of fear and delight, her eyes opened, she found that the numb limb was whole, resting against her now upright body. The triangle of muck itself was nowhere at all–the copper-colored, concrete slabs of ditch in front of her warm and solid to the touch. Had she dreamed it? Impossible. Her hand and arm up to the elbow was numb. It was as if she had fallen asleep upon it and woke up with a useless appendage, but–no–she could still move her arm. She wagged fingers in front of her astonished face. There was no panic, no worry of any kind. This was a decidedly pleasant lack of feeling. It was almost as if her arm was still submerged below the surface of the ditch floor. Like it was nothing at all.

She spent the rest of that day marveling at her phantom hand. The fingers that glided back and forth in front of her face looked no different than the fingers on her left hand. But — and this was the most amusing, almost absurd aspect of the experience — the movements of her phantom arm and fingers seemed disconnected from the rest of her body, so much so that they could almost belong to any stranger… or any ghost. And when she experimented with touching her left hand and then her own face with her phantom hand, her amusement and sense of awe redoubled. The clammy fingers on her arm, on her face did not feel at all like her own. But they were hers to control at will, like a remote-control robot’s appendage. She dared herself to close her eyes again and see if she could rediscover the little delta of filth. But no–she decided to extend the game further. In the meanwhile, she would savor the magic of the day, the ditch, the crack leading to unknown depths. Tomorrow she would return.

The numbness fell into a tingling sensation by nightfall. By the next morning her arm and fingers felt normal again. But the experience in the ditch was so deliciously odd. Of course, she returned the next day to the same spot in the ditch, which had deepened in color to a kind of burnt orange. Her breath catching with anticipation, she closed her eyes and reached down to the numbing spot in which she knew the crack in the ditch, in the world, would open. But she couldn’t find it. She tried again, closer to the drainage pipe this time, but had no luck. Hours passed filled with frustration, pain and–finally–panic. How wretched is the terror of misplacing something precious. A worn stuffed animal, a note from a secretly adored classmate. She left the ditch that evening, palms and knees scratched and bruised from an afternoon of crawling on concrete, eyes tightly shut. She had searched, unseeing, all along the surface of the ditch. Her gasps and sobs of frustration echoed within the concrete depths of the drainage pipes.

(Mr. Cardin described how a river levee was breached and one hundred downtown city blocks were submerged. The green shirted man again held up his shovel of a hand, which had, she noticed, one too many fingers.)

As the years ticked by following her remarkable ditch discovery, the details faded. They grew tinier and tinier in her memory until she dismissed them altogether as a waking daydream, a mere fancy of the girl she had been before terrestrial experience and time extracted stillness from all her days to come.

But then the National Disaster Network selected her small, childhood city as their annual conference spot. The morning after her late-night flight, she drove a rental car to her old street, to her old house… to the ditch behind it. And she found the thing again. No, she rediscovered it there. And more.

Afterwards, she had returned to the conference hotel in a muffled daze. She viewed the world around her as if from underwater. Ripples of sparkling glass now appeared between herself and the escalators and suitcase pushers, the social workers and dull-eyed administrators. Later, in her box of a room, she closed her eyes and heard distant bells. Bells from deep beneath the earth, perhaps under the water. The miracle she had experienced as a child again spoke through those bells.

Invisible. Untouchable. 

The chiming resolved all at once into the ringing of her cell phone.

“Deirdre,” her boss said when she finally answered, “where have you been? You know you missed the disaster committee meeting, right?”

How could she explain what she had seen earlier that day and how she felt, to her boss or–for that matter–anyone?

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t try. The thing was hers to keep.

Deirdre apologized, feigning illness. It was a perfunctory excuse, one she was sure her boss didn’t buy, but Deirdre didn’t care. She smiled as small, cool fingers caressed her face.

Her hands, her arms couldn’t feel a thing.

II

Earlier that day, before Mr. Cardin’s presentation, Deirdre drove to her childhood home. She noticed the greater foliage up and down the streets. Many of the parking lots in front of shabby shops were empty. She observed a light brown building, shuttered, with a “Shield of Faith” marquee near the street. So many more building fronts appeared dotting the roadway with no signs at all. And many buildings she recalled were gone now–replaced with messy flora. It was as if her hometown had devolved, as if the landscape to which it belonged was drawing the mill town back into itself. That old bar, Bronco Billy’s, passed by, one of the few establishments she recognized. It was closer to Municipal Park than she remembered it.

She crossed the half-bridge where the park’s lake fed into a small trio of anemic, man-made waterfalls. Deirdre wondered if the waterway fed into the labyrinth of ditches in her neighborhood. Were all such waterways and ditch systems in all townships part of the same intricate system? It hadn’t rained for some time.

The green arch of Municipal Park, smaller and shabbier than she remembered it, appeared to her left. She glanced at the thin, tall pines and the skeletal playground beyond it. Finally, she reached a landmark that was exactly as she recalled: the old black steam engine. It had red and white wheels and was enclosed in a wrought iron enclosure. The thing always looked less like a real train, though, than it did a toy somehow grown gargantuan. Rather hideous, she thought.

Deirdre was in no hurry despite the looming committee meeting at the convention hotel–less so as she continued along. She was lulled by the projection of the past laid upon her present road trip. She passed a church she remembered (the last of many, almost on every corner it seemed). It was gray with a red, rectangular awning. As she passed, she read a snippet of the church marquee: “IF YOU ARE NOT WHERE YOU ONCE WERE” something something “GUESS YOU MOVED?”

Now she was close–a suburban area of town, or what passed for it. She drove by tons of one story ranch-style houses. There were two story houses as well, which looked like small houses stacked on top of ranch-styles. Minor service roads ran parallel on either side of the main drag. Deirdre veered onto one of them, which was heavily wooded on each side. She had entered her old neighborhood, Alpine Hills. The streets appeared almost purple here–scored with lighter rock within the pavement. The large lawns were well mown, though dotted with brown bare patches. The houses themselves were faded, worn without the appearance of actual disrepair.

Deirdre made the turn onto her old street, feeling that the past was consuming the present by degrees. Here especially the neighborhood looked like an unaltered version of the one she remembered but for the expansive overgrowth. More pines, bigger oaks and magnolias but all with a threadbare look peculiar to hurricane ravaged trees. She noticed the unusual, short, concrete street name obelisk-signs were still present. FRIBOURG STREET.

And then there it was–her old house: the long, low brick ranch-style house, still painted white with dark blue shutters. She parked her rental in front of it and walked halfway down the driveway pavement, noting that there was no indication anyone was home. This stood to reason. It was a weekday–kids at school, adults working or out. Deirdre entered the backyard, noticing the open carport, still smelling of mildew after all this time. She was only interested in the ditch, though. And it was gone.

