PseudoPod

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

PseudoPod 606: The Fainting Game is a PseudoPod original.

“This story is partially autobiographical. My older cousins did, in fact, teach me how to induce a fainting spell, and I did, in fact, have some kind of seizure. Do not try this at home, in the woods, or anywhere else.”

The Fainting Game by Nino Cipri

I held my arm out the window of the car and pretended it was a long sword slicing through the landscape. This was a game I always played on long car rides, holding my hand flat and my fingers rigid. The wind pushed the sword up, and I chopped through the tops of trees and telephone poles. Lower and I scythed through farmhouse attics and distant silos. I tried to control the sword by changing the angle of my hand, so I could hop over other cars without slicing their passengers in half. But sometimes, the wind forced my hand lower, and I’d apologize under my breath to the motorcyclist or hitchhiker I’d beheaded.

“Roll your window up,” Jenn complained. “It’s too much wind.”

I ignored her and let the wind fill my ears until she pinched me. I slapped her hand and said, “Mom!”

“Quit it, both of you,” Mom said sharply from the front seat.

Dad added, “Quiet down, or I’ll stick the two of you in the trunk for the rest of the ride. Maya, roll up your window.”

The wind pushed his words away. I kept my arm dangling out the window, cutting through the trees and hills until Dad started to raise the window from the driver’s console. I yanked my arm back.

All three of them ignored me as I crossed my arms and cried in the backseat, and when we got to Aunt Shauna’s house, they didn’t bother to wait and see if I got out of with them. I locked all the doors and lay down on the backseat, pretending that I was dead, pretending they were dead, pretending the car was moving all on its own, pretending I was alone and everyone else in the world had disappeared.

I always felt like I was on the verge of disappearing when I was a child—like I could sink into the dirt and never re-emerge. I could disappear; run away, fall into a river or a stranger’s car, and the world wouldn’t stop itself for me. I saw it happen all the time; girls and women being erased, or erasing themselves. Cautionary tales, but I took the wrong lesson from it.

It was Labor Day weekend, and it got too hot in the car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up. Or I got bored of sulking. I abandoned the car at the bottom of the long dirt driveway. Outside, I could hear snatches of a radio playing the classic rock station, and the metallic tink tink tink of someone hammering a length of pipe into the ground, setting up a pit for horseshoes. My uncles’ raucous laughter drifted down from the top of the hill. If I hiked up there, I’d see them gathered in clumps around Aunt Shauna’s big backyard, busy with their beers and games of horseshoes, busy telling Uncle Eddie how he should work the grill. My mother and aunts would occupy nearly every room in the house, carrying wine coolers in their hands and babies on their hips, sneaking out into the backyard to take drags off their husbands’ cigarettes. They’d pay attention to me long enough to tell me to go outside, enjoy the last days of summer before school started up again. Maybe they’d never notice I was gone.

I was most of the way up the drive when I heard giggles coming from the woods off to my left. Lanie and Sierra, Aunt Shauna’s daughters, liked to play in the woods on their property. Our ages lined up like a ladder: I was ten that summer, Lanie eleven, Jenn was twelve and a half, and Sierra had just turned fourteen. The giggling sounded like it belonged to Sierra and, oddly, Jenn. Jenn rarely laughed; rarely cried, either, now that I think about it. I veered off the road to find them.

Sierra was older than Jenn, prettier, meaner. She already had boobs, and wore shirts that showed off the straps of her bra. Our dad had commented on it when we saw them over Christmas, which made Mom’s face go pinched and angry. Sierra seemed to think that having a chest – “getting a nice rack” as my father put it – made her the first and greatest authority; like an underwire bra might as well be a crown.

I picked my way down to the woods, practicing moving quietly in case I wanted to be a spy when I was older – it seemed like a good choice for a job. I took the long way through the brush so they wouldn’t see me coming. The woods muffled the voices of my uncles and the radio, though the clang of horseshoes ringing against the spike still carried, clear and high like a warning bell. A flock of crows took off from the spindly branches of a pine, startling me with the noise of their wings and cawing.

The giggling quieted, and I ducked behind a beech tree, standing as straight and narrow as I could.

“We can see you, dumbass,” Jenn called. She sighed, loud enough that I could hear. “Did you get tired of crying in the car?”

I thought about running away, but I wanted to see what they’d been giggling about. I came out from behind the tree and walked towards the clearing where they stood. There were signs that other people used the spot: a collection of crumpled beer cans and cigarette butts, charred wood and ashes where someone had built a fire. Among the detritus, I spotted three fresh cigarette butts on the ground. I could smell smoke—not the greasy smell of charcoal and lighter fluid, but tobacco, menthol ones like Aunt Shauna smoked.

I would have made a good spy, I thought then. I still think it now, but it seems like all spies do is hack each others’ computers. Not so fun anymore.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Talking about how much you suck,” Jenn said sourly. “God, go back to the car.”

“Don’t be so mean,” Sierra said. “She’s your little sister. You should be nice to her.”

It was an odd thing for her to say, since I’d seen Sierra make her own little sister cry plenty of times. Lanie herself was sitting with her back up against the fence, staring down at her hands, which were smeared with dirt. She was painfully shy, even around family. Sometimes it seemed like she was trying to be invisible in a crowded room. I understood that, and thought we should have been friends, but we never were.

“Were you smoking cigarettes out here?” I asked. “It smells.”

Jenn opened her mouth, probably to tell me what she’d do if I told on her, but  Sierra cut in. “We were playing a game.”

“What kind of game?” I asked.

“We’ll show you,” Sierra said. “Lanie, get up.”

Lanie shook her head. “I don’t like it. I still feel dizzy.”

“Don’t be such a baby.”

“Do it to me,” Jenn said. “I wanna go again.”

Jenn stood, brushing leaf litter off her butt, and walked over to one of the thin beech trees at the edge of the clearing. She bent over at the waist and started breathing hard and deep, like she’d just run a mile. The sound of her breath was the loudest thing in the woods. I felt hypnotized by it, like my heart beat to the same rhythm she was keeping. Then she suddenly stood, and Sierra grabbed her by the throat, pushing her back into the tree. Jenn’s face puffed up red, cheeks ballooned out. Gradually, she went boneless, slumping forward into Sierra’s arms and slithering onto the ground. She’s dead, I remember thinking, we killed her. Just as I was about to start crying, Jenn let out a stream of giggles, rolling over onto her back.

She looked happier than I’d ever seen her; no pinched look on her face, no anger or resentment, no self-consciousness. Her T-shirt rode up, exposing her pale, soft belly. She was a different creature than the one I’d rode in the car with, who had complained about the wind and our dad’s choice in music and the fact that we had to come to Aunt Shauna’s at all.

“It’s called the fainting game,” Sierra said. “That’s all. You bend over and breathe really hard, and then you stand up, hold your breath, and someone presses on your neck. It feels really cool. Weird and cool”

Jenn’s giggles tapered off. She pulled her shirt back down over her hips, then rolled over and sat up. She still looked calm, though, not as annoyed as she had before.

“I wanna try,” I said.

“You’re too young,” said Jenn, picking leaves out of her hair.

“You let Lanie do it!”

“She almost puked,” Sierra said, pointing at her sister. Lanie did look pale and queasy, but I was stronger than her.

“If you don’t let me play,” I said, “I’ll tell Mom you were smoking. I’ll tell Aunt Shauna you were sneaking Kools out of her pack.”

Jenn sighed in disgust. “Fine. Come here.”

“I…” I was suddenly afraid. “I want Sierra to do it.”

Jenn gave me a look, surprised and hurt. I dropped my gaze. Sierra had a mean streak, but she didn’t hate me like my sister frequently said she did. I was scared that Jenn wouldn’t take her hands off my throat, a fear so sudden and clear that it had already tangled its fingers around my airway.

“Whatever,” Jenn said. She went and sat next to Lanie and pulled a crumpled cigarette out of the pocket of her shorts. She glared at me as she lit it, daring me to say something.

I stood against the tree, and Sierra stood next to me.

“Lean over and breathe in and out really fast,” she instructed.

“I know,” I said. I braced my arms against my knees, feeling self-conscious and nervous. “How long do I do it for?”

Sierra shrugged and said, “Thirty seconds? That’s probably enough.”

I closed my eyes and began to count to thirty. I tried to do five breaths per second, then six. I got up to eight breaths a second before realizing I’d actually counted to forty-three and was already feeling dizzy. I stood back up and was taken off balance as Sierra clamped her hands around my throat and pinned me to the tree. I forgot it was a game, and dug my fingernails into her wrists trying to push her away. But Sierra was bigger than me, stronger and taller, and the weight on my throat didn’t let up. She pushed until red static crawled across my vision; pushed until I toppled off an invisible ledge and fell downwards, watching the scene in the woods recede away.

It feels like I shouldn’t remember it as well as I do. But my entire body keeps the memory: dangling like a kicking corpse at the end of a noose, not knowing how much space was beneath my feet, or above my head. Not quite falling, and never landing. The only thing that grounded me was Sierra’s grip around my neck, which had followed me all the way down, stretching like silly putty.

I stayed down in the static place for a long time. I screamed, but my voice went nowhere. I thought someone would come get me, but nobody did. Just like in the car.

Eventually, I climbed out myself, hand over hand up Sierra’s arms, the only path that I had. It took me a four tries to get out, and everytime I fell, it seems like I sank down a little further, had to climb a little higher and a little more desperately. There wasn’t any thought of disappearing now. I made the kind of bargains that anyone who’s been in desperate situations would find familiar. I guess one or more of them took because I could eventually see a light, like a window cut into space. As I reached for it, Sierra’s hands came loose from my throat, and floated back down into the darkness. There was pressure and a soft pinch on my hand, that I heard as much as felt: like the feeling as when your ears pop going up or down a mountain, a relief that’s as much pleasure as pain. I could smell oily charcoal smoke and dirt. I’d gotten out.

The relief was temporary. I opened my eyes and a wave of pain rolled over me, burning and scraping down my face. I screamed and pressed my hands to my cheek, then sucked in a breath and screamed again. When I opened my eyes, it was to Jenn, looking down at me. She tried to pry my hands away to look at my face, and I kicked out at her.

“What did you do?” Jenn said.

I tried to open my eyes, but one of them was already swelling shut. I caught a quick glance of her face, shocked and angry, and a dim, blurred outline of Sierra. My eyes seemed to skate right past her. I shut my eyes again.

My hands were still pressed to my face when my mother and Aunt Shauna arrived. “You’re all right,” Mom said calmly. “We’ll take you to the doctor and they’ll fix you right up, baby.” Usually she didn’t say anything much more than, “I can’t believe you got me up for this.” Mom’s disregard was its own source of comfort, as much as her soft hands when they smoothed band-aids into place. “You’re going to be okay, Maya,” she said, but her voice was sharp with fear, and she touched me like I was already broken.

My mother recounted the story to her friends by telephone, over and over until it was a script she had memorized and made sense of. After fainting, I’d had a seizure, which had startled Sierra so much that she dropped me. I’d fallen face-first to the ground and cracked my cheek against a rock.

“It was Sierra’s idea, of course. The girl’s turned into such a little—“ My mother would pause here, shaking her head and sucking on her cigarette, or taking a sip from her ginger ale. “If Shauna hadn’t gotten to her first, I would have killed her dead.”

I liked hearing the story in my mother’s words. They made me feel safe – made the whole thing feel comfortably real.

When they released me from the hospital, I was the owner of two new scars. One was a shallow divot on my right cheek from the tree root. It would fade from an angry red to a soft purple within the week. The other was a small, bony stump where the smallest finger on my right hand had been. My mom, confused by my reaction to it, reminded me that I’d lost the finger in an accident when I was a toddler, too young to remember. When I didn’t believe her, she sent my father home to get a photo album as proof. We looked at the pictures together: a little girl with an awkward smile, tangled hair, and only four fingers on her right hand. But I remembered the pinch on my finger when I’d climbed back out, that snap of pressure. I knew the static place had taken that bit of flesh, rather than a car door when I was eighteen months old.

“Retrograde amnesia is normal in concussions and seizures,” Dr. Robards told my parents. “I will say, though, that Maya’s case is quite unique.With your permission, I’d like to write up her case for a research paper.”

I liked all those medical words enough to roll them around in my mouth when I was alone: retrograde amnesia. Zygomatic arch. Tonic-clonic seizure.

“Are we going to get any money from it?” my father demanded, and when Dr. Robards said no, he rolled his eyes. “Call me when you can pay us,” he said, and ushered us out the door. My mother’s mouth was pressed down into a thin line as we walked into the waiting room, and she snapped at Jenn. “Get up, we’re leaving.”

Jenn put down the issue of Seventeen that she’d been reading and followed us out the door. She’d always accused me of being the sulky one, but since we’d played the fainting game, she’d barely spoken to me. I couldn’t help but remember the way the game had turned her into a laughing, happy stranger rolling in the dirt, all her familiar edges softened and blunted. She was probably right to be angry at me. She had tried to escape me for just a little while, and instead I had dragged them all into a mess. I sympathize with her now. Sympathy’s easy when I’m on this side of it.

It took about a week for Sierra to fade completely away. I don’t know what the process was like, since I wasn’t there to see it. (I’m almost never there to see it.) I didn’t even know it had truly happened until Aunt Shauna called our house, a couple weeks later.

“She’s hysterical about something,” my dad said, handing the phone to Mom and going back to the TV.

I saw Jenn stand and walk quietly out of the living room and down the hall to her room. I waited another minute, and then followed her, pushing open the door to her room. She had her phone off the hook and was listening in. When she saw me, she looked murderous; if she could have killed me with a thought, all my arteries and veins would have peeled open for her then.

Let me listen, I mouthed.

No, she answered, one hand over the mouthpiece.

I leaned out the doorway, ready to call my mother. Jenn let out an explosive, angry shushing noise, and impatiently beckoned me over. She held the phone up so we could both hear.

“—Since two nights past, Mel, and she’s been acting so goddam strange.” Aunt Shauna’s voice wavered and hiccupped.

“Didn’t the police—“

“They said they’d put word out, but they’re treating it as a runaway case.”

“They think Sierra ran away?” Mom asked. I heard gentle skepticism in her voice. She agreed with the police.

“They think she’s just being a goddam teenager, and I told them no, she’s been different. You’d barely recognize her. She stopped talking, stopped coming to meals, it was like living with a ghost.”

The crackle of silence. Jenn and I both covered our mouths, so Mom wouldn’t hear us breathing.

“God, Shauna, why didn’t you tell me?” my mother asked.

“I didn’t want to worry you. After everything that happened with Maya–“

Jenn hung up the phone, and looked at me carefully. I stared back. After a moment, Jenn replaced the phone in the hook, stood up, and went back downstairs. I followed her. We watched TV together, on the floor in front of our father’s chair. I kept an ear cocked towards my mother, who’d taken the phone into the kitchen. I still remember her saying, “I’m sure it’s something else with Sierra. She’ll come back. You know how kids are.”

