The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  She saw me looking at it. "What purpose would it serve to go in?" she asked.

  "Then I would know why," I said.

  "You might know why, or you might not. But you would come out mad."

  "Am I not already mad?"

  I couldn't find an individual starling within that glass cage. They had become something else.

  "Trap," I said, wrenching my gaze away.

  She nodded, led me forward. We had no weapons.

  I had said no weapons.

  Was I right?

  The lights, they went out behind us. Now the few windows showed us not forest but darkness. Night had come, and kept encroaching while we walked down the corridor. I kept thinking about the starlings. I kept thinking about the soundless scream that must be rising within them.

  We came to a massive enclave hollowed out from the inner wall. I did not think that there could be such a space within the house, until I remembered the second floor and the way the steepled roof had looked like a chapel.

  Within this enclave lay a giant human body composed of many other bodies. And within its belly, which had been ripped open, there lay the bodies of animals too various to describe. And these bodies too had been torn apart and remade to create still stranger creatures. And those creatures had their own as well. The scene seemed to recede from us as we watched it, as if my mind wanted to put as much distance there as possible. The face of the giant human body was various - a patchwork of so many different possibilities that culminated in a gashed, bearlike muzzle. Flesh is only flesh, skin only skin, muscle only muscle. It can all change and be changed. There was a desperation to it, as of someone frustrated, thwarted, looking for a solution that never came.

  The stain across the walls, across the ceiling, across the floor, had smashed through the glass divide between us and that tableau. The stain ended here even if the corridor did not. Somehow this change in logic unnerved me more than the box of starlings - more even than the body within bodies laid out before us.

  "What is the meaning of us?" she whispered.

  I know she meant "What is the meaning of this?" but that is not what she said.

  "Keep moving," I said. "We are almost at the end now."

  "What kind of end can that be?"

  "The great man is nearby, I can tell."

  "But we have no weapons."

  "That is our weapon."

  "I expected..."

  "Stop."

  At first, the corridor seemed to end in a blank wall - as disconcerting as following an arm with one's gaze only to have it end in a nub. But no: it curved once again, and beyond the curve was the office of the great man. A sparse desk. A windowless existence. Parts of things all over the floor, red and various. No chair. It was not needed.

  In the light from the lamp on the desk, we could see that a giant raven stood there. It had a beak huge and ominous, which had the sheen of steel but the riddled-through consistency of driftwood, riven with wormholes and fissures. A clacking black tongue within the beak. A head like a battering ram. A body the size of a mastiff. Instead of legs and claws it had thick human forearms and hands. The fingernails were long, curved, and yellowing.

  The raven inclined its head and turned one giant, bottomless eye toward us - an almond of pure black with just a hint of light reflecting from it.

  "It didn't take them long," the raven said, in a deep, refined voice. "It didn't take them long at all."

  At the sound of that voice, my partner began to cry: a soft weeping that I echoed from somewhere deep inside.

  But I had a mission. We had a mission. Now, when it didn't matter, I took her limp, cold hand in mine and held it tight.

  "We have a message to deliver," I said.

  "Oh?" the raven said, considering me coldly. I saw now that dried blood had flaked all across his razor beak. "And what message is that? I'm busy here."

  "You are to stop. You are to stop," I said.

  "Stop what?" Bemusement beneath the dark feathers.

  "Out there, they want you dead."

  A soft, chuffing laugh that a bird should not be able to make. "There is no out there. Anymore."

  "No," I admitted. "We didn't find much. But every time you change something, it changes there."

  "Some day it may be enough," he said.

  My partner made a sound, as if to speak.

  "Don't you recognize her?" I asked.

  "Her?" he said. "Her?" Peering.

  "Don't you recognize me?" she said. "I recognize you."

  The raven with the human hands turned back to his desk. Beyond that desk was a formless darkness. "That was a long time ago. That wasn't here. That wasn't this."

  "It could be," she said, and took a hesitant step forward. And then another. I saw the courage that took, although I don't believe in courage.

  The raven's head whipped around, and it said, almost with a snarl, "Stay back."

  She stopped.

  I heard a lurching sound now, coming from down the corridor. Every light behind us was dark. We existed only in the round glow of the lights in the office. I was trying to remember a life before this that might have been nothing but smoke: a cottage by a stream and a cool night with friendly stars and the weight of a woman's head against my chest as we looked up from the wet grass.

