The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He looked around at the trees, at the fading light. It was time to accept that there was no reason to it, no why. It was time to get out, one way or another.

  "A pattern of heads," he muttered to himself all the way home. "A pattern of heads."

  Horley did not remember much about the meeting with the villagers upon his return. They wanted to hear about a powerful witch who could help or curse them, some force greater than themselves. Some glint of hope through the trees, a light in the dark. He could not give it to them. He gave them the truth instead, as much as he dared, but when they asked questions he could not stand the truth, either, and hinted that the witch had told him how to defeat the Third Bear.

  Did it do much good? He didn't know. He could still see winter before them. He could still see blood. And they'd brought it on themselves. That was the part he didn't tell them. That a poor old woman with the ground for a bed and dead leaves for a blanket thought she had, through her anger, brought the Third Bear down upon them. Theeber. Seether.

  "You must leave," he told Rebecca after the meeting. "Take a wagon. Take a mule. Load it with supplies. Don't let yourself be seen. Take our two sons. Bring that young man who helps chop firewood for us. If you can trust him."

  Rebecca stiffened beside him. She was quiet for a very long time.

  "Where will you be?" she asked.

  Horley was forty-seven years old. He had lived in Grommin his entire life.

  "I have one thing left to do, and then I will join you."

  "I know you will, my love." Rebecca said, holding onto him tightly, running her hands across his body as if as blind as the old witch woman, remembering, remembering.

  They both knew there was only one way Horley could be sure Rebecca and his sons made it out of the forest safely.

  Horley started from the south, just up-wind from where Rebecca had set out along an old cart trail, and curled in toward the Third Bear's home. After a long trek, Horley came to a hill that might have been a cairn made by his ancestors. A stream flowed down it and puddled at his feet. The stream was red and carried with it gristle and bits of marrow. It smelled like black pudding frying. The blood mixed with the deep green of the moss and turned it purple. Horley watched the blood ripple at the edges of his boots for a moment, and then he slowly walked up the hill.

  He'd been carelessly loud for a long time as he walked through the leaves. About this time, Rebecca would be more than halfway through the woods, he knew.

  In the cave, surrounded by all that Clem had seen and more, Horley disturbed Theeber at his work. Horley's spear had long since slipped through numb fingers. He'd pulled off his helmet because it itched and because he was sweating so much. He'd had to rip his tunic and hold the cloth against his mouth.

  Horley had not meant to have a conversation; he'd meant to try to kill the beast. But now that he was there, now that he saw, all he had left were words.

  Horley's boot crunched against half-soggy bone. Theeber didn't flinch. Theeber already knew. Theeber kept licking the fluid out of the skull in his hairy hand.

  Theeber did look a little like a bear. Horley could see that. But no bear was that tall or that wide or looked as much like a man as a beast.

  The ring of heads lined every flat space in the cave, painted blue and green and yellow and red and white and black. Even in the extremity of his situation, Horley could not deny that there was something beautiful about the pattern.

  "This painting," Horley began in a thin, stretched voice. "These heads. How many do you need?"

  Theeber turned its bloodshot, carious gaze on Horley, body swiveling as if made of air, not muscle and bone.

  "How do you know not to be afraid?" Horley asked. Shaking. Piss running down his leg. "Is it true you come from a long way away? Are you homesick?"

  Somehow, not knowing the answers to so many questions made Horley's heart sore for the many other things he would never know, never understand.

  Theeber approached. It stank of mud and offal and rain. It made a continual sound like the rumble of thunder mixed with a cat's purr. It had paws but it had thumbs.

  Horley stared up into its eyes. The two of them stood there, silent, for a long moment. Horley trying with everything he had to read some comprehension, some understanding into that face. Those eyes, oddly gentle. The muzzle wet with carrion.

  "We need you to leave. We need you to go somewhere else. Please."

  Horley could see Hasghat's door in the forest in front of him. It was opening in a swirl of dead leaves. A light was coming from inside of it. A light from very, very far away.