School started again. Nobody reacted to my missing finger, not the other kids nor the teachers, though I had plenty of comments on the scar on my cheek. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but the kids I played with during recess agreed that it made me look dangerous, though we couldn’t agree on what kind of dangerous.

In science class, Mr. Cranston started teaching us the scientific method. Observation, hypothesis, testing, thesis. I wondered if maybe I could be a scientist instead of a spy when I grew up. I drummed my remaining three fingers on the desk.

One. Fainting had knocked me down into the static place.

Two. I had pulled part of Sierra in with me. Used her to pull myself back out. Literally climbed up and over her. And I’d left part of her in there.

Three. The missing joints of my finger. Sierra’s dim and blurry outline when I’d woken up; a few days later, she was gone.

Hypothesis: the static place had taken its own payment. Maybe it had taken Sierra, too. Maybe the static had followed me out and nestled in her body, taking it over until it, too, was nothing.

One, two, three.

I had to perform a test.

That Saturday, I rode my bike to a park, and asked a couple of kids if they wanted to play a new game that I’d learned over summer break.

People think that every child will be missed, but it’s not true. People miss certain kinds of children less than others: the ones that cause problems, that get angry, that cry too often, that feel too much, whose emotions are unwieldy or unpleasant or unrecognizable. They used to call us changelings; I read about it in a book. Strange seeds from familiar flowers. I could have been one of them, but I was something different: a doorway that other people disappeared through. It feels good to know that. It’s good to know what you are.

I had a few more scars by the time summer rolled around again. The rest of my pinky was gone, along with the finger next to it. My whole right hand was thinner than it had been, and ached strangely, in the places where parts of me were missing. I wondered if the ones I took to the static place, who got pulled over the course of a few days or a week, if their bodies ached like mine did.

If I were to go back to the static place—

Not that I will. Well. Not that I plan to any time soon. You should never say never.

But if I did, and I took the time to look around, I wonder how many people I’d find. I can’t be the only person who’s gone down there, who’s left someone there. How many girls live down there, who everyone thought went crazy and ran away? The third time I went, I stayed there for a while, calling out, straining to hear a voice in reply. But there was nothing. It’s like going down into one of those caverns, so big and so dark that you feel like you could choke. I’m not sure I could find anyone down there, even the people I put there myself.

At the next Labor Day barbecue, nobody spoke of Sierra. Nobody said her name. The door to her bedroom was closed and locked. She was still in the photos on Aunt Shauna’s mantle and wall, but she always seemed to be on the edge of the frame, slightly out of focus. Lanie stayed at her mother’s side, ensconced in the kitchen with the other women, but Jenn and I were shooed outside.

The radio played, the same as last year, Aerosmith and Led Zepplin, but none of my uncles sang along. They played horseshoes studiously, drinking from cans of Budweiser that they pulled slick from the cooler. I snuck a cigarette and a pack of matches out of Uncle Eddie’s pack, which lay unattended by the grill, and walked into the woods.

The day was overcast this year; no sun, no floating dust motes. The woods were damp and smelled like rotting leaves. I sat against one of the trees lit the cigarette that I’d taken from my uncle. Maybe it was the one that Sierra had pushed me against when I first played the fainting game. I couldn’t remember anymore; all those trees look the same.

“Mom’s gonna kill you when she finds out you were smoking.” The voice surprised me enough that I sucked in too much smoke and started to choke. Jenn was leaning against the other side of the big fallen hemlock tree. She’d snuck up on me – or maybe she’d already been out here, and I’d blundered into her hiding spot.

“I thought tattling was something only babies did,” I said, standing up, still coughing.

“It’d be payback,” she said. “Eye for an eye, for all the times you told on me. It’s only fair.”

It was something our dad said a lot, usually when he was lazily doling out some kind of judgment when the two of us fought about something. When Jenn would hit me, but only because I hit her first: Eye for an eye. Fair’s fair.

“Go ahead,” I dared her. “I’ll just tell her you were out here smoking too.”

“So what?” she shrugged. “Mom already hates me because of your stupid stunt last year.”

“Then I’ll tell her you gave me the cigarette. And that you were there for the first time I ever smoked.” Not quite a lie, though it was Sierra who had procured the cigarette, and I’d gone along with it as enthusiastically as Jenn. Our mother could detect a full lie. But I always put in enough truth to convince her.

“God.” Jenn shouted, so loud and sudden that the crows in the trees started scolding her. “God, I wish you’d never been born.”

She’d said the words to me a hundred times, a thousand, maybe. They barely even hurt, now.

“You’re just jealous because everyone likes me more than you,” I told her.

“Only because they don’t know what you’re really like,” Jenn spat. “Not like I do. But they’re starting to figure it out, you little psycho bitch.”

I could feel my eyes starting to burn. This is the thing Jenn never understood; I didn’t fake crying. I couldn’t stop myself. I sometimes wished that I’d lose the ability to cry altogether, like she had.

“Oh, are you crying? Did I hurt your feelings?” Jenn said, stalking forward. “Are you gonna throw yourself against a rock again? Cry for Mom and tell her it was all my fault?”

“I didn’t throw myself–”

“I don’t believe your bullshit.” She got right in my face as she said it. “I know you did something to Sierra.”

I went silent. The tears dried up, quick as they had started. I didn’t have control over that either. I’d learned that I didn’t cry when I was afraid, truly afraid.

“You did,” she insisted. “I know it. I saw…”

Jenn trailed off, sounding unsure. What had she seen? And did she know about the other kids? Even if she didn’t, it was only a matter of time before she put it together.

“Oh, what now?” Jenn spat, as I bent over at the waist. “Are you crying? Go find someone who cares.”

Instead of counting seconds, I counted syllables. Tonic-clonic seizure. Zygomatic arch. Retrograde amnesia. I recited them like a prayer. Four breaths per phrase. Then five.

“What are you doing?” Jenn asked. She didn’t sound as dismissive this time. She sounded scared. I didn’t answer, too busy trying to get six breaths a second, then seven. Her voice faded as the sound of my rushing blood filled my ears.

My eyes were shut tight, so I didn’t see the hit coming. Jenn’s fist cracked hard across my cheek, the same one I’d broken. But I think it had healed up harder than it had been. After the impact, after the heat and numbness spread across my face, I got my rhythm back.

Tonic-clonic. Three breaths. Zygomatic. Four. Retrograde amnesia. Five breaths.

“Stop it! Maya!” She said my name — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her call me by my name. She sounded so scared.

I stood up and wrapped my hands around my throat, pushing and pushing against the pulse point. Just as my vision was starting to narrow, Jenn grabbed at my hands, trying to pull them away from my neck. She was shouting, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. I clapped one of my hands around her wrist, and threw us both backwards over that ledge, into the red and gray static. Down and down we went.

It wasn’t just a finger I lost this time; when I came back to myself, there was a smooth, round knob of bone and skin that ended at my wrist. I knew enough not to say anything this time, only to ask for our family photo albums. Even in my earliest photos, my right arm terminates in a narrow knot of bone, covered with smooth, unblemished skin. I never wear a prosthetic in the pictures; I probably never needed one. My left hand has always been stronger anyway, and my right arm smoothly turned the pages of the album, skilled from a decade of practice that I have no memory of.

When I woke up in the hospital, the harsh fluorescent light seemed to shine right through my sister, though I was the only one who noticed. And in the photos, Jenn is already fading away. She stands half-out of the photographs, face blurred, little more than a silhouette, permanently displaced.

If you asked me if I missed Jenn, I’m not sure what I’d say. Sometimes the emptiness where my hand used to be aches, cramps, or tingles. When that happens, I worry that the static place is reaching out for me, reminding me of its hunger, and its patience. Mostly, though, I don’t notice the absence at all.

The post PseudoPod 606: The Fainting Game appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Thomas Ligotti
• Narrator : Anson Mount
• Host : Anson Mount
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

The Town Manager was first published in Weird Tales, September-October 2003

The Town Manager by Thomas Ligotti

One gray morning not long before the onset of winter, some troubling news swiftly travelled among us: the town manager was not in his office and seemed nowhere to be found. We allowed this situation, or apparent situation, to remain tentative for as long as we could. This was simply how we had handled such developments in the past.

It was Carnes, the man who operated the trolley which ran up and down Main Street, who initially recognized the possibility that the town manager was no longer with us. He was the first one who noticed, as he was walking from his house at one end of town to the trolley station at the other end, that the dim lamp which had always remained switched on inside the town manager’s office was now off.

The post PseudoPod 605: The Town Manager appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Tanith Lee
• Narrators : Scott Campbell and Sharon Moskowitz
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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‘The Gorgon’ originally appeared in 1982 in the anthology of quiet horror Shadows 5 edited by Charles L. Grant.

The Gorgon by Tanith Lee

The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and, day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out.

Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess) was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbor or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes or the bottle glass of certain spirits.

The post PseudoPod 604: The Gorgon appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : James Tiptree Jr.
• Narrator : Amy H. Sturgis
• Host : Lisa Yaszek
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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Beyond the Dead Reef originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1983

Beyond the Dead Reef by James Tiptree, Jr

My informant was, of course, spectacularly unreliable.

The only character reference I have for him comes from the intangible nuances of a small restaurant-owner’s remarks, and the only confirmation of his tale lies in the fact that an illiterate fishing-guide appears to believe it. If I were to recount all the reasons why no sane mind should take it seriously, we could never begin. So I will only report the fact that today I found myself shuddering with terror when a perfectly innocent sheet of seaworn plastic came slithering over my snorkeling-reef, as dozens have done for years—and get on with the story.

I met him one evening this December at the Cozumel Buzo, on my first annual supply trip. As usual, the Buzo’s outer rooms were jammed with tourist divers and their retinues and gear. That’s standard. El Buzo means, roughly, The Diving, and the Buzo is their place. Marcial’s big sign in the window reads “DIVVERS UELCOME! BRING YR FISH WE COK WITH CAR. FIRST DRINK FREE!”

The post PseudoPod 603: Beyond the Dead Reef appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Melinda Brasher
• Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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A Learned Man was first published in Electric Spec

I based the story loosely on an El Salvadorian folk tale I read in a book while I was traveling there.  It was a collections of local legends, oral tales, etc. retold by different people from the area. The one I based “A Learned Man” on was about a page and a half and very spare.

Here’s the reference:  

“La Leyenda de Bolsa Salgado.” El Salvadorian Folktale from Ozatlán, Usulután, El Salvador. Retold by Maria Irene Rivera. Espíritus Mitológicos de El Salvador. Ed. Gloria Mejía Gutierrez and Refugio Duarte de Romero. San Salvador: Concultura, 1997.    

Here’s what I wrote about it in my story notes:  

I’d been travelling on a shoestring through Central America for quite a while. One day in a small town in El Salvador, tired of sight-seeing and ready for something “normal,” I found a little library where signs warned in no uncertain terms that you must not touch the books. After I explained what I was looking for, the librarian warily found me a collection of local folk tales, which I quickly devoured. My favorite was “La Leyenda de Bolsa Salgado” from Ozatlán, Usulután, retold in one bare page and a half that sparked my imagination.

When the librarian kicked me out for siesta, I sat in the town square and wrote about three quarters of the rough draft of “A Learned Man”–one of the fastest first drafts I’ve ever written.

I’d like to thank Maria Irene Rivera, who retold the local legend, and Gloria Mejía Gutierrez and Refugio Duarte de Romero, the editors of the collection Espíritus Mitológicos de El Salvador ( San Salvador: Concultura, 1997). I’m also glad the librarian let me touch the books.

A Learned Man by Melinda Brasher

I hated her father. It wasn’t fair, really, because he’d been nothing but kindness to me. When my hens all sickened one afternoon and died together at midnight, he hitched up his wagon and brought me half of his own brood so I could start again. With them he brought an amulet Lottie’s mother had made to ward off the curses of the old lady who lived down among the reeds behind the mill.

“The Marsh Witch” everyone called her, as they tiptoed around trying not to offend her, letting her steal cabbages and herbs from their gardens. I worked too hard to let a lazy woman who’d never done a lick of good for anyone take what was not hers. The night I caught her stealing carrots, I picked her up by her scruffy collar, threw her out onto the street, and warned her never to come back. All the neighbors crossed themselves when they heard and pressed me to go ask forgiveness before she called on all her dark powers.

“What powers?” I scoffed, to everyone’s horror. She was no witch. Witches didn’t exist.

But a week later, at the full moon, all my hens died, and that confirmed the villagers’ fears of her dark powers.

Lottie’s father came with his chickens and amulets, and I thanked him, but I hated him for it. I was a working man, and I didn’t need his charity. I could have sold some sheep, bought new chickens, consulted one of those city doctors who could cure sicknesses in all creatures. There had to be a scientific explanation and a scientific cure.

Her father always deferred to me in matters of “book learning.” After all, he couldn’t read and admired me for the library of seven books I’d worked so hard to collect. It was uncomfortable, his deference. When he talked about how his precious daughter deserved a man of science, of knowledge, of deep thoughts, I wondered if he was somehow mocking me. He expected great things of me, he said, and I expected them too, never doubting I would achieve great heights. But not for him. For me and Lottie.

He realized how much I hated all the tedious ceremonies of courtship—evenings of pleasantries and gift exchanges that so rarely involved Lottie. He was a man of tradition and wouldn’t let his beloved daughter go without following the correct path, the path that would bless our union. He knew I hated it, and would rather spend my time with my books or on my land, so he kept the ceremonies short and gave me ample time to see Lottie, even alone sometimes.

I had nothing to reproach him for. No valid excuse for my hatred. At least not one I could admit to anyone.

But the thing was, Lottie loved him to distraction, worshiped him like a hero. She did nothing without his approval, said nothing that would disappoint him. She obeyed him to the letter, canceled plans we’d made if he so much as suggested some other use of her time. To be fair, I don’t think he was ever aware that she left me alone to spend time with him. And though she claimed to love me, she clearly loved her father more. If I met her at the village market and wanted to take her for a stroll, she’d ask her father first. He always agreed, but I resented this control he had over her. She’d never fully be mine, I realized, and that tortured me because I loved her desperately.

For five years we’d been promised to each other, while I built myself a living, while we took the courtship ceremonies step by perfect step. For five years I hadn’t touched her in any way her father wouldn’t approve of, but the wedding was nearing. Midsummer, it would be.

Then she’d be mine. I could satisfy this fiery need I felt when I thought of her. I had spent too many years alone. I needed conversation in the evenings, a hot meal when I arrived home, tender hands and lips and skin to wipe away the years of solitude. I’d worked hard, doubled my lands. I had money hidden away to buy her fine dresses so I could show to the world how well I had done. I’d make her happy, happier than she’d been in her own house, trapped by her need to make her father proud.

But it was not to be. The wedding was only three weeks away when her father died. Dropped dead in the fields with a shovel still clutched in one hand. I heard the news from a neighbor. “John Otero is dead,” the woman cried, thunderstruck that such a strong, healthy man could have disappeared so suddenly from this world. “John Otero, gone above,” she wailed, and my first reaction was relief. He was all that stood between me and Lottie. With him gone, she would give herself fully to me—her love, her attention, her everything. We could be happy now. I scolded myself for my reaction and tried to be appropriately mournful, but it was hard.