The realization was startling and dismaying. More than her old house, more than the worn, purple streets that she once haunted or the obelisk street signs, the ditch embodied her childhood. So many days exploring the neighborhood from behind and below it, gathering dewberries from the ditch walls with a friend or two. Spying on rival neighborhood kids playing in other backyards. Lurking, giggling, till one or two children spotted them in the ditch. She remembered when some kids began hurling red dirt clods at Deirdre and her companions. She and her friends ran away down the runny pavement of the ditch, laughing madly.

But it didn’t make sense. How and why did the city have the ditch filled in? She walked along the area in which her memory insisted the ditch lay. Everything covered with pine straw and dotted with overgrowth now, a wheelbarrow on its side near the terminal point in the back of the property. Everything gone.

A sense of loss, all out of proportion, welled in Deirdre, originating from a twisting in her stomach and rising into her gorge. She could feel it squeeze through her neck into the hollow of her head. The tears began, which she fiercely wiped away, clenching her eyes shut with a desire to dam the loss, or at least divert it elsewhere.

Immediately upon closing her eyes, though, Deirdre sensed a change in her surroundings. She opened her eyes again and looked around, seeing only shabby crabgrass and pine straw where the ditch once ran. She closed her eyes once more and immediately felt, and, what’s more, smelled it–the ditch that once was, specifically after a significant rainfall event.

Deirdre kept her eyes shut to maintain the illusion and tested it, walking towards one of the walls she felt sure was close. Astonished, she felt the rough, mineral-rich, slanting concrete with one and then both hands. Deirdre opened her eyes again to find her arms extended into blank space, an azalea bush in front of her. She sniffed her hand. Yes, it smelled like the ditch.

Her eyes closed again. Deirdre could feel the concrete wall. Now, blindly, she began walking down the drainage-way she once knew so well. The projection of the past onto the present felt stronger than it ever had been. Soon she stopped groping the side of the ditch altogether, memory giving her sight. Deirdre made the ninety degree turns when needed, feeling every invisible backyard as it came up on her left or right. And then she was there. The spot, about a block from her home near that drainage pipe. She could feel dank, cold air from it on her face. How long had it been since she felt real awe? Had she, in fact, ever felt it as she did in that moment? There was no doubt in her mind that she hadn’t.

The little delta of filth was there, and–eyes closed–she could see it vividly.

There was a desiccated black bean label by it, can missing. And the muck itself, she saw now, originated from the pipe in front of her–a kind of dark but glittering pile of refuse left over from the flooding the days before. A concentrated muck concealing a secret that had been waiting for her in this other-ditch for decades.

Deirdre fought the impulse to open her eyes, filled with that old, delicious mixture of dread and delight. She knelt before the delta, the smell rank but fertile. Sharp.

She pushed, gradually, even luxuriantly, one, two, and then all the fingers of her right hand into the cold, moist filth. And pushed. And pushed further. Eventually she worked her entire arm to the shoulder into it. A phantom arm within a phantom ditch. For, truly, she could no longer feel it.

Her eyes almost opened of their own accord then, but she fought to keep them closed. Deirdre removed her numb, right arm and inserted her left into the delta.

“Can I help you, ma’am? Are you hurt?”

Deirdre’s eyes finally opened, and she found herself in the back part of a yard she recognized. Mrs. Lee’s yard. She must be long dead now. A grinning, middle-aged man (her son?) with a sizable belly and a rake was peeking from behind a large pile of pine straw at her. Deirdre giggled. It looked like he was playing hide and seek, and she had spotted him.

“Ma’am?” The man’s voice and his dull blue eyes looked worried in spite of his grin. Then Deirdre realized he was of that rare breed of unfortunates who could not easily close their mouths. “Ma’am? What… what happened to your arms?”

The absurd combination of grinning fear and that genteel, familiar south Alabama drawl, made her laugh harder. The man’s face intensified into a mask of smiling horror.

She looked down at her numb arms, which were now a kind of burnt orange color and were perhaps thinner and shorter than they should be. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. She had had her eyes closed for so long. In any case, her arms, though senseless, seemed usable.

When she looked back towards the grinning man, he was gone as if he had never been there in the first place. Probably had run to call 911. Time to go.

Deirdre closed her eyes just once more. She couldn’t help herself. And soon she was grinning herself. The ditch was still there. And, she knew, so was the little delta of filth.

Time to leave. But she would return soon to finish what she had started.

III

Her arms had changed. There was no doubt about it. Reduced in every way. Driving had been something of a challenge, not only because her arms were shorter but also because they lacked any feeling at all. Deirdre, though, remained unconcerned. She floated in the midst of a delicious, continual reverie. The numbness of her arms contained the cool nothingness of subterranean spaces below the grass and pine straw, below the hidden ditch itself. Below it all.

Once in the hotel parking garage she draped her suit jacket over her shoulders, concealing her transformed limbs within them. She was only biding her time, though. Ensuring that any police investigating a possible trespass report was complete before she returned.

After Mr. Cardin’s workshop, Deirdre’s boss asked her to stay in the hall for a talk.

“You don’t look too bad off to me. What’s wrong?”

“It’s my head. I think I may have a fever.”

He sighed and put on his warning voice.

“You know how important tomorrow’s meeting is to the agency. The funders are watching every move we make, and we’re better positioned to impress them than ever. I need you to be present. You can’t flake out on me, Deirdre.”

How ridiculous. As if tomorrow’s meeting or Deirdre’s behavior or the agency itself were of any consequence at all to anyone.

She stared at the projector’s blank light against the presentation screen.

“Don’t let it bother you,” she said.

“Excuse me?” A sharper tone. “You know better than anyone what will happen to the agency if we don’t start… I need to know where your head is, Deirdre.”

“In the ditch.”

“What the hell?”

Deirdre looked at her boss–his thick, bald head and little round glasses shimmering–and smirked.

His face darkened.

“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this matter, Deirdre. If you can’t hold it together, you might be looking for another job soon. You should be worried about your future. Consider this a wakeup call.”

Deirdre felt like sneering at the little man, so concerned with budgets and impressing the right people, so obsessed with his illusions of ego and control. What could he know about depth, true depth? The man was a cartoon character–no more. A distraction from the silent spaces below this hotel, the inner substance of this town, perhaps the whole world.

“But I’m not worried about my future… sir. Why should I be?”

This disconcerted her boss. He changed tactics.