  Theeber held Horley against his chest. Horley could hear the beating of its mighty heart, loud as the world. Rebecca and his sons would be almost past the forest by now.

  Seether tore Horley's head from his body. Let the rest crumple to the dirt floor.

  Horley's body lay there for a good long while.

  Winter came - as brutal as it had ever been - and the Third Bear continued in its work. With Horley gone, the villagers became ever more listless. Some few disappeared into the forest and were never heard from again. Others feared the forest so much that they ate berries and branches at the outskirts of their homes and never hunted wild game. Their supplies gave out. Their skin became ever more pale and they stopped washing themselves. They believed the words of madmen and adopted strange customs. They stopped wearing clothes. They would have relations in the street. At some point, they lost sight of reason entirely and sacrificed virgins to the Third Bear, who took them as willingly as anyone else. They took to mutilating their bodies, thinking that this is what the Third Bear wanted them to do. Some few in whom reason persisted had to be held down and mutilated by others. A few cannibalized those who froze to death, and others who had not died almost wished they had. No relief came. The baron never brought his men.

  Spring came, finally, and the streams unthawed. The birds returned, the trees regained their leaves, and the frogs began to sing their mating songs. In the deep forest, an old wooden door lay half-buried in moss and dirt, leading nowhere, all light fading from it. On an overgrown hill, there lay an empty cave with nothing but a few old bones scattered across the dirt floor.

  The Third Bear had finished its pattern and moved on, but for the remaining villagers he would always be there.

  THE QUICKENING

  In the old, tattered photo Sensio has been dressed in a peach-colored prisoner's uniform made out of discarded tarp and then tied to a post that Aunt Etta made me hammer into the ground. Sensio's long white ears are slanted back behind his head. His front legs, trapped by the crude arm holes, hang stiff at a forward angle. The absurdly large hind feet with the shadows for claws are, perhaps, the most monstrous part of Sensio - the way they seem to suddenly shoot from the peach-colored trousers, in a parody of arrested speed. The look on Sensio's face - the large, almond-shaped eye, the soft pucker of pink nose - seems caught between rage and a strange acceptance.

  Sensio was, of course, a rabbit, and in the photo, Aunt Etta's stance confirms this bestial fact - she holds the end of the rope that binds Sensio to the post, and she holds it, between thumb and forefinger, with a form of distaste, even disdain? Such a strange pose, delicate against the roughness of Sensio; even a gentle tug and his humiliation would be undone.

  Or maybe not. I don't know. I know only that Aunt Etta's expression is ultimately unreadable, muddied by the severe red of her lipstick, by the bookending of her body by a crepe-paper bag of a hat and the shimmering turquoise dress hitched up past her waist, over her stomach, and descending so far down that she appears to float above the matted grass. (Between the two, a flowsy white blouse that seems stolen from a more sensible person.) I'm not in the photo, but she'd dressed me in something similar, so that I looked like a flower girl at a wedding. The shoes Aunt Etta had dug up out of the closet pinched my feet.

  Sensio had said nothing as he was bound, nose twitching at the sharp citrus of the orange blossoms behind them. He'd said nothing as
we'd formed our peculiar circus procession from the bungalow where we lived to the waiting photographer. No reporters had come, despite Aunt Etta's phone calls, but she'd hired the photographer anyway - and he stood there in white shirt, suspenders, gray trousers, black wingtip shoes. He looked hot even though it was only spring, and was so white I thought he must be a Yankee. His equipment looked like a metal stork. A cigarette dangled from his lips.

  "That's him," Aunt Etta said, as if Sensio were her rabbit and not mine. Shameful, but that's what I felt that long-ago day: Sensio is mine, not hers. I was twelve in 1955, and big for my age, with broad shoulders that made me look hunched over. I did chores around the orange groves. I helped to get water from the well. I'd driven the tractor. In the season, I'd even harvested the oranges, just for fun, alongside the sweating, watchful migrant workers, who had no choice. But I was still a kid, and as Aunt Etta put Sensio down and bound him to the post I'd pounded in the day before, all I could think was that Aunt Etta had no right to do anything with him.