I saddled my horse and rode the three miles to her house, across the river, through the village, all the way to her farm in the shadow of the Great Mountain. Only when I saw her weeping in the flower patch he’d planted for her did I understand how much this would hurt her. That grieved me. I didn’t want to see her in pain. For a while I, too, grieved. Now that he was safely dead, I could admit he was a good man and a good father. I told her how generous he’d been with me, how understanding. She thanked me for my words and sobbed into my chest.

I brought her flowers and sweet cakes every day, but her tears wouldn’t stop. After they buried him, she slept most nights in a blanket at the foot of his grave. She went through her days pale, in the same black dress. The sweet cakes remained untouched, until her little brothers scarfed them down when no one was looking.

It was two weeks before I dared mention the wedding. She looked at me, patted my hand absently, and said, “Yes, it’s a shame we’ll have to put that off.”

“Put it off?”

“Of course. We can’t marry while we’re in mourning for Papá.”

“But…but it’s next week. I’ve already hired the cooks, bought the extra cows to slaughter.”

She looked at me as if I were a bug she’d rather like to smash, if only she had more energy.

Her mother walked in then with a basket of eggs.

“I can’t wait a year, Lottie. I love you,” I got down on my knees in front of her and begged. “I’ve waited five years. I can’t wait any more. I’m a man. A man who needs a wife. You’ll be happy with me. It will help you—distract you from your grief.”

She pulled away. “I would never disrespect my father so.”

“It’s not disrespect. He would want you to marry me. Remember how he always said he was so happy you had found a man like me, who could take care of you? A good man, a learned man, he called me. He told me once that he could rest easy once we were married, because he knew you’d be taken care of. So let him rest easy.”

She started to cry again, as had become so natural for her the last two weeks. “But it’s not right.”

“It’ll curse your life together,” her mother added softly.

“Curses, curses, there are no curses,” I fumed. “You make your own future. And we can do that, together. It’s as he would want it.”

Lottie shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Do you love me?” I demanded.

“Yes,” she sobbed. “Please, I love you so much. Don’t be angry.” I softened. She’d never been so passionate in her declaration of love. “It’s only a year.”

“Two,” said her mother, from where she sat cracking eggs one by one into a bowl.

“Two?” Lottie asked in a dry whisper.

“Two,” her mother repeated. “He died with a tool in his hands. That means his soul is not easy because he was not finished with his work in this life. He needs more time to complete that work, before his soul finally rests with God, and he disappears from our memory. Two years. It is written.”

“Where is it written?” I demanded. “You couldn’t read it even if it were written anywhere.”

The egg in her hand broke under the pressure of her grip. “I know what I know, young man. Two years.”

“Superstition,” I cried. “He died with a tool in his hand because the tool was in his hand when he died. Nothing more.” Why did these ignorant fools have to make signs out of everything?

She stood up, her hands wet with egg. “My husband tolerated your Godlessness long enough. But I won’t. You respect our mourning, the traditions of our people, and the will of God, or you walk out of here and never come back.”

I took Lottie’s hand and kissed it, then walked resolutely out. I heard Lottie cry after me, but I kept going. In this age of printing presses, of schools for even the poor, of scientific discoveries every day, how could people live mired in these superstitions? These beliefs of ghosts of the deceased with work still to be done? This adherence to arbitrary periods of mourning the dead? All mourning accomplished was to make the mourners unhappy and disrupt the course of their lives. It did nothing for the dead.

I ranted to myself all the way home. I’d walked today, and the three miles back flew beneath my feet as I formulated a plan. I was a learned man, just as her father—an unwitting nemesis in death as well as in life—had called me. A learned man knows that to succeed, you need not just the will. Not just muscle. You need the right tools. You need to attack the problem where it’s weakest. Fight fire with fire. Fear with fear. Superstition with superstition. I smiled. I would have my way after all. I would always have my way.

I waited a month. What discipline that took. I kept feeding the cows intended for the wedding feast. I told the cooks I would send for them when I needed them. I worked long hours on my lands, so I would be too tired to miss Lottie’s presence in my house and in my bed, where she should have been.

Then one night, six weeks after his death, I put on my dark coat, wrapped a bit of black cloth around my head, so only my eyes were bared to the moonlight, and saddled my horse. I rode the three miles to her house. It was midnight when I got there, just as planned. Midnight was when my chickens had all died, as one, and that more than anything had convinced the townspeople it was a curse, not some natural disease. Stupid superstitions: symbols and omens and curses.

I tied up my horse out of sight in the woods, then crept to the window where I knew Lottie’s mother slept, alone now that her husband was dead and buried. Or so she thought. I smiled.

I began soft, with a moan, a murmur, a low cry of desolation. Something stirred inside. I could imagine Lottie’s mother lying awake, straining to hear whatever had awakened her. I let loose a heart-wrenching wail, followed by the growl of a man angry with his fate. A light appeared behind the curtains, weak and flickery, as if the hand that held the candle were shaking. I moaned again, louder, but this time I added a simple word. “Why?” I drew it out for long moments. “Why-y-y?”

From inside came the terrified voice. “In the name of God All Knowing, are you from this world or the other?”

“The other,” I moaned, holding the cloth over my mouth to muffle and disguise my voice.

“Who are you?” she cried out.

“I am John Otero.”

Half a scream turned into a choked sob. “I buried you. Why are you here?”

“My soul is trapped between this world and the next, trapped in eternal nothingness. Until my work is finished, I cannot rest.”

“I know, I know,” she sobbed. “I tried to tell them. But what is it you need to do?”

“I need to see my daughter safely married, protected. That is my duty as a father. But you, woman, have forbidden them to wed. I have failed in my duty because of you, and my soul lies in torment.”

“I’ll go tomorrow, husband. I’ll beg him to marry our Lottie as soon as possible.”

“Then I will be free to rest in the lands of our Maker above. Bless you, my wife. Bless you and the union we all desire.” I sighed loudly, contentedly, and repeated, “Praise be,” more and more quietly, as if the spirit of John Otero were fading away into the eternal peace of above.

I heard her cry softly in her room, the candle still lit. I listened for a few moments, then crept silently away, with a grin so big it hurt. Hah. That’s how a learned man conquers ancient superstition. When I was far enough away, I started to whistle. Lottie’s backward mother would come to me in the morning, begging me to marry her daughter. I’d hesitate, which would only drive her into more desperate pleas. Then I’d consent. The wedding would be as soon as I could hire back the cooks and announce the date. Then Lottie would be mine, and we would be happy.

When I found the place where I’d tied up my horse, the fool animal was gone. He did that sometimes, when I didn’t tie him up well enough. He thought he was clever, getting free, but he always came home later, sheepish and hungry, unhappy with the wild grasses he found. The night was clear and I was in too good a mood to get mad.

I kept whistling and skipped like a boy down toward the village. The path curved ahead of me, by the boulder shaped like a pumpkin, and I leaned for a moment against the cool rock. I looked back toward her house. That’s when I saw it. A black shape in the distance, like that of a man wrapped from head to foot in a winter cloak. One of the other villagers, probably, one of those who hired themselves out to richer farmers. Maybe he’d been helping with a late calving, and was headed back now to his home in the village.

A cold breeze whooshed past my ear and blew off the black cloth around my head. I leaned down to pick it up, and when I straightened, the black figure was much closer. There was something odd about his walk, something too smooth, too fast. As if he were skating on ice, like boys did when the river froze over. Another gust of cold air blew past me and I set my sights on the village. I no longer whistled as I walked. Something heavy in my chest made it hard to breathe. That was just because I was walking too fast, I told myself. But I didn’t slow. At the hanging tree I glanced over my shoulder. The figure still followed the path. I couldn’t make out a face, or a hat even, but it was the right height for man. Besides, what else could it be? It was then I realized how quiet everything was. None of the usual night sounds surrounded me. No insects hummed in the dark. No bats squeaked above. No rodent claws rustled in the grass. No owls hooted in the distance. I heard my own heart, my own footsteps, and nothing more. The night was so still I should have heard the footsteps of the man behind me, far away though he was. I stopped and listened. Nothing. He must have stopped too. I glanced back, but he was still advancing, silent and smooth.

“Ho, neighbor,” I called out. My voice sounded hollow.

No response. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Because none of the villagers would ignore a friendly call like that on a deserted road.

I turned on my heels and headed for the village.

The village gate was closed, but they never actually locked it. It took me a moment to get the latch open. The night had turned cold and my gloveless hand shook. The alehouse was closed, everything dark. Every last window. I thought about knocking on a friend’s door, but that was ridiculous. What would I say? “There’s a silent stranger following me. Can I hide in your house?” Never would I lower myself to such a womanly act. I was a man. Men don’t hide from things they don’t understand. Not learned men. So I wove my way through the dead streets, and out past the well toward the river—and home.

I began to breathe easier. The figure must have been a villager, because there was no sign of him on the road. He’d now be climbing into his bed, beside his wife, with the children asleep on the floor. He’d have been too exhausted by his day’s work to notice me. That’s why he hadn’t responded.

The night was still so silent that I began to hum softly to myself. It wasn’t far now. My muscles felt tight, and I wished I’d tied up my horse better. The road curved ahead around a stand of trees, and then it would open out onto the old bridge that spanned the river. I was humming a cradlesong my mother used to sing to me when I turned the curve and the tune stuck in my throat. There on the bridge was the black figure. How had he gotten ahead of me? It was him all right—no hat, no face I could see, just the black cloak. He stood still, and because I couldn’t see a face, I didn’t know if he was looking straight at me, or in the opposite direction. I stopped. He didn’t move. There was nothing to be afraid of. He must have bypassed the village, taken a shortcut I didn’t know. Now he was simply resting in a pleasant spot. I strode forward. He still didn’t move, but I somehow knew he was looking at me.

“Good evening neighbor,” I called out.

No response again. Who did he think he was, to ignore a friendly greeting not once but twice?

“I don’t know where you’re from,” I said, “but in these parts we say good evening back when someone greets us on the road.” I was close enough now I could see from his body under the cloak that he was indeed facing me, but the cloak covered his face entirely. “Are you deaf, man?”

“I am not deaf,” said the figure, and my legs went stiff.

I knew that voice. That voice had once called me a learned man. When I gained control of my legs again, I backed away.

“I am John Otero,” said the figure.

He knew what I had done. He knew what I had said to his wife. But he was dead. I’d helped bury him. He couldn’t be here. Yet somehow he was, and he knew everything.

“You’re a fake,” I said shakily. “John Otero is dead. You’re some village troublemaker. You envy me my lands. You envy me my wife to be.”

At that, the figure leapt at me, so fast I could only stumble backwards half a step before he knocked me to the ground and pinned down my arms with his bulk.

“I am John Otero,” he repeated, his voice still low and calm. “I am John Otero.”

I wrenched a hand free and punched at where I figured his face was, but I hit nothing. His fist, however, found its target, and I smelled blood. I struggled, swinging my arms with all the force my working man’s muscles could muster, but I could never find his body in the dark. The blows he gave me were only too real, and I began to feel dizzy with pain. Finally I broke free and stumbled away. He blocked the path to the bridge, so I flung myself down the bank and into the river. I knew he didn’t swim. Lottie couldn’t either, because he thought it was dangerous. The water was so cold it hit me like something solid, but I let it carry me downstream, away from the creature with John Otero’s voice.

Finally I found my way onto the opposite bank, a good distance downstream. He couldn’t have run across the bridge and all the way down the rocky bank in that short time. I headed straight for the woods. Once there I could lose myself in them. He could search all night and not find me in those thickets I knew so well.

My right leg hurt like the devil when I put my weight on it, so I half limped, half crawled up the steep bank toward the first line of trees. I was almost there when a hand closed around my ankle, and pain shot like lightening through my body. I kicked and clawed but could never find the thing that beat me until the blackness came as a relief.

I remember the burning, like the fires of Hell the villagers always talked about. Burning everywhere. Maybe that was the fever they tell me I had, the fever that made me rant and rave like the lunatic they thought I was when they found me bruised and half frozen on the banks of the river. They told me I screamed out that I was John Otero. I mumbled of flames and souls that would never rest. I don’t remember any of that.

All I remember was the tea they made me take by the cupful when I started to get better—tea so bitter it made me thirstier. The Marsh Witch’s brew. In my delirium I apparently demanded a doctor, then another when the first shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. The second and third tried, and the priest with his prayers and incense and sacred readings. But it was only the witch’s brews and candles and incantations that brought me around.

I remember the taste of that tea, and I remember the voice of the specter—hollow like a gust of air. “I am John Otero.” He’d repeated that, a ceaseless wind of words as he dragged me down the banks back into the river, as he pummeled me under the water. I remember the rocks in my back, the water closing over my head. I remember choking, gagging, trying to fight back, my fists unable to find anything to make contact with.

I still hear that voice in my dreams even though I sleep with wards the Marsh Witch makes me. Mostly I stay inside. I kept the hens Lottie’s father gave me, though they don’t lay many eggs anymore. The pigs are all gone, and the sheep. My lands have fallen into disuse. The money I had saved for Lottie goes now for new amulets and crosses blessed with holy water. I wear garlic around my neck, even when I bathe quickly in the stream at midday. I don’t leave the house at night. If I do, he is there. A black-robed figure that hides at the edges of my vision. The wind carries his words, though no one else can hear. Even in the day I see him sometimes in the shadows. He follows me, haunts me, this John Otero. Sometimes I think I’m as crazy as they all say I am. But he’s there waiting for me, as real as the river, as real as the scars I have from that night, white lines where the rocks cut me in my desperate struggle to get free.

I’ve tried to banish his dark figure. I’ve gone to see the Marsh Witch more times than I can count, but she says she can’t send a soul back to where it belongs until the soul is ready. I’ve taken to carrying the scythe I no longer use at harvest time, but he never gets close enough. Even if he did, would the scythe have any better result than my useless fists that night by the river? I’ve tried to lure him into traps I set surreptitiously in the daylight hours, but he never takes the bait, and the neighbors tear down my useless contraptions in the evenings, as they murmur to themselves and cast me looks of pity as I hide within my walls.

I can’t go north of the village, where Lottie’s house lies, without him barring the way, dark and shadowy in the distance. I don’t speak to her. When I see her in the market, I just hold tighter to my amulets, my garlic on a string, and look around for the familiar dark shape. It’s always there. Behind the butcher’s stand or around the corner where the women gather to gossip by the well.

It’s been almost three years now. Lottie’s to marry a farmer, one who can’t even read. My neighbors told me the news. I rage inside when I think of it. But maybe this illiterate yokel will take care of her as her father always wanted. Maybe John Otero will be able to rest easy. Maybe the dark figure will disappear, his soul and mine both at peace. Because God and the devil know I’ve tried to rid myself of his specter.

But it’s not easy to kill a man who’s already dead.