“Deirdre, look. I didn’t mean that just now. But what’s wrong? You really haven’t been yourself today.”

“I already told you,” Deirdre said with a little jump in her chair. “I’m not well.” With that, she shrugged her suit jacket off her shoulders. It fell onto the floor.

Her boss took one look at Deidre’s arms and collapsed out of his chair.

“Dear god,” he said, scooting like a crab away from her.

Deirdre approached and stepped over the cringing man, not bothering to look over her shoulder at him on her way out of the workshop hall, not bothering to retrieve her suit jacket.

“No worries. If you need me, I’ll be under the ditch,” she said.

But her terrified boss only whimpered in response.

IV

The trip back that night to her old neighborhood, to the ditch, was timeless. Deirdre had to drive slowly, chest close to the dashboard. Her senseless arms had grown even smaller, her tiny fingers barely capable of grasping the steering wheel. It felt like she was driving with her mind. A wondrous anticipation coupled with anxiety grew within her. Would Deirdre be able to find her way back to the little delta of filth in time? Or–even worse–would the treasure of the phantom ditch reject her as it had all those years ago?

But a delicious, dreadful sense of fate erased these worries by degrees as she came closer and closer to her neighborhood. She inched along the empty road towards the park and Alpine Hills beyond it. Deirdre almost pulled over on the half-bridge and jumped into the dam spillway in her eagerness. But she couldn’t be sure that the trickling trio of waterfalls and the drainage system to which it led were connected to her underworld ditch. Soon Deirdre had the impression of being driven rather than driving–her phantom limbs in control independently from her will. But, oh, she did choose this.

Her cell phone was ringing, ringing as she turned onto Fribourg Street, as she pulled up to Mrs. Lee’s house. Her arms by now were half their normal size but the fingers were starting to elongate, like crooked antennae. She had to kick off her sandals and open her car door with one foot.

It was late at night–quite late–and no lights were on in Mrs. Lee’s (now the grinning man’s) old ranch-style. She wondered vaguely if he was huddled up in his bedroom or living room, his grinning mouth and wide, terrified eyes pushed against a windowpane, waiting to see if the crazy lady with the little, orange arms had returned. The thought made Deirdre smile as she walked, barefoot, down his driveway and into the expansive backyard beyond it. The bells were ringing again, but not from her phone, which she had kicked with her car keys into the street sewer by the abandoned rental car. These were bells she could hear and feel, far beneath the shabby crabgrass, below the mounds of pine straw.

We will make you invisible. Untouchable, the bells said. We will make you so small–drawing you down into the cool, dank spaces below everything.

Deirdre closed her eyes and placed one and then two feet into the little delta of filth. And, gradually, deliciously… she began to sink.

The post PseudoPod 609: A Little Delta of Filth appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Joe Weintraub
• Narrator : Halloween Bloodfrost
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“A Visit to the Catacombs of Via Altamonvecchi” was originally published in Karamu (vol. xx, no. 2, Spring 2007), a literary review out of Eastern Illinois University. In addition, I have featured a shortened version in readings around the Chicago area, including at the Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub (then the only haunted bar in the Chicago metropolitan area).

This soundbed utilizes the following sources from Freesound.org (https://freesound.org/): Long Low Thunder 02 quiet autumn downtown street 03 Low Rumble pasture ambience LONG INT Cave Room tone Mystical Cavern Water Dripping in Cave Ewater_drip-echo stream running under rocks, glamorgan coast, wales Water Through Drain (With Reverb) A Visit to the Catacombs By J. Weintraub

Welcome to the catacombs of via Altamontivecchi, the grandest and one of the most ancient in the world. I will be your guide for this special pilgrim’s tour in the English language. If you have booked in advance, you will find the number 34 stamped on your ticket. If you have not booked in advance, you have no business being here. Please return tomorrow in the morning when there will be more tours for you in several languages.

For those of you who have booked in advance, please step inside.

Again, welcome to our tour. I trust you have all signed the waiver and have also had the opportunity to visit the facilities as instructed? Good. The visit will be of long duration, and there will be no opportunities once we are inside. Now, please hand over your tickets. Twelve places only. Thank you. Thank you. Please step inside. Thank you.

Before we proceed further, several cautions need to be spoken. Please stay close to me together so you will hear all of my instructions and absorb all the history and the other observations without the need for repetitions. But more important, you must not stray from the group. This is absolute. The galleries of via Altamontivecchi are quite intricate and are estimated to extend over 15 kilometers, longer than even the great complex of Domitilla outside the walls of Rome. Galleries lead into galleries in a most confusing manner, intersect with upper and lower levels, and at its outermost extremities, to the east and to the south, merge with unsafe pagan columbria linked to the worship of Mithra and Sabazius. If you become lost in these extremities, there is no assurance you will find your way out or be found. In the past century, in fact, an entire class, sixteen students and their professor, disappeared without a trace.

Of course, you might be saying to yourself, “All I need do is to follow my way back towards the light!” But that is not such an easy thing as you might think. I myself once thought in a similar manner, but I mistakenly took a passage that led me in the opposite direction, and when I tried to retrace my steps, I could only see an occasional flickering, like fireflies on a moonless night. Fortunately, I had not penetrated far, but there are sectors where huge crevices have opened, quite deep enough to swallow anyone who has strayed from the guided tour and then gone from there into eternity. Even in ancient days, when the galleries were new and expanding, guides like me were hired and passages were obstructed to prevent visitors and relatives from losing their way and eventually polluting these holy places with their unsanctified corpses.

So, please stay with the group and avoid curious wanderings. We want you to enjoy your visit!

Also, please avoid touching the walls and masonry. The galleries we will be visiting are quite safe, but catacombs require a soft, penetrable rock like this tufa. Slabs can be easily dislodged, and there are pockets just beneath the surface where the rock becomes loose and granular, almost like a liquid. Also, the ancients strengthened many of the vaults and stress points with brick, mortar, and plaster, all subject to erosion. You do not want to risk bringing down several tons of volcanic rock upon our heads for a souvenir.

And yes, to remove anything from the premises, from the smallest stone to an undiscovered fragment of a relic, is a criminal offense. The Altamontivecchi catacombs are a national treasure.

So, we are understood? Are there questions? Good. We can begin our tour. Please hold onto the railing and proceed carefully. The descent is steep and the steps are as old as the catacombs themselves, carved directly from the rock and rubbed smooth by the footsteps of numberless pilgrims just like yourself. Note the small square apertures cut into the walls where oil lamps were placed to light the way for many centuries, depositing an impressive residue of soot and grime along the passageway. Another reason to avoid contact with the walls and to thank providence for the miracle of electricity.