  "Do you have to tie him up like that?" the photographer asked Aunt Etta, but not in a caring way. He reached down to ruffle my hair and wink at me. I flinched away from him, wrinkling up my nose. People were always touching my head because of my curly red hair, and I hated it.

  Aunt Etta just looked at him like he was stupid. She was stiff that morning - a broken hip that had never completely healed - and further trapped in her ridiculous dress. She grunted with effort and no little pain as she leaned precariously to loop the rope over and over again across Sensio's chest. "Shit," she said. I heard her, distinct if soft. She looked over as she straightened, said, "Rachel, finish it for me."

  So it was I who tied the last knots, who knelt there beside Sensio, smelling the thick yet sweet musk of his fur.

  "It's okay," I said to him, thinking, Aunt Etta 's just gone a little cracked. She'll be better soon. I tried to will the message into that deep, liquid eye, through to the brain beyond.

  Aunt Etta tapped my shoulder with her thick fingers. "Come away."

  "Are we ready, then?" the photographer asked. Aunt Etta wasn't paying him by the hour. He was already looking at his watch.

  In the photo, Aunt Etta has the end of Sensio's rope in her right hand, arm extended down, while her left arm is held at a right angle, palm up, thumb against the index finger. At first, people think she's holding a cigar in her hand, because the photograph is so old. Then they realize that's just a crease in the image and they think she holds something delicate - something she's afraid to close her hand around for fear of damaging it.

  But I know there was nothing in Aunt Etta's hand that day.

  We lived in a land of gentle hills, farms, lakes, and small towns. We lived on an orange grove in the middle of the state of Florida, near a place that's now a favorite truck stop on the freeway, Okahumpka. The attraction called Dog Land lay to the west and Orlando to the east - a sleepy town that didn't know that Walt Disney's touch would one day awaken it. My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. At age five, after living for a few months with a cousin who didn't really want me, I was sent to live with Aunt Etta, who, it soon became clear, wanted me mostly for the modest life insurance my parents had left for me. Etta Mary Pitkaginkel was her full name, but no one dared call her that because no one could say it without laughing.

  She worked for A. C. Pittman, who owned over ten thousand acres of orange groves all over the state. She'd started off cleaning and taking care of his big house, which he never lived in because he had taken a mistress in Cleveland. Pittman's wife lived in California, at their other house. Aunt Etta also helped with the orchards next to the house during the picking season, assisting the foreman. Sometimes it seemed like she was the foreman. In the off season, with almost no one around, Aunt Etta took up the position of being in charge almost by default.

  I'd like to think that the Aunt Etta I met as a child was very different from the Aunt Etta from before, that the rare hints of good humor and of kindness had once been a fireworks display. She, like me, had come from up north, from near Minneapolis, and she had also been fleeing disaster: a bad marriage, and dead-end jobs afterwards that never matched up with the comfortable, even rich, life she'd had before. She never talked about her brother, my father, but she'd so loathed those crappy jobs that she still muttered about them, couldn't let go of past slights and injustices. Other muttering came from resentment over Pittman keeping an exhaustive catalog of the house's many treasures - and having someone come and check that they were still there every six months, "as if I'm not to be trusted." Revenge for Aunt Etta came in the form of pretending she was related to Pittman, and using that to control the foreman, in a variety of ways.

  She had what looked to me like a boxer's hands, all knuckles and calluses, and she used them like a boxer sometimes, too. The pickers, behind her back, called her "Auntie Dempsey" after Jack Dempsey. A tall woman with some meat on her, she used to boss the Mexican immigrants around - she stood over them like a stern, plump statue of liberty. They all feared her, endured her.