The post PseudoPod 602: A Learned Man appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Authors : Linda Addison, Steve Rasnic Tem and Thomas Welsh
• Narrators : Siobhan Gallichan, Scott Campbell, Susan Gage and Spencer Disparti
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

Suicide Vending Machine was first published in The Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2017 Anthology in July 2017

Am I Repeating Myself? was first printed in Animated Objects in 1997 and reprinted in Outer Darkness in 1998 and How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend in 2011

At the Bureau originally appeared in 1980 in the anthology of quiet horror Shadows 3 edited by Charles L. Grant.

stick my hands thru the cage of this endless routine

just some flesh caught in this big broken machine

Suicide Vending Machine: “I was in the crisp white gleam of the car showroom with a coffee machine and a stopped clock, and I couldn’t imagine anyone ever being allowed to leave.”

Suicide Vending Machine by Thomas Welsh

Good morning sir. I see from my paperwork that you have a budget of ten thousand dollars, but I’m pleased to announce that you can benefit from our “recommend a friend” discount scheme. Yes sir, it’s another three thousand, and you should certainly thank them the next time you see them. Or perhaps allow us to send them a message of thanks  on your behalf?

I am glad you asked! You absolutely can make a referral too. Don’t worry; I’ll remind you when we finalize our documentation. Just the name and location is all we need, we will pick them up.

Alright then, let’s begin!

Now of course technically I am the salesman, but really I am more of a guide because these machines sell themselves. After all, why would you skimp on the last thing you’ll ever buy? The Life Transition Machines start at one thousand dollars, but we recommend you consider our “best value” package. We have a range of finance options available.

I already know what your next question will be. And yes, for the sake of authenticity, the machines really do take coins. We offer large denomination, special run tokens. You wouldn’t want to be standing here all day would you? We find that most of our customers don’t want to spend their final hours depositing thousands of coins into a slot. That would be neither authentic nor practical.

Ah, I see you eying up the mid-range options. Great for a man on a budget who doesn’t want to compromise on quality! The dark blue machine to your right may be of interest. As you can see there are two main receptacles, one for each arm. You slide your hands inside – after you’ve deposited your payment of course – and the machine will beep twice to let you know it’s ready. Stainless steel bracelets will secure your wrists in place, locking you at the exact angle necessary for a clean, precise procedure. The incision takes place in one… let me just check the specs in my documentation here… yes it takes place in “one one-thousandth of a second”, severing both arterial veins with a single nanometre-sharp edge. That’s the real genius of this particular machine: a single motion so fast and fluid that you won’t feel a thing.

From there, you can either pull your wrists free – the locking mechanism will release automatically after the incision – or you can lean on the moulded Corinthian leather arm rests. We find some of our customers are interested in the aesthetic side and want to see the results of the machines work, while others are happy for the residual mess to stay inside. We either mop up afterwards, or inside the machine a vacuum chamber means you won’t see a drop. Of course as with all procedures that cut the wrists, we don’t cross the street, we go up the highway. Vertical cuts are far more effective at severing the appropriate arteries than horizontal.

No? I see that perhaps this one is not for you, but please follow me! I have something far more suited to your tastes.

Let’s see, let’s see… Yes, along this way please. Ah here we! Now this machine in the green is actually a little cheaper. Many customers are put off by the nature of its operation, but discerning individuals like yourself might be able to handle it. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re up to a bit more of a challenge in your transition from this life to the next, this is a good choice. Shall I tell you more?

I know it looks a little more intimidating, but its operation is both simple and effective. You put your head through this space here. As you can see, there are hand-holds at either side so you can steady yourself. Now as you put your head inside this gap, the metallic actuators release. You see the black band here? This is a three inch diameter vulcanised rubber with a tensile strength of… let me quickly check… yes, “half a tonne”. The metal grips release this band and it snuggly compresses the neck. You see the sophistication of this design? The metal grips hold it open wide enough for your head to fit comfortably through, but with a taut radius much smaller than the thinnest neck, this band is absolutely effective one hundred percent of the time.

What’s that? No, not suffocate. The mechanism of transition is down to the blood flow being cut off rather than the air. Yes, it is quite quick.

Are you interested in suffocation? Please sir, I am only asking! Of course we can skip over those machines. If it’s not to your taste, I recommend you ignore the yellow one. Yes it laminates. You sir… It laminates you.

Certainly I could tell you about the white machine. Yes, it is quite pricey, but we are very proud of it. Cutting edge certainly, but also refined and classic. You see the smooth bezel down the side? Ivory inlays. Ultra HD display screen. I agree, it is quite difficult to identify exactly what it does just by looking at it. The mechanism in this machine is very small. You see this panel here? It looks like a key slot, but actually if you push your finger inside – no sir don’t do that right now – well if you place your finger in here a micro-syringe will push through the fur coating and deposit a tiny dosage of our secret formula into the tip of your finger. Not intravenous, this formula doesn’t need to go directly into your veins. Paralysis at first. Look down sir, you see the matt on the floor? Padded and shock absorbent. It’s a little like a very peaceful sleep. Yes sir, a forever sleep.

Perhaps we could look at the red machine. It’s far closer to your budget and offers a – no sir, come over here please! I’m afraid that area is off-limits. Yes of course it’s not working? Why sir that isn’t one of our machines! That’s the door. Well yes it’s an entrance, but it’s not also an exit. Not unless you have the cancellation fee at hand. Fifteen thousand. No sir, financing is not available for that option.

Would you like to see the blue machine again?

Am I Repeating Myself? by Linda D. Addison

ANOMALY REPORT #27RC393

BEGIN DOCTOR’S OBSERVATION:

The doctor shifted in his leather chair. He bit at a corner of his thumb nail, spread his palms on the dark mahogany desk and looked at both sides of his hands before lowering them to his lap. He looked up at the monitor, straightened when the green light came on.

“Computer, open Case 101B.”

“File opened, Doctor,” the computer’s soft voice answered.

“Prepare for evaluation. Replay the last interview with the patient.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

The screen showed a thin, dark-skinned woman in a hospital gown, seated opposite the doctor. She pulled a strand from her cloud of tangled hair with one hand, placed it in her palm, pulled another hair out. After a few seconds she began to talk.

Did you ever wake up one morning and feel everything was wrong? That’s how today started. I opened my eyes to Ralphie sitting on my dresser, licking his paws. I woke to that grey striped cat every day for seven years. Nothing strange about that. But today every move he made seemed like a rerun of a movie. Every move I made was an echo. I felt out of place. My oak bed, the beige walls, even my worn blue slippers felt strange and familiar at the same time.

I shrugged it off as déjà vu. I took my shower, gulped a cup of coffee and rushed out to the subway. Things started falling apart as I left the subway station. Deep in the herd of workers crowding onto the escalator to the street, I started noticing the people around me.

There was a familiarity that didn’t make sense. I tried to ignore the feeling. But the voices, the bumping into bodies, felt like, well, you know how it is to bump into someone you know well. There’s warmth, an acceptance. When you bump into a stranger you want to move away.

I tried to shake the feeling. It wouldn’t go away. The crowd got thicker. Their eyes bore into me. I knew them, all of them. My heart pounded. I couldn’t get enough air. I had to get away, to think. Try to understand what was happening.

I pushed through them. People yelled, pushed back. An old man fell in front of me. I started to climb over him. Others shoved me to the ground. Held me down. They yelled at me, asked me questions. I started screaming. I didn’t want to hear the sameness in their voices. I screamed and screamed.

The police came and put me in an ambulance. They tied me down. Someone gave me a shot that made me sleep. I woke up here.

We’ve never met, right?

But, I know you. Your voice, your eyes. Like mirrors. Like theirs. Like mine. Everyone is me. I understand, now that I’ve had time to rest and think about it. We’re all made from the same kind of cell. Someone has taken one cell and made copies of people. See this hair in my hand? Each hair could be used to make hundreds of me, of you. It’s like something out of a science-fiction story. I don’t know why someone would do this or why I suddenly realized it.

You think I’m crazy, but I don’t care. I understand now. I know that everyone is me. In this city, maybe in the whole world.

I can’t go on, now that I know. Maybe you can help me forget. So things will be like they were. I just want to forget. Please. Help me.

The patient buried her face in her hands and broke into tears.

“Computer, end playback.” The doctor wiped his sweating hands on his pants before crossing his arms and leaning back in the chair.

The monitor changed to a soothing, slowly changing fractal pattern. “Doctor, what is your opinion of this case?” the computer asked.

“I-I think the patient has become involved in a sudden delusional fantasy as a means of escape.”

“What is she trying to escape?”

The doctor picked up a glass of water. His shaking hand caused ripples. He put the glass down. “I don’t know. I-I mean I don’t have enough information about her life at this point.”

“Doctor, you seem upset. Has something happened you would like to talk about?”

“No. I’m just tired. Didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Perhaps you should go home and rest, Doctor.”

“Yes, maybe you’re right.” The doctor stood and left the room.

CONCLUDE DOCTOR’S OBSERVATION

LOG ENTRY ANOMALY REPORT #27RC393:

Confirmed spontaneous recognition of Project Repeat by one subject in Sector 5760.

Recommend removal.

Consequent corruption of second subject.

Recommend removal.

Detach both subjects from template to analyze their design for errors.

Order replacements.

At the Bureau by Steve Rasnic Tem

I’ve been the administrator of these offices for twenty-five years now. I wish my employees were as steady. Most of them last only six months or so before they start complaining of boredom. It’s next to impossible to find good help. But I’ve always been content here.

My wife doesn’t understand how I could remain with the job this long. She says it’s a dead end; I’m at the top of my pay scale, there’ll be no further promotions, or increase in responsibilities. I’ve no place to go but down, she says. Her complaints about my job always lead to complaints about the marriage itself, of course. No children. Few friends. All the magic’s gone, she says. But I’ve always been content.

When I started in the office we handled building permits. After a few years we were switched to peddling, parade, demolition licenses. Two years ago it was dog licenses’. Last year they switched us to nothing but fishing permits.

Not too many people fish these days; the streams are too polluted. Last month I sold one permit. None the two months before. They plan to change our function again, I’m told, but a final decision apparently hasn’t been made. I really don’t care, as long as my offices continue to run smoothly. A photograph of my wife taken the day of our marriage has sat on my desk the full twenty-five years, watching over me. At least she doesn’t visit the office. I’m grateful for that.

Last week they reopened the offices next door. About time, I thought; the space had been vacant for five years. Ours was the last office still occupied in the old City Building. I was afraid maybe we too would be moved.

But I haven’t been able as yet to determine just what it is exactly they do next door. They’ve a small staff, just one lone man at a telephone, I think. No one comes in or out of the office all day, until five, when he goes home.

I feel it’s my business to find out what he does over there, and what it is he wants from me. A few days ago I looked up from my newspaper and saw a shadow on the frosted glass of our front door. Imagine my irritation when I rushed out into the hallway only to see his door just closing. I walked over there, intending to knock, and ask him what it was he wanted, but I saw his shadow within the office, bent over his desk. For some reason this stopped me, and I returned to my own office.

The next day the same thing happened. Then the day after that. I then refused to leave my desk. I wouldn’t chase a shadow; he would not use me in such a fashion. I soon discovered that when I didn’t go to the door, the shadow remained in my frosted glass all day long. He was standing outside my door all day long, every day.

Once there were two shadows. That brought me to my feet immediately. But when I jerked the door open I discovered two city janitors, sent to scrape off the words “Fish Permits” from my sign, “Bureau Of Fish Permits.” When I asked them what the sign was to be changed to, they told me they hadn’t received those instructions yet. Typical, I thought; nor had I been told.

Of course, after the two janitors had left, the single shadow was back again. It was there until five.

The next morning I walked over to his office door. The lights were out; I was early. I had hoped that the sign painters had labeled his activity for me, but his sign had not yet been filled in. “Bureau Of …” There were a few black streaks where the paint had been scraped away years ago, bare fragments of the letters that I couldn’t decipher.

I’m not a man given to emotion. But the next day I lost my temper. I saw the shadow before the office door and I exploded. I ordered him away from my door at the top of my voice. When three hours had passed and he still hadn’t left, I began to weep. I pleaded with him. But he was still there.

The next day I moaned. I shouted obscenities. But he was always there.

Perhaps my wife is right; I’m not very decisive, I don’t like to make waves. But it’s been days. He is always there.

Today I discovered the key to another empty office adjacent to mine. It fits a door between the two offices. I can go from my office to this vacant office without being seen from the hallway. At last, I can catch this crazy man in the act.

I sit quietly at my desk, pretending to read the newspaper. He hasn’t moved for hours, except to occasionally peer closer at the frosted glass in my door, simulating binoculars with his two hands to his eyes.

I take off my coat and put it on the back of my chair. A strategically placed flower pot will give the impression of my head. I crawl over to the door to the vacant office, open it as quietly as possible, and slip through.

Cobwebs trace the outlines of the furniture. Files are scattered everywhere, some of the papers beginning to mold. The remains of someone’s lunch are drying on one desk. I have to wonder at the city’s janitorial division.

Unaccountably, I worry over the grocery list my wife gave me, now lying on my desk. I wonder if I should go back after it. Why? It bothers me terribly, the list unattended, unguarded on my desk. But I must push on. I step over a scattered pile of newspapers by the main desk, and reach the doorway leading into the hall.

I leap through the doorway with one mighty swing, prepared to shout the rude man down, in the middle of his act.

The hall is empty.

I am suddenly tired. I walk slowly to the man’s office door, the door to the other bureau. I stand waiting.

I can see his shadow through the office door. He sits at his desk, apparently reading a newspaper. I step closer, forming my hands into imaginary binoculars. I press against the glass, right below the phrase, “Bureau Of,” lettered in bold, black characters.

He orders me away from his door. He weeps. He pleads. Now he is shouting obscenities.

I’ve been here for days.

The post PseudoPod 601: Flash On The Borderlands XLIII: The Grinding of Gears appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Henry Kuttner
• Narrator : Robert C. Eccles
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“The Graveyard Rats” was first published in Weird Tales, March 1936.

The Graveyard Rats by Henry Kuttner

Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats. Generations ago they had come up from the wharves and settled in the graveyard, a colony of abnormally large rats, and when Masson had taken charge after the inexplicable disappearance of the former caretaker, he decided that they must go. At first he set traps for them and put poisoned food by their burrows, and later he tried to shoot them, but it did no good. The rats stayed, multiplying and overrunning the graveyard with their ravenous hordes.

They were large, even for the mus decumanus, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length, exclusive of the naked pink and grey tail. Masson had caught glimpses of some as large as good-sized cats, and when, once or twice, the grave-diggers had uncovered their burrows, the malodorous tunnels were large enough to enable a man to crawl into them on his hands and knees. The ships that had come generations ago from distant ports to the rotting Salem wharves had brought strange cargoes.

Masson wondered sometimes at the extraordinary size of these burrows. He recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem—tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity. Wagging their grey heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.