We arrive now at the most recent construction, an extensive marble altar erected shortly after the rediscovery of the catacombs during the so-called Bloody Schism. Here it is said that many sacraments were performed in private until the authorities of the Counter Reformation put a stop to it. Note the fine decorative ornament on the altar stone, with garlands and cornucopia almost pagan in their exuberance.

Now as we turn down this path . . .  and then into this one, you will note that all natural light has vanished behind us. Without the electric lights on the walls and the torch in my hand, we would be in total darkness. Here, along both walls, in the displays behind the glass, are the artifacts that have been found in the tombs and their surrounding spaces. Note the iron, bronze, and ceramic lamps that I mentioned earlier. Also we have the digging tools—mattocks and picks—left by the fossores, numerous offerings—coins, glass vials, earthenware vessels—and mementoes of the dead—rings, bracelets, and brooches, and even this toy doll, carved from ivory, found embedded in the stucco sealing the grave of the eight-year-old Aurelia Hyacinth.

In the far corner, you see pottery shards, cooking pots, stone fetishes, and iron utensils of great antiquity. These were found at the end of the last century with the collapse of a wall during an excavation that revealed behind it a cavern hidden since Neolithic times. Among the shards and cookware were fragments of human bones, also scorched like the pottery. It is unknown whether this was the result of primitive funerary practices or, as one radical archaeologist suggests, signs of ritual cannibalism among our native ancestors. In either case, it speaks of the long habitation of the site and its ancient ceremonial significance.

Now, as we turn into the central gallery, look up to the roof of the vault. Near what was once a skylight, you see the great image of the Majestas Domini, thought to have been painted in the late third century. Scholars tell us that since this is the first known portrayal of Christ Enthroned surrounded by a nimbus—a device typical of pagan iconography–the painting is likely to have been superimposed upon an earlier fresco of Helios, God of the Sun.

It is also exactly here at this spot, just where that young lady is standing—no, no, Miss, you don’t need to move —where Tomas the shepherd fell through that very skylight above us to his death. The opening had been sealed long before to prevent such an unfortunate incident, but perhaps several months of floods and the seepage led to its collapse. We can only hope that enough natural light followed from his fall to illuminate the magnificent image above him as Tomas lay there on his broken back, dying.

Tomas was given credit for the re-discovery of the Altamontivecchi catacombs, but in truth, it was his herd of abandoned sheep and his barking dog that brought the villagers to the site. And if it had not been for the intercession of Father Adrian, now beatified by the Holy See, the opening may have been quickly resealed by the superstitious peasants and the catacombs again forgotten. A simple parish priest, Father Adrian was also a learned man and deeply committed to the defense of the Church against a violent iconoclasm then wreaking havoc and bloodshed across the countryside. What a superb witness then is this striking vision above us to the importance and power of the image for the first believers, the founders of the true Church.

As we descend deeper into the earliest parts of the complex and turn here, we arrive at the Corridor of the Martyrs, the most important of our pilgrim sites. Yes, it is quite impressive, isn’t it? Row upon row, tier upon tier of burial slots, graves like shelves or berths on a ship carved into the rock. They are called loculi and they extend seemingly endlessly into the darkness, ample evidence of the ferocity of the third- and fourth-century persecutions, particularly during the reigns of Valerian and Diocletian.

No, all of the loculi here were emptied of their remains long ago, some the victims of barbarian plunderings, others translocated to the surface where they could be venerated more publicly, and still others transported far beyond our borders during the eighth and ninth centuries when the market for relics was especially active and profitable.

And, of course, not all of these are the graves of martyrs or saints. Most of the epitaphs and graffiti were inscribed years after the burials, and entire communities wished to be entombed near those who could intercede in their behalf in the world to come. But note the simplicity and starkness of the arrangement and the lack of ornament or display, testimony to the modest circumstances of the original believers, but also the willingness of those in higher stations to humble themselves as part of a congregation before God.

But still, martyrs and saints were laid to rest here, and we know for a fact that in this tiny niche the holy Palladian once reposed, and in these six graves, one atop the other, lay the six Coronati—Praetorian guards converted, brutally tortured, and thereafter crowned with the gift of martyrdom. Here, at my eyelevel, was once the saintly Petros, and in this narrow slot just below, lay his skin, now venerated in Budapest. In here the holy Valeria was interred, although her head was claimed for via Altamarina. Here Palomon the Elder and by his side Palomon the Younger, or at least those parts that could be retrieved from the horses. Posidius. Pontesilea, Aprius—said to be a follower of the anti-Pope Novatian—Dalmatius, Onager, Vitalia, Rubilla, Viktor, and the one, two, three, four, five sons of Renata, and above, the blessed Renata herself. Beneath this cavity, you can still see engraved the single word Stercorius, or “abandoned in garbage,” although whether this is the name of the martyr or simply where his remains were first deposited is unknown.

These two cavities, when opened, first seemed empty, but the inscriptions and the traces of paint seemingly depicting flames on the arcosolium of this one convinced the ecclesiastical authorities that the heavy residue of ash found inside was none other than St. Eventius. In the other one? In there nothing more than two pairs of pincers were found, but it was believed that the shreds of flesh soldered into the grooves of the prongs once belonged to St. Marcella.

Farther on down the loculi become more sparse, but the graves increase again in number as we move into the latter half of the fourth century with its multitude of heterodoxies, and then at the end of the passageway, behind the grating, the surprisingly ornate ossuarium of the Heresiarch Ostian, who was interred here with the bones of 200 of his slaughtered followers. If you visit the smaller complex at via Altamarina, you will see the crypticum of the Archbishop Fabian, who has been credited with the extermination of the cult.

Now, allow me to turn on the interior light, and as you pass the grating, look toward the lunettes of the arcosolium just above the altar, and you will see a series of remarkably realistic chthonic and zoomorphic representations painted by an anonymous Thracian artist, who, if the inscription is to be believed, was sympathetic to the sect and eventually joined them here.

Oh, my . . . oh, no . . . Don’t be frightened. Please, Madam. . . . This happens on occasion. Power failures like these are common in the late summer. Or perhaps there’s been a short circuit. The severe humidity. Here, let me try something. This switch just over here. . . . Sometimes after an overload, we can simply click it off—there—and then wait a moment before I click it back on. . . . There. . . . No, that’s not it. I suppose it is a power failure. We have had a very oppressive summer, and I’m sure the lights, air conditioners, refrigerators, and such above ground are all in the black, too, just like here below. But still we must proceed, and thankfully, I have the light of my torch to guide us. The batteries were replaced several weeks ago, so we should be just fine. But please, stay close to me as we move on.