  For my part, as soon as I had sense enough to understand Aunt Etta, I tried to keep out of her way. The rest of the time, I obeyed her the best I could, and looked forward to each and every day of school at Littlewood Elementary and, later, Westwood Middle School. I didn't make many friends, never felt comfortable, but at least other kids were around. No kids on the Pittman land, except for the children of the Mexican laborers, and they wouldn't play with me by the bungalow because of Aunt Etta. I had to sneak off into the groves. Even then, they were wary as the deer that sometimes appeared at dusk, while I, husky and my face ruddy with acne, felt like some clumsy monster barging in on their peace and quiet. Sure, there were kids at the Episcopalian church we sometimes went to on Sundays, but with Aunt Etta it was always go in, worship, and, as she put it, "get the hell out." I always wanted to "get the hell out," too, so in a way perfunctory church-going formed a bond between us.

  I guess maybe that's why I said yes to Sensio in the first place - to have someone to play with, even if a rabbit was just a couple steps up from a doll. It was a summer day, I remember. I was just hanging around the pond behind the bungalow, in my bathing suit, watching the water ooze into the soil and wondering how the smell of oranges could have gone from smelling good to being an awful stench, and then a nothing, a scent that had no texture, no impact. I was in that good, silent place where the sun's warm on your skin and the breeze moves lazily over the hairs on your forearms.

  The man was a presence leaning over me, and then a shadow through the sunlight from which appeared a darkened face, alongside a voice like the soft rasp of weather-beaten leather that said, "Would you like a rabbit?" Then through my squint the figure resolved into a withered old man with only one eye and one arm. Where the eye should have been there was just an obsidian-black hole. Where the arm should have been, there was just a blue sleeve flapping in the breeze. He had a strange whispering rasp to his accent that drifts away from me whenever I try to identify it. A vague thought in my head that maybe he'd served in the War, although I didn't know much about "the War" beyond what I'd heard some men at the church say.

  He carried a cage full of rabbits with the other hand. His remaining arm was what an adult would have called hypertrophied, the muscle in his bicep, triceps, and forearm thick, shoulders almost splitting his shirt seam.

  "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers," I said. For some reason, he was a curiosity to me. I didn't feel threatened even as I said the words.

  "Then don't talk," he said, and set down the cage. He reached down and undid a latch, and suddenly there was something soft and white and heavy on my lap. The man said, "His name is Sensio," and then he was lurching away with the cage, saying over his shoulder, "Tell Aunt Etta I said hello."

  I stared after the man long enough for him to become a f
licker of light and dark moving through the orange groves. Then I turned to the rabbit.

  Sensio was nuzzling up against my shoulder as he searched for a carrot or a lettuce leaf. To a bored kid in an orange grove in Florida, he looked like any old rabbit. He looked like my best friend.

  I never told Aunt Etta the truth about where I got him. Something about the way the man said, "Tell Aunt Etta I said hello," had bothered me. It wasn't that I wanted to protect Aunt Etta; in my kid's logic, she was as much of a problem as she was the person feeding me, putting a roof over my head. It was more that I didn't know how the man knew Aunt Etta. What if she hated him? Did that mean she wouldn't let me keep Sensio?

  Aunt Etta kept giving the photographer suggestions that he didn't take to, like "Move the tripod to your left, young man, so you can get the trees behind me." She had an odd sort of pride about those trees, I realized later. A kind of pride not in keeping with her actual role as servant, as if she thought she owned the orchard.

  "Ma'am," the photographer would say, "the light won't be right if I do that." Or, "That will take another half hour."

  Whatever patience the man possessed had been used adjusting to the oddness of the assignment. He was a young man, yes, but he had shadows under his eyes, and wrinkles at the corners. I remember thinking that his face shone oddly in the same way as Sensio's as he suffered his humiliation bound to the post.

  As Aunt Etta tried to settle down for the photograph, even as she kept primping and fussing, I almost said something to her, but it was Sensio who broke in first.

  "Take the picture," he said in his voice, which always had a gruffness to it. "Take the picture and be done with it."

  The photographer stepped back, knees bent. The cigarette fell to the grass as his mouth opened so wide his jaw must have hurt. He looked like he'd just realized he was standing in quicksand or something.