And then, too, there was this curious dread of the rats. Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; but he could not understand the inexplicable horror which the oldsters held for deserted, rat-infested houses. He had heard vague rumours of ghoulish beings that dwelt far underground, and that had the power of commanding the rats, marshalling them like horrible armies. The rats, the old men whispered, were messengers between this world and the grim and ancient caverns far below Salem. Bodies had been stolen from graves for nocturnal subterranean feasts, they said. The myth of the Pied Piper is a fable that hides a blasphemous horror, and the black pits of Avernus have brought forth hell-spawned monstrosities that never venture into the light of day.

Masson paid little attention to these tales. He did not fraternise with his neighbours, and, in fact, did all he could to hide the existence of the rats from intruders. Investigation, he realised, would undoubtedly mean the opening of many graves. And while some of the gnawed, empty coffins could be attributed to the activities of the rats, Masson might find it difficult to explain the mutilated bodies that lay in some of the coffins.

The purest gold is used in filling teeth, and this gold is not removed when a man is buried. Clothing, of course, is another matter; for usually the undertaker provides a plain broadcloth suit that is cheap and easily recognisable. But gold is another matter; and sometimes, too, there were medical students and less reputable doctors who were in need of cadavers, and not overscrupulous as to where these were obtained.

So far Masson had successfully managed to discourage investigation. He had fiercely denied the existence of the rats, even though they sometimes robbed him of his prey. Masson did not care what happened to the bodies after he had performed his gruesome thefts, but the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.

The size of these burrows occasionally worried Masson. Then, too, there was the curious circumstance of the coffins always being gnawed open at the end, never at the side or top. It was almost as though the rats were working under the direction of some impossibly intelligent leader.

Now he stood in an open grave and threw a last sprinkling of wet earth on the heap beside the pit. It was raining, a slow, cold drizzle that for weeks had been descending from soggy black clouds. The graveyard was a slough of yellow, sucking mud, from which the rain-washed tombstones stood up in irregular battalions. The rats had retreated to their burrows, and Masson had not seen one for days. But his gaunt, unshaved face was set in frowning lines; the coffin on which he was standing was a wooden one.

The body had been buried several days earlier, but Masson had not dared to disinter it before. A relative of the dead man had been coming to the grave at intervals, even in the drenching rain. But he would hardly come at this late hour, no matter how much grief he might be suffering, Masson thought, grinning wryly. He straightened and laid the shovel aside.

From the hill on which the ancient graveyard lay he could see the lights of Salem flickering dimly through the downpour. He drew a flashlight from his pocket. He would need light now. Taking up the spade, he bent and examined the fastenings of the coffin.

Abruptly he stiffened. Beneath his feet he sensed an unquiet stirring and scratching, as though something were moving within the coffin. For a moment a pang of superstitious fear shot through Masson, and then rage replaced it as he realised the significance of the sound. The rats had forestalled him again!

In a paroxysm of anger Masson wrenched at the fastenings of the coffin. He got the sharp edge of the shovel under the lid and pried it up until he could finish the job with his hands. Then he sent the flashlight’s cold beam darting down into the coffin.

Rain spattered against the white satin lining; the coffin was empty. Masson saw a flicker of movement at the head of the case, and darted the light in that direction.

The end of the sarcophagus had been gnawed through, and a gaping hole led into darkness. A black shoe, limp and dragging, was disappearing as Masson watched, and abruptly he realised that the rats had forestalled him by only a few minutes. He fell on his hands and knees and made a hasty clutch at the shoe, and the flashlight incontinently fell into the coffin and went out. The shoe was tugged from his grasp, he heard a sharp, excited squealing, and then he had the flashlight again and was darting its light into the burrow.

It was a large one. It had to be, or the corpse could not have been dragged along it. Masson wondered at the size of the rats that could carry away a man’s body, but the thought of the loaded revolver in his pocket fortified him. Probably if the corpse had been an ordinary one Masson would have left the rats with their spoils rather than venture into the narrow burrow, but he remembered an especially fine set of cufflinks he had observed, as well as a stickpin that was undoubtedly a genuine pearl. With scarcely a pause he clipped the flashlight to his belt and crept into the burrow.

It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze himself along. Ahead of him in the flashlight’s glow he could see the shoes dragging along the wet earth of the bottom of the tunnel. He crept along the burrows as rapidly as he could, occasionally barely able to squeeze his lean body through the narrow walls.

The air was overpowering with its musty stench of carrion. If he could not reach the corpse in a minute, Masson decided, he would turn back. Belated fears were beginning to crawl, maggot-like, within his mind, but greed urged him on. He crawled forward, several times passing the mouths of adjoining tunnels. The walls of the burrow were damp and slimy, and twice lumps of dirt dropped behind him. The second time he paused and screwed his head around to look back. He could see nothing, of course, until he had unhooked the flashlight from his belt and reversed it.

Several clods lay on the ground behind him, and the danger of his position suddenly became real and terrifying. With thoughts of a cave-in making his pulse race, he decided to abandon the pursuit, even though he had now almost overtaken the corpse and the invisible things that pulled it. But he had overlooked one thing: the burrow was too narrow to allow him to turn.

Panic touched him briefly, but he remembered a side tunnel he had just passed, and backed awkwardly along the tunnel until he came to it. He thrust his legs into it, backing until he found himself able to turn. Then he hurriedly began to retrace his way, although his knees were bruised and painful.

Agonising pain shot through his leg. He felt sharp teeth sink into his flesh, and kicked out frantically. There was a shrill squealing and the scurry of many feet. Flashing the light behind him, Masson caught his breath in a sob of fear as he saw a dozen great rats watching him intently, their slitted eyes glittering in the light. They were great misshapen things, as large as cats, and behind them he caught a glimpse of a dark shape that stirred and moved swiftly aside into the shadow; and he shuddered at the unbelievable size of the thing.

The light had held them for a moment, but they were edging closer, their teeth dull orange in the pale light. Masson tugged at his pistol, managed to extricate it from his pocket, and aimed carefully. It was an awkward position, and he tried to press his feet into the soggy sides of the burrow so that he should not inadvertently send a bullet into one of them.

The rolling thunder of the shot deafened him, for a time, and the clouds of smoke set him coughing. When he could hear again and the smoke had cleared, he saw that the rats were gone. He put the pistol back and began to creep swiftly along the tunnel, and then with a scurry and a rush they were upon him again.

They swarmed over his legs, biting and squealing insanely, and Masson shrieked horribly as he snatched for his gun. He fired without aiming, and only luck saved him from blowing a foot off. This time the rats did not retreat so far, but Masson was crawling as swiftly as he could along the burrow, ready to fire again at the first sound of another attack.

There was a patter of feet and he sent the light stabbing behind him. A great grey rat paused and watched him. Its long ragged whiskers twitched, and its scabrous, naked tail was moving slowly from side to side. Masson shouted and the rat retreated.

He crawled on, pausing briefly, the black gap of a side tunnel at his elbow, as he made out a shapeless huddle on the damp clay a few yards ahead. For a second he thought it was a mass of earth that had been dislodged from the roof, and then he recognised it as a human body.

It was a brown and shrivelled mummy, and with a dreadful unbelieving shock Masson realised that it was moving.

It was crawling towards him, and in the pale glow of the flashlight the man saw a frightful gargoyle face thrust into his own. It was the passionless, death’s-head skull of a long-dead corpse, instinct with hellish life; and the glazed eyes swollen and bulbous betrayed the thing’s blindness. It made a faint groaning sound as it crawled towards Masson, stretching its ragged and granulated lips in a grin of dreadful hunger. And Masson was frozen with abysmal fear and loathing.

Just before the Horror touched him, Masson flung himself frantically into the burrow at his side. He heard a scrambling noise at his heels, and the thing groaned dully as it came after him. Masson, glancing over his shoulder, screamed and propelled himself desperately through the narrow burrow. He crawled along awkwardly, sharp stones cutting his hands and knees. Dirt showered into his eyes, but he dared not pause even for a moment. He scrambled on, gasping, cursing, and praying hysterically.

Squealing triumphantly, the rats came at him, horrible hunger in their eyes. Masson almost succumbed to their vicious teeth before he succeeded in beating them off. The passage was narrowing, and in a frenzy of terror he kicked and screamed and fired until the hammer clicked on an empty shell. But he had driven them off.

He found himself crawling under a great stone, embedded in the roof, that dug cruelly into his back. It moved a little as his weight struck it, and an idea flashed into Masson’s fright-crazed mind: If he could bring down the stone so that it blocked the tunnel!

The earth was wet and soggy from the rains, and he hunched himself half upright and dug away at the dirt around the stone. The rats were coming closer. He saw their eyes glowing in the reflection of the flashlight’s beam. Still he clawed frantically at the earth. The stone was giving. He tugged at it and it rocked in its foundation.

A rat was approaching—the monster he had already glimpsed. Grey and leprous and hideous it crept forward with its orange teeth bared, and in its wake came the blind dead thing, groaning as it crawled. Masson gave a last frantic tug at the stone. He felt it slide downwards, and then he went scrambling along the tunnel.

Behind him the stone crashed down, and he heard a sudden frightful shriek of agony. Clods showered upon his legs. A heavy weight fell on his feet and he dragged them free with difficulty. The entire tunnel was collapsing!

Gasping with fear, Masson threw himself forward as the soggy earth collapsed at his heels. The tunnel narrowed until he could barely use his hands and legs to propel himself; he wriggled forward like an eel and suddenly felt satin tearing beneath his clawing fingers, and then his head crashed against something that barred his path. He moved his legs, discovering that they were not pinned under the collapsed earth. He was lying flat on his stomach, and when he tried to raise himself he found that the roof was only a few inches from his back. Panic shot through him.

When the blind horror had blocked his path, he had flung himself desperately into a side tunnel, a tunnel that had no outlet. He was in a coffin, an empty coffin into which he had crept through the hole the rats had gnawed in its end!

He tried to turn on his back and found that he could not. The lid of the coffin pinned him down inexorably. Then he braced himself and strained at the coffin lid. It was immovable, and even if he could escape from the sarcophagus, how could he claw his way up through five feet of hard-packed earth?

He found himself gasping. It was dreadfully fetid, unbearably hot. In a paroxysm of terror he ripped and clawed at the satin until it was shredded. He made a futile attempt to dig with his feet at the earth from the collapsed burrow that blocked his retreat. If he were only able to reverse his position he might be able to claw his way through to air … air …

White-hot agony lanced through his breast, throbbed in his eyeballs. His head seemed to be swelling, growing larger and larger; and suddenly he heard the exultant squealing of the rats. He began to scream insanely but could not drown them out. For a moment he thrashed about hysterically within his narrow prison, and then he was quiet, gasping for air. His eyelids closed, his blackened tongue protruded, and he sank down into the blackness of death with the mad squealing of the rats dinning in his ears.

The post PseudoPod 600: The Graveyard Rats appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : J.L. Flannery
• Narrator : Paul S. Jenkins
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 599: The Boy with the Glass Eyes is a PseudoPod original.

The Boy With The Glass Eyes By J.L. Flannery

My son arrived in a brown cardboard package, no bigger than a shoebox.

I lifted the lid to see him lying there flat on his back, eyes closed, as though he were asleep.

‘Go on,’ my Boss said, ‘lift him up.’

Nervously, I lifted him up out of the box and cradled him in my arms. His skin was velvet. His smell; pure talcum powder. I looked down at his sleeping face and put on a smile, pretending the nausea that was rising in my throat didn’t exist.

My Boss, Mr Yamamoto, stood staring, waiting for me to react.

‘It’s incredibly lifelike,’ I said in Japanese.

He nodded, ‘Just like a real baby. Go ahead. Power it up.’

I hesitated a moment. What on earth would Alice say when I bought this thing home with me?

‘It’s a great privilege to be chosen,’ Mr Yamamoto said smiling, as if he could sense my unease.

I nodded, ‘Yes, I know. Thank you. I’m very grateful about it, honest I am. It’s just…’

‘It’s just what?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing,’ and I held down the button on the base of its spine and the baby woke up.

Slowly, his eyes opened and he turned his head to look at me with his blue eyes made of glass.

‘The baby will be on at all times,’ Mr Yamamoto explained, ‘the light at the base of his spine will glow green to tell you its on. He’ll automatically go into shutdown mode at night, once the room is dark. If you need to, you can force shutdown mode by putting him back in his box.’

I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening. The baby I held in my arms was smiling at me, a big gummy smile. As far as AI go, this was the most remarkable I’d seen. It looked like a real baby. It’s skin felt soft like a baby’s. Hell, it even had the same scent as one. I was fascinated and disturbed in equal measure.

‘Your wife will enjoy having him for the weekend, I’m sure,’ Mr Yamamoto said, smiling proudly.

‘Oh yes,’ I lied, ‘I’m sure it will make her very happy.’

It was my idea to move to Tokyo. At the time my wife, Alice, wasn’t so keen.

If you have never been there, the experience is hard to describe but I’ll try my best: neon buildings grow out of the concrete, stretching up to reach the sky. Zebra crossings zigzag in all directions, whilst people in their thousands march across in total silence. Cartoon characters stare back at you everywhere you look: on a subway pass, on manhole covers, on shop signs, on crisp packets and tourist leaflets. Boys wear eyeliner and t-shirts emblazoned with nonsensical English. Girls wear ghostly white make up and Bo-Peep dresses, giggling like porcelain dolls come to life. Dogs wear bows and sequin outfits. In one corner of Tokyo, Roppongi Hills, a giant spider stands keeping watch over the city. In Odiba; a giant gundam robot. Toilets flush themselves. Hotels rooms are space age capsules. Stepping into Tokyo feels like stepping into the future.

We visited there when we first got married and I’m pretty sure Alice loved it as much as I did. After visiting Tokyo, England lost its shine. It was difficult to hide our irritation at people talking loudly on public transport, the lateness of just about everything, and the general selfishness of people. When it was cold and rainy at home, we longed for the sun and cherry blossoms of Japan.

And, of course, we’d just lost the baby.

Jasper was only two weeks old when he died.

Alice gave birth to him at only twenty-eight weeks and if I’m honest, I knew as soon as I saw him that he was going to die. He looked too tiny, too fragile to live. I would sit for hours at his bedside, just watching him lying there in the incubator, struggling to breathe in. Every time he breathed he made this awful rasping noise. The doctors said even if he had survived, he would have had respiratory problems for the rest of his life.

The first time I got to hold our baby in my arms, he was already dead. We dressed him in the blue flannel sleepsuit Alice had bought for him and we took photos together as if he was still alive, and we were a ‘normal’ family. Jasper looks just like a doll cradled in our arms.

Depression washed over the both of us for a long time, but for Alice it was much worse. I was scared she was going to let grief wash her away completely. She refused to get out of bed. She cried all day long. She blamed herself for Jasper’s death even though it was nobody’s fault.

For a while I was scared to leave her alone for fear she would hurt herself, but gradually with time and with medication, her grief began to ease a little and that was when I suggested we came to Tokyo.

It was meant to be a new beginning.

A way to forget.

The night I bought the AI home, I couldn’t bring myself to tell Alice straight away. I left the baby in its box in the hallway of our apartment whilst I thought of a tactful way to break the news. I waited until we’d both finished eating dinner before I told her about him. She listened to my explanation and instead of bursting into tears like I thought she would, she seemed enthusiastic about the idea.