These stairs will lead us to the next level below and into the fifth century. I will shine the light on the steps, but be sure to take hold of the railing as you descend. Yes, I know it is a bit unsteady from the porous nature of the rock here, but it will be perfectly safe if you proceed carefully. . . . Here, I have reached bottom, and if you will first gather around me, we will continue into the gallery.

On this level, we witness the enormous growth of what was once a tiny congregation of true believers now spread across the land despite the state’s attempts to eradicate them. Again, row upon row, tier upon tier of graves, excavated at considerable cost, yet worth the expense to those who wished to be interred nearby the saints and martyrs of previous generations.

Here much of the original plaster and terracotta tiles are still in place, along with the remains interred inside. Apparently this level was unknown to the barbarians and others who vandalized the tombs. But they would not have found much of value had they in fact penetrated this far. These were ordinary folk, their bones not worthy of public veneration, the mementoes interred with them—copper jewelry, vials of unguents, small coins, and toys for the children— all of little artistic or monetary worth. But still a unique site since many of the epitaphs are as visible as when they were inscribed into the plaster. See HIC REQUIESCIT here, and here HIC REQUIESCIT, and here HIC REQUIESCIT, and up and down the gallery HIC REQUIESCIT, HIC REQUIESCIT, HIC REQUIESCIT. Not very creative, these ordinary folk, but an impressive display, nevertheless.

As we turn towards the chamber reserved for your group, the corridor becomes very narrow. Please single file here, and you might want to place your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you until we reach the great Cryptoporticus of Danilo at the Spelunca Magna.

Now attention, please, as we turn here. The rubble you see on your right spilling into your path seals a transverse gallery that once led to the famous Capella of the Good Shepherd—all destroyed when the passage and several others collapsed five years ago last month during the previous eruption of Altamontivecchi and the ensuing earthquake. An unredeemable loss. By the by, I hope you have had the opportunity to visit our Altamontivecchi volcano during the evening time. A spectacular display, particularly around the crater where the lava flow is especially impressive.

Here you see the plaque recently dedicated to the Dacian pilgrims who were awaiting the return of their guide when the first tremors struck. Unfortunately, my good friend Nicolo, who was still on the surface, was killed instantly in the collapse of the basilica, and with so much chaos and devastation above, little thought was given to those awaiting Nicolo here below. Of course, it probably was no matter, since the galleries and cubiculi hereabouts seemed to have disappeared completely. At least, when shafts were sunk from above, they struck nothing but rock, and excavations here were abandoned in face of the tons of solid granite that had tumbled into the passageway.

It was no accident, some superstitions people say, that the incident occurred in the vicinity of the Cubiculum of Danilo, and here we are. Note the brick masonry on the vault, required to support the tufa in this sector, and the plaster surfaces where fragments of color from the frescoes that once appeared here can still be seen. Over there, behind the grating, is the throne of Danilo carved from solid rock and where bits of gold leaf still sparkle in the light of my torch.

On either side are the seats occupied by the catechist and presiding deacon, and the low stone benches were probably set aside for the instruction of the catechumens. No one knows what rites were performed here, although there are suggestions of a corrupt Eucharist liturgy. The paintings were largely destroyed during the purifications of the late fifth century, but note the remnants of la banquet scene on the vault, either a celestial or diabolical convivium, and over there is what might be the earliest representation of the devil. You can barely see the gaping mouth of the demon amidst the roaring flames of hell, although some scholars say it is rather the maw of the leviathan about to swallow Jonas and the flames are merely waves.

Behind the throne is the crypt where the sarcophagus of Danilo was to rest. The walls here, too were once covered with frescoes and grotesqueries, but in this instance even the plaster was scraped from the masonry, and nothing remains. Of course, the great Apostate was never interred here, his ashes scattered to the four winds, but it is said by superstitious people that his spirit animates these corridors when the sun disappears in the west.

Now we descend in this direction, and please form again into a very narrow single line. Careful. The ground is uneven, and you will notice a trembling at your feet as we cross over a very swift subterranean river. The current is especially strong this year because of the heavy summer rains, and this explains the thick moisture on the walls and the chill in the air. No, no, Madam, that was only a cold draft, I’m sure,  that passed over your feet. From the river, probably. There are no vermin down here.

And here we arrive at our terminus. This chamber is called the Capella of Peace, from the inscription IN PACE AETERNA engraved over the portal.

All of you come inside. You must now remove the robes from your packs and put them on. There are additional robes on the shelf there if you neglected to bring one. Place your packs, your guidebooks, and your other belongings in the corner here. They will be safe.

Be sure all of your garments are well covered. The loculi here are clean–all remains and offerings, of course, have been removed—but dust and dirt continue to erode from the walls. Use the hoods to protect your heads, but careful not to wrap it around your nose or mouth. It will be close enough for you inside as is.

All the loculi here are about the same size, but the elderly among you may want to choose the ones closest to the ground. There are stepladders about for those of you who can climb to a higher tier and are not uncomfortable with the sensation of height.

No, I’m sorry. You must all find a place for yourself. Yes, I know, people do change their minds, but there is nothing I can do about it now. You have come this far and you must carry on to the end. No, I cannot take anyone back under any circumstances. You must find your place here. There are no benches or resting spots nearby, and besides, you must not leave the chamber in my absence, especially now that we are suffering through a power failure. I assure you that this is an experience that will change you forever. To meditate among our ancient martyrs and saints in this famed locus sanctus, to join spiritually a community of primitive believers and the pilgrims and people of God who followed in their path and acted as you are about to act, this is a privilege permitted only to a few and many have waited in vain for years to participate. As the graffito over there  reminds us: Intra limina sanctorum, quod multi cupiunt et rari accipiunt.

So, take my hand, and you can slide in right here. That’s right, on your back with your arms crossed over your chest. A nice fit. Yes, I know it feels tight. It often feels tight. Our ancestors were smaller than we are, and they usually arrived here in a state of considerable desiccation. But this will help you to remain still. You must not move or shift your position. You certainly do not want to wedge yourself inside, by trying, say, to turn onto your stomach, and be sure, all of you, to avoid sudden movements. Tufa is soft rock, but it is rock nevertheless, and the mattocks have left sharp ridges.

Those tremors? I am sure they are no more than the vibrations from the river running beneath us nearby.

Now, all of you, now that you have found your places and are comfortable, breathe slowly and quietly. If you become anxious, concentrate on breathing more slowly, regularly, silently—otherwise, you will feel as if you are suffocating, which only contributes to your anxiety. Respect the meditations of those around you and the sanctity of the place. Yes, I know. I have participated in this very chamber twice myself. I know how tight it can feel, and I, too, have tasted in my mouth the dirt and the grit of the place. But that is all part of the experience we promised you, as is this. . . . There. I have extinguished my torch, and you find yourself within a darkness so profound it is palpable. Do not be afraid. Study the darkness. Look into the darkness until it becomes one with you and you are one with it, separate from every living thing in the world above.

I can find my way out in the darkness. Ignore the quiet breath of your neighbors and allow the silence to envelop you as I leave.

I should be back before very long.

The post PseudoPod 608: A Visit to the Catacombs of Via Altamonvecchi appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Damien Angelica Walters
• Narrator : Justine Eyre
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“Take A Walk In The Night, My Love” was first published in The Madness of Dr. Caligari in 2016.

Take a Walk in the Night, My Love by Damien Angelica Walters

He is a good man. Remember that. He is a good man.

There’s something in the bed, something that scratches your skin when you move your legs, and you whip the sheets aside, fearing an insect, or worse—a spider. Dirt, coarse and abrasive, clings to your feet and ankles, between your toes. You hiss in a breath, shake your husband’s pajama-clad arm.

Half-asleep, he mumbles, “What’s wrong?”

“There’s dirt in the bed.” Your voice is little more than a whisper.

He rolls over, wiping grit from the corner of his eye. “What time is it?”

“Just after six. Look,” you say, pointing to your feet.

He sits and untangles his legs from the sheets. No dirt there, only on your side, on your skin. Your arms break out in gooseflesh, even though it’s mid-spring and your bedroom is warm.

“Did I get out of bed last night?” Your voice is thick with unshed tears.

“Not that I’m aware, but you know me, I sleep like a stone,” he says. “Maybe you were sleepwalking.”

“I’ve never done that before, have I?”

He shrugs and shakes his salt and pepper hair from his eyes. “I don’t think so.”

The bright sunlight, welcome after several days of unceasing rain, makes the lines fanning the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth appear deeper than usual, makes the fifteen years between the two of you more than evident.

He takes your hand, but you slip free and swing your legs over the side of the bed. There’s a smattering of dirt on the floor as well. And in the hallway, and on the stairs. You make out the curve of a heel here, the smudge of a toe there. You pinch the bridge of your nose before descending, still clad in your nightgown. More dirt leads from the back door, which is shut and locked as it should be. Through the window, you see impressions on the stone patio as well.

Beyond the patio, the grass of the large, sweeping lawn shimmers with dew. Several acres separate the house, a brick two-story, four-bedroom built in a neoclassical style, from the towering pines at the edge of the property.

His footsteps are soft behind you.

“Look,” you say, pointing.

He takes your shoulders in hand. “Maybe… Maybe it’s ah…hormonal. You are turning fifty in a few months.”

You feel the smile softening his words and lean back against his chest. “So I’m getting old? Is that your official diagnosis, Doctor?”

He clears his throat, scuffs one foot on the floor.

“Healthy adults don’t just start sleepwalking,” you say. “They don’t. Not even with changing hormones.”

He kisses the top of your head. “Are you sure you don’t remember getting up?”

You bark a laugh. “For what? To go outside in the yard? It isn’t even trash day,” you say, regretting the words as soon as they’re past your lips. They sound absurd. As absurd as the thought of sleepwalking. And yet, a quick memory flashes in your head—you turning back the sheets and slipping from bed as quietly as possible, your fingers trembling and mouth dry.

He turns you round and kisses your lips, softly, sweetly. “If it bothers you that much, you can always call the doctor.”

“Not confident in your diagnosis?” you say, smiling a little.

He kisses you again. “Honestly, my love, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

You’re brushing your teeth and then you’re in the back yard. You blink in the darkness, take a step back, the grass soft beneath your bare feet, and press fingers to temple. Lilac perfumes the night air, and the chirrup of crickets and the distant hoots of an owl give it voice.

The taste of mint lingers on your tongue. You’re in your nightgown, your hair still pulled back from your face with a fabric headband. You shake your head, as though you can shake this away. You were in the bathroom. The bathroom. And then you were here, with no memory of the journey in between. Your stomach clenches, painfully so. You can’t sleepwalk when you’re wide awake so how did you get here? And why?

Behind you, the door opens with a bang. He’s wide-eyed and worry-lined, crossing the lawn in long strides until he’s at your side. He reaches for you, then lets his hand drop. The lines on his face deepen. His mouth works, but nothing emerges, and a lump grows in your throat.

Finally, he says, “Julia?”

“I…” you manage. “I don’t know what happened. I was inside, I was brushing my teeth, and then, and then—”

Tears spill over your lashes, stealing your voice away. He takes you into his arms and you breathe him in, holding tight. I’m not well, you think. It’s the only explanation.

The tears continue to fall, and when they stop, your voice is a sandpaper rasp, “I think I should see the doctor now.”

He hugs you closer. “We’ll make that happen,” he says into your hair.

Several days of tests pass in a blur. Bloodwork, an EEG, a CAT scan, an MRI. Words run through your head all the while—epilepsy, meningitis, brain tumor. When the doctor says there’s nothing physically wrong with you, you laugh. You can’t help it. He prescribes rest and Valium to help calm your nerves, and while you’re sure you don’t need the latter, you take the prescription anyway.

On the drive home, you twist your hands in your lap and stare at the passing scenery. Old houses, older trees, luxury cars. Everything feels wrong, as though you’re an actress on an elaborate movie set, in a role you’ve not prepared for. Your spine grows cold and you shudder, digging half-moons in your palms with your fingernails.

“Julia, is everything okay?” he asks. “How are you feeling?”

“Disjointed,” you say, turning your gaze toward him, taking comfort in the planes of his face. “As though I’ve something on the tip of my tongue, something I should know, but don’t.”

While waiting at the stoplight, he meets your eyes. His are dark brown, the sort that appear almost black in certain light. You’re a lucky woman; he’s a kind and gentle man, not at all like most of the plastic surgeons portrayed on television, all filled with ego and arrogance and grand delusions of perfection.

You remember when you first met at a small coffee shop on the other side of town. How your heel slipped on a lid someone had dropped on the floor, and he grabbed your arm just in time to keep you from falling. You shared a table that day and three months later you said I do, though it didn’t feel like an impulsive decision. It felt like the right one. You loved him, loved the light in his eyes when he looked at you. No one had ever looked at you that way. You still feel the same, even after twenty-five years.