‘Well, bring it inside,’ she said smiling, ‘you can’t just leave him outside, John. What if your Boss found out you’d left his prototype in an apartment hallway?’

So, I bought the box inside and placed it on the kitchen table.

‘You ready?’

She looked back at me and nodded.

As soon as I lifted the lid, I saw the look of surprise in her eyes. She was expecting Astro Boy, not a doll so realistic it could pass for a real human baby.

She reached out slowly to stroke its soft blond hair, and the baby writhed and held up its arms. Alice jumped back from the box, afraid, but then she moved forward again and picked him up, laughing nervously at herself for having been startled.

The baby gurgled in her arms.

‘Wow John! This is unbelievable,’ she said.

It was the first time in eighteen months I had seen her smile like that.

I thought then, that it would all work out okay after all.

But I was wrong.

That night, as the sun set and the room grew dim, the baby did just as Mr Yamomoto said it would and powered down. It’s movements slowly stiffened and eventually came to a stop. I watched Alice’s face change from contentment to panic and I quickly snatched the baby away from her and carried it over to its box.

‘It’s okay. It’s meant to do that,’ I reassured her, ‘it’s powering down for the night.’

But as I stood putting the baby in the box with my back turned, I felt that feeling of nausea return again. I knew what Alice was thinking: when the baby went still and stiff, it looked as though it was dead. It looked just like Jasper.

I put the lid on the box and turned to her, ‘Are you okay having him here?’

‘Sure, I’m fine. I was just scared for a moment that I’d broken it that’s all. He’s beautiful John. He’s just so real.’

‘I know.’

I moved towards her and pulled her close to my chest. Her hair smelled of cherry shampoo and I kissed the top of her head. She looked back up at me with those big brown doe eyes of hers and we kissed.

I’m not going to give all the juicy details of what happened next, but we had sex for the first time in weeks and I finally relaxed, wondering how I could have hesitated in bringing this baby home.

I woke up in the night. The clock said 3.30am and the other side of the bed was cold. Alice was missing.

I got up and found her, sat downstairs at the table in the dark, her back turned to me.

‘Ali, you alright?’

She jumped round, ‘Shit John! Don’t sneak up like that. You scared me to death.’

‘Well, I’m not the one roaming the house in the middle of the night. You scared me, shuffling about down here.’

She sighed, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I keep hearing it crying.’

I shook my head, ‘It doesn’t cry Alice. Mr Yamamoto said the developers thought it might put people off.’

She still looked unconvinced so I stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders the way she liked me to, and tried to reassure her.

‘Babies cries are as loud as a road drill. If it cried, which it can’t, I would have heard it too.’

‘Are you sure? I swear John, I heard it.’

I’d already explained to her how it worked. I couldn’t see what else there was left to say. The baby couldn’t cry – end of story. I stopped rubbing her shoulders.

‘It must be someone else’s kid. Next door’s maybe. You know how thin the walls are here. Come on Ali, its late. Just close the damn lid and come back to bed.’

I watched her get up from her seat and close the lid of the box. I followed behind her as she climbed the stairs.

I was knackered the following morning; and like most people, when I’m tired, I’m easily irritated.

I took a shower and got dressed, leaving Alice to take the baby out of the box and make breakfast. When I came downstairs, I found she had taken the red sports bag from the garage and was knelt down with it unzipped, its guts spilling out onto the tatami mat floor.

I knew what she was looking for in there: the blue flannel sleepsuit Jasper had worn. I couldn’t bear to see it again.

‘Why’d you bring these with you? I thought you had thrown those things away,’ I snapped.

But Alice didn’t look up. She was transfixed by the contents of the bag and was pulling them out one after another, like a magician pulling never-ending handkerchiefs from a hat.

‘Those ‘things’ were our son’s clothes that he never got to wear. Of course, I kept them. Why wouldn’t I?’

I stood by, watching her sifting through them as she pulled out each piece of clothing and held it up to inspect each piece for its suitability. All the time, the baby writhed around next to her on the mat, like a baby that was alive.

It dawned on me how absurd the whole thing was. She was sorting out our dead baby’s clothes for a doll and saw nothing wrong with it at all. I could have killed for a cigarette right then, only I knew she would start going on at me if I lit one up in the flat.

‘Ah, here it is!’

She held up the blue flannel sleepsuit.

‘You’re not really going to dress it in that are you?’ I could hear my voice shaking as I spoke.

‘Why not?’ She said.

I wanted to say things like, ‘because it’s wrong. Because that way, you’ll never let go of the past. Because we both know they belonged to Jasper and this is just a lifeless, soulless doll that could never replace our baby boy.’

But of course, I never said anything.

Maybe you think I was being unfair. After all, she was a woman who’d lost a child. What was the point of making a fuss? Its only clothes, right?

Wrong.

In Japan, some believe that everything you own has an imprint of your soul on it, as if some part of you rubs off on it when you touch it. Even clothes. That’s why you won’t find a charity shop anywhere in Tokyo. It’s also one of the reasons why nobody steals anything. Why would you want to own something that had traces of someone else’s soul all over it?

I’ll give you an example: there’s a famous doll called Okiku in Mennenji temple in Iwamizawa, whose owner died in the 1930’s from fever, when she was just three years old. Because the girl carried Okiku everywhere with her, it’s believed that the girl’s spirit possessed the doll the second she died.

But that’s not the worst of it: to this day the doll’s hair keeps on growing. Growing as if the doll were alive and breathing.

So to use your dead child’s clothes to dress a toy…well, you can see how that might be a problem for some people. For me.

After the disagreement over the sleepsuit, I went for a walk around the block to get some air. And by ‘air’ I mean ‘smoke a cigarette.’ I knew how Alice hated my smoking and so I held each drag of the cigarette deep in my lungs until it burned, and when I exhaled, I puffed out smoke rings in defiance.

When I got back to the apartment, I was expecting her to smell the smoke on me and start another fight, but I could hear her in the bathroom retching, and my petty rebellion was quickly forgotten. I felt guilty now that I had left her, even for that short amount of time.

I knocked on the bathroom door, “Ali, you okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

She opened the door, her eyes watery and her hair unkempt.

‘I dunno what caused that. I was just sat there with the baby and all of a sudden…’

I pulled her close and kissed the top of her head.

‘I’m sorry I was such an asshole earlier.’

She wriggled out of my grasp, ‘It doesn’t matter. Hey you should see the baby now. It started sitting up while you were gone.’

I don’t know why this bothered me so much. It was an AI after all, which meant was meant to learn and develop and grow. Just like a real baby. Only real babies don’t sit up after just a day.

We went together into the living room and there it was just sat on the mat playing with a ball Alice found in the garage. The sports bag was gone. But it was wearing the blue sleepsuit.

When I walked into the room, it’s head turned and its glassy eyes looked right at me.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Alice knelt down and starting using that baby voice women always reserve for the ears of tiny puppies and small children, ‘aren’t you a clever one? Mama’s special boy.’

The hairs on my neck prickled to watch my wife talk to it like that, as if it was real. Mr Yamamoto had been right; childless women the world over would fall in love with this AI.

And then it dawned on me: after all this time trying to prove to my Boss that I wasn’t just another worthless foreigner, all I had had to do to prove my worth was bring this baby home and tell the company it was a success. I might even get a promotion.

And yet, something about the whole thing made me uneasy.

When Alice gets a craving for something, there’s nothing that will stop her until she gets it. That day she was desperate for some freshly baked donuts.

‘I dunno Ali,’ I moaned, ‘it’s pissing down outside. Can’t we go another day?’

‘You stay here,’ she said tying up her laces. You and the baby can get to know one another.’

When she was gone, the baby gave a giggle. I picked it up and put it on my lap. It didn’t feel like a real baby; it was too heavy. I tipped it upside down and held it by the leg to see what it would do, but it began to frown, so I quickly turned it the right way up. Then I felt stupid for being momentarily manipulated into thinking the damn thing was real.

‘You’re just a piece of metal in there,’ I said to it.

The baby wrinkled its nose at me.

‘You’re not real.’

It gave a grin.

Alice returned with a box of six donuts and she ate them all, one after another.

‘Do you remember the last time I craved these? It was when I was pregnant. Isn’t that weird.’

‘Yeah honey, I guess it is.’

I suppose the alarm bells should have been ringing then. Vomiting. Cravings. It was like that AI was causing her to relive the pregnancy all over again. I started thinking of how I could get out of this. Perhaps I should call my Boss. Just explain that we had lost a baby and that my wife has had severe anxiety and depression and that this could possibly bring about a relapse.

I did think about doing it.

But then I saw how happy she looked.

So I didn’t.

That night, Alice woke me up.

‘I can hear him John,’ she kept saying, ‘can’t you hear him? He’s crying. He’s making that rasping noise. Just like Jasper did.’

I didn’t really know what to say. I mean, I couldn’t hear the noises she claimed she could. And I’d already explained it couldn’t cry. It was impossible. It hadn’t been programmed to.

I held her tight in my arms, ‘Hush now Alice. It’s okay. You must’ve had a bad dream that’s all. Listen.’

She lay there in my arms, both of us listening to the silence.

‘See,’ I said, ‘it was just a dream.’

She wiped away her tears and I stroked her hair until she seemed calmer.

‘I’m so sorry John,’ she whined, ‘I just don’t know what’s happening to me.’

‘You know, if its too much having the baby here, I could power it down. My Boss wouldn’t even have to know.’

‘No,’ she answered far too eagerly, ‘don’t switch him off, John. I’m fine, honestly. It’s like you said, it was just a dream, that’s all.’

She turned onto her side and I lay down on my back, staring at the ceiling, waiting for her to drift off. It was making her ill again, it was clear for anyone to see. Once I heard her snoring, I started to relax a little. I lay there for a while thinking of what to do.

And that’s when I heard it too.

The crying.

For a moment I thought I was imagining it. I looked over at Alice but she was fast asleep.

There it was again.

The sound of a baby crying in our apartment.

My stomach somersaulted and I lay there frozen to the spot. What if the Japanese were right? What if that baby had somehow obtained the spirit of my dead boy by wearing that damn sleepsuit? It was a completely irrational thought, I knew, and yet…

I got up out of bed and slowly, so not to wake Alice, opened the door and listened. The crying had stopped but there was a scuttling sound, like something running across the floorboards.

It couldn’t be the baby, I told myself. That was impossible.

I tiptoed down the stairs, heart pounding. I didn’t switch on the light. I was worried it would wake my already anxious wife. If that happened, how would I explain it? I could hardly say that I heard it crying too. That would tip her right over the edge.

When I got to the bottom step, something rushed past me, giggling.

The baby had obviously learned to walk.

I stepped down and tried to see it in the dim light but it was hiding.

‘Hey baby,’ I whispered to it, ‘dada’s here to see you.’

I heard it rustling around in the bin, pulling out Alice’s donut box and dropping it onto the floor.

I pulled open the drawer in the table and fumbled for the emergency torch we kept there. When I switched it on and flashed it around the room, I could see him. He was standing there in the corner of the room. He was looking straight at me with those glass eyes.

‘Come on now baby,’ I said in a singsong voice, ‘come to Dada.’

He started walking towards me with his arms outstretched and that grin on his face. I picked him up.

‘Gotcha!’

‘John, what are you doing?’

I turned to see the figure of Alice on the stairs.

She switched on the light, and as she did so, I could have sworn the damn thing sunk its teeth into me.

‘Little shit!’ I dropped it and it bounced onto the mat.

Alice dashed over and picked it up, ‘Jesus John! It’s just a baby!’

Just a baby? Like hell, it was.

‘There’s something wrong with it,’ I said to her as calmly as I could manage, ‘there’s a fault somewhere. I need to restart it.’

Alice was staring at me like I was about to commit murder.

‘Don’t be ridiculous John! We’re not turning him off. How could you even suggest that?’

She pulled him closer to her and the baby snuggled into her chest.

‘Give him to me Alice.’

‘No,’ she held onto him even tighter.

I swear, I didn’t mean to hurt her. I mean, I wanted the baby, sure I did, but only because it was making her paranoid. I lunged forward and pulled at her arms, trying to prise them open so I could get to the baby.

‘Stop it John. I won’t let you!’

The baby writhed and wriggled like crazy, but it never made a sound as we fought with one another. I pulled hard until Alice was unable to fight any longer. She let go and I grabbed hold of its head and pulled him away from her.

‘No John, please! Please don’t take my little boy!’

I lay him face down on the table and unzipped his sleepsuit and found the little green light at the base of his spine. I could hear Alice sobbing and begging me not to do it. Believe me, I felt awful, but I knew now I should never have bought the damn thing home in the first place.

I dug the tip of my finger into its spine and held it down until the baby grew stiff and still. The green light went out.

Alice was shrieking and sobbing and so I went to her and tried to hold her close, even though she kept pushing me away.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘It’s okay. It’s over.’

She settled down then and stood weeping quietly into my chest.

But it was then, as I stood comforting her, that I saw it move. The damn thing rolled over onto its back and sat up.

‘Jesus Christ Alice! That thing’s alive.’

I pushed Alice out of the way and picked up the AI again. There was no green glowing light and yet there it was, writhing and wriggling and biting me, fighting to stay alive.

I slammed the thing face down onto the table and pushed down hard with my hand to keep it still. It’s legs and arms flailed wildly and I could hear Alice crying out behind me, ‘John, please John! Stop it John, you’re hurting him!’

Beneath it’s soft velvet skin I could see its blue wires. It was only now that I realised how they looked like human veins underneath that translucent material. I hesitated for a moment and tried to think of another way but there wasn’t one. It’s just a robot, I told myself. Don’t look at it. Don’t listen to Alice. It’s just a robot.

I dug my nails into the soft pink skin on its back and I tore it open.

The baby let out an ear-piercing shriek. One long, shrill note.

Alice stepped forward screaming and shrieking, trying to pull me away but I shook her off, sending her stumbling backwards. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her drop to her knees, and at first I thought she was just upset. Distraught at having her baby taken away from her for a second time.

It’s not real. Just a robot.

I shoved my hand into the cavity in the baby’s back and gripped the cords as tightly as I could and pulled hard. The baby screamed. Try as I might, the wires just would not break. They stretched out, like long laces of licorice. I pulled and I tugged and there was a sickening sound like tendons snapping, as the wires finally came off in my hand.

The baby lay on the table, convulsing and shrieking so loudly I had to place my trembling hands over my ears to block out the noise. Eventually, the baby gave a final whimper and lay still. I waited a moment to check if it moved again, but it was dead this time.

‘I’m so sorry Alice,’ I said, ‘I should never have bought it home. I guess I thought…’

But Alice wasn’t answering.

I turned to see her lay on the floor clutching her stomach.

‘It’s okay Ali, you’ll be okay,’ I said, ‘it’s not like it was real. It wasn’t our Jasper. It was a robot. You’re okay, Alice. Alice?’