Right now, though, fear coils in your belly, a fear both strange and yet familiar. Not of him, but of something else.

He rubs your thigh. “Julia, my love, all shall be well.”

You nod.

All shall be well.

The Valium makes you foggy headed and you brew a pot of coffee stronger than usual, hoping it will cut through the haze. Unfortunately, it’s barely drinkable, even with copious amounts of milk and sugar. Still, you take small sips, trying to swallow as quickly as you can before the bitterness sets in.

You wander the house, trailing fingertips across the dark wood furniture. Family heirlooms, most of it, and it fills you with calm. In the library, your favorite room in the house with its built-in shelves and comfortable furniture, you select a book at random and sink into the corner chair, your legs curled beneath you.

Yet the Valium dulls your focus and after a time, you set the book aside in favor of a photo album—the two of you on holiday, an island in the Caribbean, the name of which escapes you at the moment. Fruity drinks with paper umbrellas, bright turquoise water, white sand. Breakfasts in bed; making love beneath a swirling ceiling fan, your bodies coated in sweat; walks in the moonlight. The smell of the sea, of hibiscus blooming in red profusion.

Barbados. The word swims into your mind and you nod to yourself. Yes, you were in Barbados. You turn another page in the album, revealing several photos of only you, sitting in bed with a sheet draped across your hips. You squint at the picture and slip it from its plastic sleeve, holding it close. There’s a scar on the right side of your abdomen.

You push down the waist band of your pants, trace your fingers over the smooth, scarless skin. You check the photo again and the strange fear settles in your belly. Scars can’t disappear. You check your abdomen yet again. There are creams and ointments to make them less apparent but there’s nothing on your skin. Not a dimple, not a bump, nothing.

At dinner, you ask, “Did I have my appendix out?”

He swallows his food, takes a quick sip of wine. “No, why?”

“Here,” you say, sliding the photo from your pocket and pushing it across the table.

He picks it up with a frown.

“Doesn’t it look like I have a scar?”

He lets out a breathy laugh. “It looks like it, yes, but it’s a shadow. From the sheet, see?”

And it is a shadow. It’s so obvious your cheeks warm.

“We can arrange to have your appendix out though, if you really want to. That would be rather silly, though, wouldn’t it?” Although his face is serious, his eyes shine with mirth and then the corners of his mouth lift and a laugh bubbles up from your throat.

When the laughter begins to fade, he says, “Eat, my love.”

You cut a piece of steak. Chew. Swallow. “We should go back there.”

“Hmmm?”

“To Barbados.”

“Okay,” he says. “We will.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Is dinner okay?” you ask.

“It’s wonderful,” he says. “As always. I’m a little tired, that’s all.”

Someone is calling your name, over and over again. You freeze in place, blinking in confusion. You’re in the driveway, almost to the gated entrance, dressed in your nightgown with your purse slung over one shoulder. Light rain dances across your skin, plastering your hair to your cheeks and neck, and the stones of the driveway dig painfully into your bare feet.

“Julia!” he calls again and you turn.

Even in the darkness, his face seems pale and drawn.

“Where were you going?”

“I’m not sure,” you say, and then you are. “My mother. I was going to see my mother.”

“In the middle of the night, dressed like that? You must have been dreaming.”

“Yes, I think I was.”

“Here,” he says, extending one arm for you to loop yours through. “Walk on the grass so you don’t cut your feet.”

Halfway to the house, you say, “Can I go see her, though? My mother? Obviously not tonight, but it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

His forehead creases. “You mean her grave?”

The fear returns to your belly. Your mother’s dead?

“We can take flowers to the cemetery this weekend if you like,” he says.

“Yes, I’d like that,” you say. “I’d like that very much.”

Back in bed, he kisses your cheek and tells you to sleep. As your eyelids begin to slip shut, a moment of panic burns bitter on your tongue. You can’t remember your mother’s funeral. You should remember something like that, shouldn’t you?

You shake a Valium onto your palm but pause with your hand halfway to your mouth. There’s too much to do today for you to be dull-witted so you drop the pill back into the bottle.

After you finish the dusting and the vacuuming, you put another load of laundry in the washer and stand in the doorway of the laundry room, your arms slack at your sides, unsure what to do next. An odd sensation washes over you and leaves you cold. The house feels wrong. Everything feels wrong. Mouth desert dry, you walk to the powder room and stare at your reflection. Have your cheekbones always been so sharp, your lips so full? You run the water until it’s cold enough to hurt and splash your face again and again.

“Love?”

You jump and spin around, your hands and face still dripping.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m…I’m,” you say. “I’m scared. I don’t feel right. I—”

“Shhh,” he says. “Everything’s fine. You’re perfectly fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

And like that, your fear is gone, but even that feels wrong, because while you may no longer be afraid, you remember feeling that way.

“Julia, come,” he says. “It’s nearly lunchtime.”

You’re in the back yard again. Alone. You have a fork in one hand and your mouth tastes of balsamic vinaigrette.

“Julia?”

“What happened?” you say.

“You got up while we were eating and came outside.”

“Didn’t you try to stop me?”

“I did, but you pulled away.” His eyes are sad. “And, I wanted to see what you’d do.”

You take a step back. He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed.

“No,” he says. “It isn’t like that at all. I thought it might help me help you. I would never do anything to hurt you, Julia. You know that, don’t you?”

You nod, but there’s something odd in his face, something…sly. He’s doing this to you. You don’t know how or why, but he is. The question is, what exactly is he trying to make you do?

When he leaves to run errands, you wait until his car pulls out of sight before you go into his study. It smells of well-worn leather and something musky, his aftershave lotion perhaps. Bookcases line the walls and you trace your fingers over the spines. Medical journals, all of them, detailing surgical techniques. You turn on his computer, but it’s password protected and all your guesses are wrong. In the bottom drawer of the desk, there’s a small Moleskine notebook, not much larger than the palm of your hand, its cover creased and worn. Heart racing, you open it, revealing small, cramped writing. On the first page is a list of names and notations you neither recognize nor understand:

Dr. James Braid – the father of – Scottish – 18/19th century

Emile Coué – 19th century – placebos – autosuggestion

Franz Mesmer – mid-18th century – animal magnetism – man in black cloak

Milton Erickson – chronic pain – 1957 founding of TASoCH – patient need not be aware, as long as cured

Caligari – 11th century Italian mystic – somnambulist (Cesare) – murders

You flip to another page, hoping for something that makes more sense.

The first stage of hypnotherapy is going well. The patient is calm and relaxed, performing simple tasks as requested, responding to questions with the appropriate yes or no answers.

You frown. Hypnotherapy? But he’s a plastic surgeon. Retired now, but still. He flattened stomachs, augmented breasts, erased wrinkles on aging faces. Was this something he studied previously? Something he did on the side? If so, he never mentioned it either way. He never said a word.

Neither the writing nor the paper look new, and the page edges are feathered, as though the book has been thumbed through many, many times.

The methods, while unorthodox, do work. The findings, of course, can’t be published because there are many who would deem them unethical.

You flip ahead.

Although the unpleasant memories cannot be eradicated, they have been suppressed. Asking about those memories evokes no recollection, only traces of confusion that further sessions are expected to nullify.

You turn to yet another page. Same handwriting, but blue ink instead of black. No dates or names anywhere. What did he do them and how does it relate to you? Did something happen to you? Something he doesn’t want you to remember?

At this point, there is no introduction of new information so as not to muddle the thought process needful for—

He clears his throat and you look up, dropping the book onto the desk. Your hand butterflies to your chest. He leans against the doorway, his face calm.

“What are you doing to me?” you say.

“Loving you, that’s all.”

You shake your head. “No, that isn’t all. The sleepwalking, the blacking out. You’re doing something to me. I know you are.” You point to the book. “Hypnotherapy, that’s hypnotism. Is that what you’ve been doing to me? Hypnotizing me? Why? Why would you do something like that to me?”

He nods toward the book. “I left it there for you to find, hoping this time I was wrong and you wouldn’t go looking. It was the only way I could be sure, even with the rest.”

“This time? What do you mean?” He steps close and you raise your hands, ball them into fists. “You stay away from me. You—”

He says, “Be still,” and your arms fall to your sides. You try to lift them, but they feel as though they weigh a hundred pounds and you can’t make them budge at all.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he says.

Your mouth won’t work although words are shrieking in your head to be released. Why can’t you move? Why is he doing this to you?

“Walk with me,” he says, his voice like good whiskey.

You don’t want to walk with him, don’t want to cross the room at his side, but your legs make the decision for you. He pulls a key from his pocket, slides a bookcase aside, revealing a door. But you’ve lived in this house for over twenty years. How has he hidden this from you?

He opens the door and flips a switch, bathing the revealed staircase in a warm glow. “Careful now,” he says. “Hold the railing while you walk down.”

Your traitorous hands and feet do his bidding.

“Despite what you might be thinking, I’m not trying to hurt you. I didn’t think we’d have to do this again so soon, but the mind fights so to break free.”

In the room sits a chair with padded restraints, a projector, a screen.

“Don’t worry. You should know by now that this part won’t hurt. I might have to do something about that scar, but you won’t remember a thing, I promise you that. Funny that you’ve never noticed it before.” He touches your face, his hand warm, and you want to pull away but you can’t. “You cling so tightly to your old life. I never thought that would happen. I don’t think…” He shakes his head. “Sit, please.”

You do and he buckles the restraints around your wrists and ankles, not so tight that they hurt but tight enough to hold you in place. He kneels in front of you and strokes the back of your hand. “Maybe this time you won’t try to remember anything else. Maybe this time we can finally be happy together. We made it nearly a year. That’s longer than before. That has to mean something. That has to mean I’m doing everything almost right.” He gazes into your eyes and you tell yourself to scream, to shout, but nothing happens.

“Speak,” he finally says.

“Please. I don’t understand any of this. Let me go. Don’t do this. Please don’t do this to me.”

“Julia was a wonderful woman. You should be proud I chose you to fill her shoes.” His eyes go soft and far away as he continues to stroke your hand. “My wife, my everything.”

But you’re Julia. You’re his wife. Aren’t you?

“Where is she?” you say, your voice trembling, both wanting and dreading the answer. “What happened to her?”

“She was sick,” he says, his mouth tight. “That’s all you need to know.”

“No, please. If I’m not really her, then who am I? Please tell me that much.”

“You were no one,” he says. “Now relax.”

Tension bleeds from your shoulders. You open your mouth, but he says, “Hush” and your voice disappears.

He turns on the projector and an image of you flashes on the screen. No, you scream silently. That isn’t me. He said she was sick, but what did that mean? Did she die? Die he hurt her? You need to know. You deserve to know.

“Your name is Julia Anne Allan,” he says, his voice honey-sweet and you feel as though you’re falling into a dark, endless hole. You don’t want to listen to him, but his voice is so soft, so steady, so sure.

“You were born on August fourteenth…”

You finish loading the dishwasher and head into the library, your favorite room in the house. On the very top shelf on the far wall, a book is pulled halfway out—Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, your favorite.

You take it and sink into the corner chair, curling your legs beneath you. A bit of paper sticks out from the end of the book and you tug it free. A letter, folded in three, the edges slightly tattered, the folds feathered almost to splitting. You rest the book on your thigh and unfold the paper.

April 5, 2010

Dear Julia:

If you’re reading this, then everything is going according to our wishes. I chose you, you see, not him, and you agreed. Please don’t be afraid. This letter is nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

There’s much I could tell you of you, of how we met, but it isn’t important to know that now. Suffice to say, you were in trouble and needed a friend, I needed a way to ensure that my life’s work would continue, and I didn’t want him to be alone. Fortuitous that we were similar in age, coloring, and build. Fortuitous that he could make alterations to correct the dissimilarities.

I know you thought I was joking at first. I know you didn’t think it would work, but if you’re reading this, then I’m hopeful it did. After all, Rebecca is my favorite book. You told me you’d never read it before.

I know it might be difficult, but you need to be patient and understanding. After I got sick, I taught him everything I knew, but when you condense years of learning into months, there are bound to be small missteps along the way. He won’t give up, and I have faith all shall be well in the end.

Though you might wish for more details of your former life, the three of us agreed that, should you ask, not telling you would be for the best. It would only upset you. I decided to write this letter—and he doesn’t know about it so you must keep it that way—in case you were afraid, but remember, you have nothing to be afraid of.

Truth be told, at first he wasn’t as keen on the idea as I’d hoped, but once I convinced him it was his idea, once I convinced him he loved you as much as he loved me, the rest of the pieces fell into place.

He is a good man. Remember that. He is a good man. I wouldn’t have put you in this situation, nor would you have put yourself here, if he were not.

Remember, you are Julia. You are his wife, the love of his life, the woman he’d do anything for. Even this. You are Julia, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. Now refold the letter, put it back in the book, and forget you ever read it.

The post PseudoPod 607: Take A Walk In The Night, My Love appeared first on PseudoPod.