But Alice couldn’t answer. She lay on the tatami mat, blood trickling down her legs, spreading out like a tulip beneath her.

The post PseudoPod 599: The Boy with the Glass Eyes appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Jim Bihyeh
• Narrator : Cayenne Chris Conroy
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

This story was first published in the PseudoPod 10th Anniversary anthology For Mortal Things Unsung and follows immediately after the end of Jim’s anthology Coyote Tales available now from your favorite purveyors of audiobooks. https://www.downpour.com/coyote-tales?sp=22087

Walk in Beauty by Jim Bihyeh

Tomacita Jones walked over the yellowing grass of the Carl Shepherd Memorial football stadium next to Wide Reeds Elementary School, listening to the autumn winds shake the elm trees at the edge of the gravel track circling the field. The winds were getting stronger now. The nights longer. The cold was becoming more real and the trees knew it. So they were letting their leaves die. She didn’t like that thought, as she bent over her knees and stretched her all-too-chubby legs under her all-too-puffy sweatpants. She double-knotted the laces on her scuffed running shoes. She hadn’t worn them in years, not since Rosa, her granddaughter, had been born. She felt snot about to drip from the tip of her nose and she brushed it away with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

But she was wearing the damn shoes today.

And they were helping her forget about those trees, hissing and letting their leaves drop away. Maybe that’s what life led you toward. You let go of the things that were supposed to die.

And they dropped to the earth, so that the rest of you (what really existed, down in the roots) could survive the winter.

The rest of the text is available in our 10th Anniversary anthology For Mortal Things Unsung. Purchase of this book helps to support Escape Artists.

The post PseudoPod 598: Walk in Beauty appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Tim Pratt
• Narrator : Eric Luke
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
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Tim Pratt publishes a new short story every month for Patreon supporters (www.patreon.com/timpratt). Fool’s Fire was first published for his Patreon in October 2015, reprinted at Nightmare in November 2016. You can read along here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/fools-fire/

“It was inspired by me thinking about how I used to get lost all the time, because I have terrible spatial sense, and now I never get lost, because my phone tells me where to go. But there have always been spirits that preyed on lost travelers, and surely they’d make accommodations to the modern age….”

Fool’s Fire by Tim Pratt

The “going away together” part of the plan to save their marriage had gotten off to a bad start, and the probabilities of success continually ticked downward in Will’s mental calculations. Dori, who normally felt more comfortable in control, had gotten so tired of driving these tree-crowded country roads that she’d ceded the wheel to Will once night fell. Now she was navigating—“nag-ivating,” they used to jokingly call it, back when they’d joked—and displaying remarkably little patience with his requests for clarification. He tried again anyway. “But, look, I don’t even see a road coming up on the right, it’s all trees. Are you sure the map thingy on your phone is working?”

“It always has before. Looks like we’re only twenty minutes away from the cabin.” She had that tone she used more and more lately: ostensibly tolerant, but with a trivial shift in pitch, it could become nastily condescending. “No, wait, now it says twenty-two minutes. It’s adjusting to your slowness. I think I just saw a turtle on the side of the road pass us.”

Several spiteful retorts offered themselves for his use, but Will let them go, visualizing his reflexive anger away, just like his therapist had taught him: the bad feelings were water, flowing down from his head and out through his feet, disappearing into the sand, soaked up and gone. Dori had every right to snap at him, after what he’d done. The fact that she’d agreed to go on this long weekend, to try and remember what they’d once liked about each other, was already a concession worthy of beatification, if not sainthood. Being snippy on a long and confusing drive was totally understandable. Placate, don’t escalate, he thought. “Sorry, hon. It’s dark and I don’t want to drive into a tree or something. I’d rather annoy you by going slowly than annoy you by crashing into a pond.”

She made a noncommittal sound, but then said, “You heard about that woman who drove into Macon Lake last week because her GPS told her to turn there? Broad daylight, she just went into the water, like she thought there was an invisible bridge. That’s why I don’t trust this whole self-driving car idea. All these computer things work fine most of the time, but when they don’t….”

Will, who taught statistics for a living, wanted to point out that humans were far more error-prone than computers, but Dori was taking a conciliatory tone, and since kindness from her was a statistical anomaly lately, he decided to let it go. “Wait, is that the turn?” He’d glimpsed the shadow of an opening among the trees.

“Right where the map said it would be.” She tapped the screen of her phone.

Will thought she sounded pretty smug for someone who’d just been decrying the unreliability of such devices. He obediently turned the wheel, though, bumping along uneven asphalt that rapidly became uneven gravel. He almost said, “See, it’s good we rented the SUV instead of that convertible you wanted,” but it was never a good idea to pick scabs, especially triumphantly.

Their headlights did little to dispel the crowding dark. They were so far out there was no light pollution from nearby towns, and the cloudy skies denied them even starshine. They’d aimed to arrive at the cabin before sundown, but they’d run into traffic, road construction, detours, and even a fallen tree, forcing the app on Dori’s phone to recalculate directions to the cabin every half hour or so, adding to their estimated time with every alteration.

Dori fiddled with the radio (in blatant contravention of their longstanding rule that the driver controlled the music, but this was a day for picking battles). Usually even in the country there were ranting preacher or bluegrass stations, but she didn’t pick up anything but static.

“This really is a rural hideaway,” he said. “It’s amazing our phones even still work out here.”

“Oh, we lost our connection a while ago. The GPS doesn’t care, that’s satellite-based, but we won’t be making any calls. Try not to get lost again, though. We can’t get new directions without a connection, and we didn’t bring any roadmaps.”

He couldn’t stop himself: “I never got lost in the first place, Dori. We just had to take some detours—”

“Stop!” she shouted, bracing both her hands against the dashboard, and he slammed on the brakes hard enough to make their baggage slam around in the back of the car.

“What?” His body was humming with adrenaline, but there wasn’t an animal in his path, or a giant pothole, or anything. He wanted to scream at her for terrifying him that way.

“Will, the road, it just drops off.” She got out of the car and walked into the beams of the headlights, and after a moment’s hesitation, he followed. The last thing he could do now, after everything, was let her venture into the dark alone. Beyond the climate-controlled confines of the car, the air had that thick, syrupy, humid summer quality. He joined Dori on the road, looked where she looked, and groaned.

A dozen yards beyond the car, the road abruptly ended, without warning sign or barrier. The ground dropped off jaggedly into nothingness, into a depth of unknown vastness, hidden by shadow. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “I…. I didn’t see that at all.”

“Your night vision’s always been bad.” There was no criticism in her voice, just a statement of fact, but he nettled anyway. “I didn’t really see the hole, either, I just noticed there were suddenly no more trees ahead, and it felt wrong.” She looked down at her phone, then gave it a little shake, like that would help. “Ha. This map says the cabin is right ahead of us, maybe half a mile.” She turned on her phone’s flashlight and shone it down into the chasm, but the beam just illuminated a short stretch of steep, rocky slope. “How deep do you think that is?”

“Too deep to drive through, anyway. Maybe there was a flash flood, and the road washed away or something. We did get a lot of rain last week.” He shook his head. “We should turn around.”

“Ha. Drive in reverse, you mean. This is barely a one-lane road, and the trees grow so close on both sides you won’t be able to make a three-point turn.”

He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes. We’ll drive until the phones work again, then find a hotel or something until we sort this out.”

She sighed. “Near-death experiences are supposed to bring people closer together, right?”

“I don’t know that we were all that near death—”

The headlights winked out, plunging them into a darkness so complete they might as well have had black bags pulled over their heads.

Dori turned her flashlight back on and started toward the car. “Great. What now?”

“Maybe there’s some kind of timed shut-off on the lights, to keep the battery from dying.”

She turned her face toward him, and though he couldn’t see her expression, he could imagine it: narrow-eyed contempt. The experts on marital problems said that when the predominant emotional response to a partner was contempt, things were very bad indeed.

“Stranded in the woods in the dark, with no phones, and we don’t even have camping gear. I guess a sufficiently disastrous trip could make our marriage seem better by comparison. Maybe that’s the idea? All we need is a couple of black bears trying to eat us.”

“Dori, don’t be dramatic. Let me see if I can get the car started. Worst case, we sleep in the SUV—the back seat is at least as comfortable as our couch, and I’ve spent enough nights on that lately. We’ll survive. We can hike out in the morning, get back to the road, get a cell signal.” He started back toward the dark hulk of their vehicle.

The clouds moved, and the nearly full moon came out, its silvery light uncannily bright in the darkness. “See, there’s even moonlight, it’s practically romantic,” Will said. “It’s an adventure. You can tell all your girlfriends about it.”

“Will.” Her voice was distant, a croak. “Will, come look at this.”

He turned around, and she was still standing near the drop-off, looking down. He had the sudden, insane thought: What if I pushed her? A greasy upwelling of guilt at the idea filled him, even though he knew it wasn’t a serious thought, just a flash of madness; what Poe had called the imp of the perverse.

He walked toward her slowly, trying to pretend that wasn’t fear he’d heard in her voice, imagining a pit full of corpses, or bones, or monsters, or rats. He stood beside her and looked down. The moon wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the full depths of the chasm below, but there was broken glass down there, and bare metal, gleaming and glinting. Fifty feet down he saw the broken remains of station wagons, sedans, vans, and SUVs, at least a dozen wrecked vehicles, and possibly more. “It’s got to be some kind of junkyard,” he said.

“Will, look at them. They’re all facing the same way. Some of them landed on top of each other. These cars all drove into this hole, just like we nearly did.”

“That’s ridiculous. Someone would have put up caution tape, or a guard rail, if this kind of accident happened that often.”

“Jesus, Will, start thinking straight. This wasn’t an accident. This is a trap.”

He stared at her, noting her narrowed eyes, her set jaw. He knew Dori had developed a grim view of human nature—understandable, after everything that had happened—but it was hard to believe she was serious about this. “What, like the people who rented us the cabin like to cause car wrecks? You’d think one of the reviews would have mentioned that.”

“You can stand here calculating the likelihood of human evil if you want. I’m getting out of here.” She turned, and then screamed, and Will whirled.

A figure had emerged from the trees near the car, holding up his hands as if to show he meant no harm. “Listen. You’re in danger, you’ll be dead in a minute, you have to get rid of your phones and follow me.” The man’s voice was nervous, his cadence strange and too fast.

Dori shone her light in his face, and the man winced, turning his head away. He was young, with a scraggly half-grown beard, wearing ragged jeans and a dirty shirt. “Lady, for real, toss the phone, they can track you.”

“Will, let’s go.” Dori’s voice was calm. She was always calm in a crisis. That was one of the many ways the two of them were different.

“Yes, good,” the man said. “Follow me, I know a safe place. But we have to hurry, they’ll be here soon. It’s good you didn’t crash, but that only bought you a few minutes.”

Dori lied, her voice level. “I have a gun, and if you don’t get away from us, I will shoot you.”

The man took a step back. “Guns… I don’t know if they’ll be much help, but it’s worth a try. But you have to—oh, no.” He pointed, and Will turned his head to look, realizing as he did so that it might be a trick to distract them. Dori certainly didn’t take her eyes off the stranger.

Will did see something, though. Lights, floating over the chasm. Fireflies? But, no, these was larger, and greenish-yellow. Swamp gas? There were no swamps here. St. Elmo’s Fire? Didn’t you only get that on ships at sea?

“Get rid of your phones!” The man charged forward and slapped the phone out of Dori’s hand. He tried to grab her arm, but she reared back, kicking him and shouting profanity, and the man gave up. He ran toward Will, and grabbed him instead. “Come on, man, they’ll kill you!”

“Will, are you going to just let him—”

Three orbs of greenish floated toward her. How had they crossed the chasm so quickly? Dori still hadn’t seen them, Will realized. The lights winked out, one after another, and then shadows unspooled from the air where they’d been, tendrils of darkness emanating in an undulating, organic way: the motion reminded him of kelp forests, swaying under the sea.

“Dori!” he shouted, “look out!”

She turned her head, and the tendrils of darkness lashed out and wrapped around her body, her throat, her face. She gave a muffled shriek, struggling against the tendrils… and then the moon vanished behind a cloud, and all was darkness.

“She’s dead.” The stranger’s voice was flat. “Come with me, or you’ll die, too.”

Will took a step toward the place where Dori had been. She wasn’t making a sound anymore, and though he could faintly discern motion on the ground, it didn’t seem like a person struggling, but more like the random agitation of flies mobbing a dead animal. “Dori?” he whispered.

There was a sound then: a sort of slurping, like a toothless old man with poor motor control drinking a bowl of soup. Will shuddered, took a step forward… and then the panic flipped a switch in his body and mind, and turned and ran for the woods.

He’d only blundered a few feet into the trees when someone grabbed his arm. The stranger’s voice said, “It’s me, come on, stay close.” By then Will’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough that he could make out the man’s shape in front of him. Will followed, unthinking, his brain transformed into a numb and useless thing: a wad of clay, a lump of fat. Suddenly the man stopped, turned, and groped at Will’s pockets. He drew out Will’s phone. “Stupid, man, I told you, they can track you.” He hurled the phone as hard as he could into the forest, in the opposite direction from where they were going. Then the man set off again, weaving through the trees deftly, and Will followed.

Not long after, he heard distant ringing. His phone: he recognized Dori’s ringtone. “I—that’s—she’s calling me.”

“Somebody’s calling you, anyway.” The stranger’s voice was grim. “It’s not your girl, though. Come on, my hidey-hole is just down here.” They’d reached a rocky place, a dry creekbed running down the hillside, and the man clambered down among the boulders, descending. The moon returned, though the trees blocked some of its illumination here. Will picked his way down the rocks, and at the bottom, found the stranger sitting under a shelf of rock, in something that was more than a crevasse but not quite a cave.

“We’re safe here. At least, I have been so far. They fly overhead sometimes, but they can’t see us under here.” The man offered Will a dented metal bottle, and Will took a sip and handed it back. He didn’t really taste the water. He felt untethered from his body, like all this was happening to someone else, far away.

“What are they?” he asked. Even his own voice seemed distant. “The lights?”

“I don’t know for sure. Aliens? But why would aliens do this? I get it, they’re alien, that’s the whole point, but….” He shook his head. “My friend Miguel used to joke about the dark gods of the GPS. You know how people drive off bridges or into walls sometimes because their phones tell them to? Or follow wrong directions that take them to a bad part of town, and they get killed? Miguel said that was the price we pay for having all this technology, for never being able to get lost anymore. Like there are these dark forces that feed on lost people, and they make sure they still get to eat, messing with our maps, sometimes even messing with our paths. Maybe he was right. I think about those old stories, too, you know, about will-o-the-wisps?”

Will. My name’s Will. He shook himself and tried to focus. Shadows with Dori at the center kept filling his mind. “I… yeah. Marsh lights. There’s a Latin name for them, I learned it in college, ignus… something. It means ‘fool’s fire.’”

“Yeah, sure, marsh lights, swamp gas, right. But in the stories, the lights lead people astray. Like you get lost in the woods, and you follow the lights because you don’t know what else to do, and they lead you into a bog, and you die. These things, maybe they’re like that, only they’ve got better technology now.” He giggled, and it was such an unhinged, mad sound that it shocked Will back into something like self-awareness.

“Hey. Thanks for helping me back there. I’m Will. What’s your name?”

“Carlos.”

Will squinted into the darkness, at a litter of aluminum cans and junk food wrappers near the back of the crevasse. He smelled urine, and something fouler, too. “How long have you been out here?”

Carlos drummed his fingers on his knee, then said, “This is the sixth night. During the days, I don’t see the lights, or the shadows that come after the lights. At first I tried to get away from here, to find my way out, but now I just use the days to forage for supplies. Usually I hide here at night, but I heard your car, and thought I could help.”

Will frowned. “We can’t be more than a mile from a paved road, Carlos. Just follow the gravel path back.”

“Oh, yeah. I walked that path. I walked it lots of times. But it doesn’t go where you think it will, and before long, you’re back where you started. These lights… they can do things to space. I don’t just mean they mess with your sense of direction, though maybe they do that, too. I mean, they actually change things. They even change themselves. Sometimes, they seem like fireflies. Other times, they’re bigger than a house. It’s hard to tell if they’re very small, and right in front of your face, or really huge, and far away, or both at the same time….” He trailed off, and then giggled again.

Will stood up. “This is… I’m sorry, Carlos. I have to go find Dori. I can’t believe I just left her back there. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, I just freaked out and overreacted.”

Carlos put out a hand, then let it fall into his lap. “I’m sorry for what happened to her, man. But in a way, it was lucky. The lights were so busy with her, they didn’t chase after us.” Something crinkled, and then crunched. When Carlos spoke again, it sounded like his mouth was full. “You don’t want to see what they did to her. I saw what they did to Miguel. I can’t stop seeing it, now.” Another crunch. “You want some potato chips? A lot of the people who crash were going on road trips, so when I forage in the wrecks, I find plenty of snacks.”

“No, I’m not hungry. Thanks for… whatever… but I need to find my wife.”

“You’ll die. But it’s your life. Before you go, though—do you know a lot about constellations?”

“I… not really. The big dipper, Orion’s belt, that kind of thing.”

Carlos grunted. “Too bad. When it’s not cloudy, you can see the stars really well, and somebody who knew the constellations, they might be able to look at the stars and figure out where we are.”

Will knew he needed to go after Dori—the last thing he could do was abandon her again, and Carlos was clearly crazy—but he hesitated. “We’re in Georgia, Carlos. Did you hit your head or something when you crashed?”

“Ha.” That wasn’t a giggle, or even a laugh: just a dry, disbelieving syllable. “Me and Miguel were going to a house party in Marin when we got led here, man.”

“Marin? Do you mean Macon?”

“I mean Marin. North of San Francisco. About three thousand miles from where you were headed, huh? I told you, the lights, they can do things to space. I looked at some of the license plates in the pit, and there are cars from Alaska, South Carolina, Idaho, and some weird ones with just numbers that I think must be from Europe or something. It’s cars all the way down in there, too. I don’t know how deep the pit was to start with, but it’s getting full. That’s why me and Miguel didn’t die. We landed on top of a pile of other cars, we didn’t fall too far down, so we climbed out of the wreck and got away. There are a couple of places where the sides aren’t too steep, so you can get in and out of the pit.” He was silent for a moment. “We’re gonna die out here. I think about finding a sharp piece of metal and cutting my own throat, you know? It could be better that way. Will-o-the-wisps, dark gods of the GPS, aliens, whatever they are… they like to play with their food.”

Silence, then, except for crunching.

Will made his way back up the boulders. Carlos wasn’t rational. He’d been in a car accident, maybe seen his friend die or hit his head or both, and it had messed up his mind, made him get lost in the woods.

Something strange was happening here, though. Will could admit that. Wasn’t there a horror movie about cannibal hillbillies who put up fake road signs to trick and trap tourists? Maybe it was even something as terrible as that. But it wasn’t dark gods of the GPS.

He hiked back through the woods, worried about his sense of direction, but the way was easier, now, with the moonlight. He’d had some hope of recovering his phone, but even with the moon the woods were too dark, and that little oblong of metal and glass and plastic that contained his whole life was far too small. After a while he hit the gravel road, and turned left. He considered calling Dori’s name, but he was reluctant to call attention to himself, just in case.

Will considered himself a rational man. His life’s work was teaching students how to calculate risk and probabilities, and how to understand the way numbers could be used to trick, mislead, and deceive them. His approach to life involved the careful assessment of risks and rewards. (He’d even done a cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether or not to ask Dori to marry him, eight years ago. The results had overwhelmingly favored marriage… which was enough to shake his faith a bit in the ability to quantify the qualitative.) Given time to ponder and weigh his options, Will had great faith in his own judgment. But in times of confusion, chaos, and the sudden eruption of the unexpected… he had a tendency to bolt in exactly the wrong direction, instincts overwhelming intellect. That’s what he’d done tonight… and what he’d done a few months ago, too, for different reasons. God, he’d left her again. Dori was going to kill him.

A small voice in the back of his head reminded him of the tendrils of shadow, and that horrible slurping sound, and suggested Dori wouldn’t be in a position to kill him, or even tell him off… but he shoved those notions away. He’d been confused, disoriented, filled with fight-or-flight chemicals. His own perceptions couldn’t be trusted.

The moonlight shone on the dark bulk of the SUV, right where they’d left it. He ran toward the car, and as he approached, the passenger door opened, and someone stepped out, shining a light in his direction. Dori’s voice said, “Will, is that you? Where the hell did you go?”

He rushed toward her, wrapping her up in his arms, burying his face in her hair. “Dori? Dori, you’re okay?”

She suffered his hug for a moment, then pulled away. “Of course I’m okay. Why did you run off? Were you chasing that guy? Did he chase you? I tried to call you, I even thought I heard your phone ringing in the woods, but you never picked up. I was so worried!”

Will couldn’t stop touching her: stroking her hair, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I saw you fall, and I thought….”

She cocked her head. “Sure I fell. That guy knocked my phone out of my hand and grabbed me, and I tripped trying to get away from him. When I got up you were both gone. I was worried he’d hurt you.”

Will produce a brittle laugh. “I’m so stupid, Dori. That guy, Carlos, he said someone was trying to kill us.”

“I thought he was trying to kill us.”

“No, he wanted to help us, he’s just… He was in a car wreck, like we almost were. I think his friend died. He might have hit his head or something. He seemed really confused. He’s been lost out here for a while, I think.”

“So… you weren’t chasing him away. You went with him. On purpose. You thought someone was attacking us, and you just left me?” Her voice was cold as interstellar voids. She stepped away from his touch.

“I’m so sorry. I panicked, Dori. I didn’t understand what was happening. Carlos said you were dead, it was too late, that we had to run or we’d die, too.”

“I see.” She turned her back on him stiffly and walked to the rear of the SUV. He trailed after her, making pleading noises, but she just ignored him, opened the back of the car, and drew out a tire iron.

Will took a step back, thinking she meant to hit him, but of course she didn’t do anything like that. Maybe the thought crossed her mind—just like he’d thought of shoving her into the abyss—but she would never hurt him. Dori wouldn’t even kill spiders; she made Will do it.

“What’s that for?” he said. “Did we get a flat?”

“If this Carlos guy is hurt, we should help him, and give him a ride to a hospital. But in case he does anything crazy, I want to have a weapon.”

“That’s… really practical. But the car doesn’t work—”

“The car is fine, Will. I don’t know why the headlights went out, but I started it up a while ago, and it works fine. I would have driven away, but I wanted to see if you’d come back before I went looking for help.” She thumped him on the arm with the tire iron, very gently. “I thought that guy murdered you or something, you jerk. Don’t make me worry like that. I know we’ve been through some rocky times lately, but you’re my husband.”

“I love you, Dori. I’m so sorry. I’ll never leave you again.”

She was silent for a moment, and he thought she’d say, Yeah, I’ve heard that before—because she had, hadn’t she?—but instead she said, “You’d better not. Do you know where Carlos is?”

“I can find him again. It’s not far.”

Dori gestured with the tire iron. “You take point.”

The trip was easier with Dori shining her flashlight around and revealing obstacles in the underbrush. Before long they reached the creekbed of boulders, and she switched off the light. “Don’t want to startle him,” she said, tucking her phone away.

Will made his way down the rocks, Dori following. “Remember when we went to the mountains of North Carolina for that anniversary trip, to see the leaves change, and we went rock-hopping?”

She laughed. “You saw something on the rock beside me and yelled ‘snake!’ and startled me so bad I nearly fell in the creek.”

He chuckled. “And then the snake turned out to be a stick. Sorry about that, again.”

“Hey, at least you were worried about me.”

They continued the rest of the way in silence. When they reached the bottom, Carlos emerged from the crack under the rock. “What—you’re alive? How did you get away from them?”

“I didn’t get away from anything,” Dori said. “We’re here to help you. Carlos, right? Let us give you a ride out of here.”

“I don’t understand.” Carlos shook his head, less like he was disagreeing with her, and more like an animal troubled by a swarm of insects. “How are you still alive?”

“The same way you are, I guess. Good luck, or the grace of God.” Dori tilted her head. “Hey, Carlos. While you and my husband were cowering in a hole in the ground, did he tell you why we took this trip in the first place?”

Will slumped his shoulders. “Dori, come on. We should get out of here.”

“No, I want Carlos to know about the man he was trying to save.” Her voice was bright, but it was a false brightness, as misleading as fool’s fire itself. “A few months back, Will and I were shopping at one of those big warehouse stores, the kind of place where you can buy a ten-pound jar of peanut butter or a hundred rolls of toilet paper at a time. Then we heard this noise. Will said something stupid like, ‘Are they setting off firecrackers in here?’ And then we realized it was gunfire.” She laughed, still bright and false. “We never had guns in my family. I don’t think I’d ever heard a gun fired outside of a movie before.”

“Dori, don’t.” Will’s voice had no force behind it, though, and she ignored him.

“We just froze,” Dori went on. “We couldn’t figure out where to go, or what to do, so we just stood there and listened. People were screaming, some of them hurt, some of them dying. No one ever knew why the shooter went off that day. He’d posted a bunch of stuff online about black people, and women, and the federal government, and he wasn’t a big fan of any of them, but what made him pick a random Saturday to shoot up a Costco….” She shrugged. “Will and I were in the aisle with all the oatmeal and cereal when the shooter turned a corner, right there in front of us. He was a potbellied middle-aged guy. I know his name, but I refuse to say it. I remember one of his shirttails was untucked, and one of his shoes was untied, and his hair was sticking up like he’d just gotten out of bed. Are you married, Carlos?”

Carlos didn’t seem thrown by the sudden shift in direction. “No ma’am.”

“Hmm. I wonder if you’d be a good husband. What you would do, if something like that happened, and you and your wife were in danger. Remember what you did, Will?” He didn’t answer, and she prodded him in the chest with the hard, cold tip. “What, you can’t say it? Will ran away, Carlos. You know how those warehouse stores are, they have those huge metal shelves, and sometimes there’s overstock stored underneath the bottom shelf, but sometimes it’s just empty space. Will saw the man with a gun and he just dove, he scurried underneath the shelf, hid himself away like a mouse in a hole. He didn’t call out to me. Didn’t take my hand and pull me after him. Didn’t try to help me at all.” She thumped the tire iron against her open palm. “Now, I’m a modern woman, Carlos. I don’t believe men should necessarily sacrifice themselves for women. But I think it would have been nice if my husband had remembered I existed, instead of just saving himself. For whatever reason, the killer just turned and walked away, and shot two other women after that instead of me, before shooting himself. Will didn’t come crawling out of his hole for a while. He was embarrassed, you see, because he’d wet—”

“Stop!” Will shouted. “I’ve said I’m sorry a thousand times, Dori. I just panicked. I wasn’t thinking at all. Pure animal instinct took over. You know our therapist says—”

“Our therapist said we should take a trip together to renew our bonds of love and trust, Will. How well is that working out?”

“Damn.” Carlos looked at Will. “And then tonight he ran away and left you again.”

Dori’s laughter seemed genuine this time. “That’s exactly right, Carlos.”

Will turned on Carlos, clenching his fists. “You told me she was dead!”

Carlos shrugged. “Yeah, but, I don’t know, man. After you ran out on her before? Had to go to therapy about it? Maybe you should’ve checked.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” Dori switched the tire iron to her left hand. “I don’t have trust issues anymore. They are all totally resolved.”

“What do you mean?” Will said.

Dori took her phone from her pocket with her free hand. Carlos took a step back and gasped, like she’d pointed a gun at him. “You have your phone? You got away from them last time, I don’t know how, but you can’t keep that thing, that’s how they find you, that’s how they found Miguel!” Carlos started toward her, reaching out for the phone, and she swung the tire iron down across his wrist hard enough to make Carlos fall to his knees, clutching his arm and howling.

Will said, “Dori, what the hell?”

She pressed a button on the phone, held it to her ear, and said, calmly, “They’re here. Both of them.” Then she put the phone away and regarded him. “Oh, Will. You cowardly piece of shit. There was a time when I would have been stupid enough to die for you, do you know that?”

“What did you do, Dori?” Will stepped toward her, but she raised the tire iron, expression calm and untroubled.

“Dead,” Carlos sobbed from the ground. “We’re dead, man.” He got to his feet and started trying to clamber up the boulders, but with just one good arm, he couldn’t make much progress.

“They were going to kill me.” Dori’s voice was far away and dreamy. “But then one of them had a better idea. It whispered in my ear. It said, ‘Let’s play a game.’ So we did. I led you astray. This way, they get Carlos, who’s been hiding from them for days, and they get you. While I get to live.” She shrugged. “You can’t blame me, Will. You’d do the same thing to me. You’ve thrown me to the wolves twice now. You just aren’t very good at it.”

Will thought of that moment, when he’d wanted to shove her into the pit. He should have given in. He rushed her, but she was too fast, and the tire iron struck him on the side of the head with enough force that his vision filled with whiteness, and his ears rang and roared.

When his senses returned, slowly, like syrup flowing downhill, he was on the ground, on his back, the moon shining down on him. But then there were two moons, and three, and four, but some of the moons were greenish-yellow, and changing in size, getting larger, and smaller. Then they went away, and Carlos started to scream somewhere off to the side.

Dori’s face appeared, looking down at him. Her face hung beside the moon, and both objects seemed exactly the same size. For a moment, he was disoriented: was Dori’s face normal-sized, and close to him, or very large, and far away?

“I loved you.” Dori’s face changed, becoming sickly, infected, but then he understood: that greeny-yellow light was shining on her, the orbs coming to float around his fallen body, illuminating her features.

“I love you too,” he tried to say.

She put a finger to his lips. “And then I didn’t.”

Her face moved away, and the orbs of fool’s fire moved closer. Everything was light after that, and then—long past the time he gave up any hope of an ending—it finally became darkness.

The post PseudoPod 597: Fool’s Fire appeared first on PseudoPod.