  "We are here to make you stop," I said.

  "I know," he said.

  "Don't you remember?" she said, as the dead talk to the dead. But she was staring into the darkness beyond.

  I was close enough now. I lunged across at him, in the motion I had practiced a thousand times under his watchful eye.

  My arm around the surprisingly delicate neck. A quick, wrenching twist. The raven's eyes rolled up. It dropped to the floor. Dead.

  I stood there, staring. Was it to be that easy?

  It was not.

  The darkness moved, came out into the light. It was him. Again. Much larger, but the same. The eye regarding me from above was not without love.

  "I couldn't let you after all," he said. "The work is too important."

  "Don't you remember?" she said, again. My partner now seemed caught in a loop. I could not help her.

  The lurching came nearer.

  "Your predecessor is almost here," the raven said. "I cannot stop, and you cannot stop me."

  "Some day you will be convinced," I said. "And you will let me."

  "Some day I will finally sleep," came the rumbling voice.

  There was a wetness behind me, and a soft guttural sound as of a throat that has been cut and yet the flesh lives.

  "Don't you remember?"

  A sadness entered the eyes of the great man. "I remember enough to let you decide."

  It was useless, but I tried. I lunged up at him, but my predecessor had caught up to me. A hand that was not a hand on my arm. A kind of intensity of motion that sucked its way into my skin, all of my skin. Tore it off. Tore it all off. All of it.

  Brought me struggling to the box of starlings. Shoved me in. Left me there. Waiting for the moments when the great man and his new-old queen walk by. Waiting to sense them from the way the wings ripple differently across my face, the way the beaks and heads and claws suppurate and wriggle and try to escape, and keep trying to escape. Breathing in the spaces between.

  One day, he will let me go, with or without her. He will release the starlings up through the ruined second story, through the chimney, to explode out into the sky, over the old woods. They will no longer know they are birds, as I no longer remember what I was before. But we will be flying and falling, falling and flying, and against that beating of atrophied wings, against that sharp blue, I will see the gravel path and the bridge beneath us. Returning. Remembering.

  While my predecessor feeds upon me.

  FIXING HANOVER

  When Shyver can't lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It's been lost
a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.

  "It's good salvage, at least," Shyver says. "Maybe more."

  "Or maybe less," I reply. Salvage is the life's blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea's too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there's no telling what the salvagers will want and what they will discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.

  To Shyver, maybe the thing he'd found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.

  As soon as I see it, I call it "Hanover," after a character in an old movie back when the projector still worked.

  "Hanover?" Shyver says with a trace of contempt.

  "Hanover never gave away what he thought," I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it's carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I've lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don't have to explain much.

  "Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts," Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he's already put a face on Hanover, too. "I think it's from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea."

  Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he's lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He's good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He'll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.

  Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we've made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and selfconscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.

  First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?

  John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders, and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called - she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling - one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We've been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.

  With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broadfaced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep goldand-orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.

  Blake says, "Where?" He's a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.

  "The beach, the cove," Shyver says. Blake always reduces me to a similar terseness.

  "What is it?"

  This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I'm the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what's sold to the hill scavengers. But I'm also Lady Salt's lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.

  I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.

  "It is part of a metal man," I say.

  A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she's thinking: in scant days she'll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it Seeker, or sometimes Mist, or even just Cleave. Salvage holds little interest for her.

  But I can see the gears turning in Blake's head. He thinks awhile before he says more. Even the blacksmith and the weaver, more for ceremony and obligation than their insight, seem to contemplate the rusted bucket before them.

  A refurbished water pump keeps delivering from the aquifers; parts bartered to the hill people mean only milk and smoked meat for half a season. Still, Blake knows that the fishing has been less dependable the past few years, and that if we do not give the hill people something, they won't keep coming back.

  "Fix it," he says.

  It's not a question, although I try to treat it like one.

  Later that night, I am with the Lady Salt, whose whispered name in these moments is Rebecca. "Not a name men would follow," she said to me once. "A land-ish name."

  In bed, she's as shifting as the tides, beside me, on top, and beneath. Her mouth is soft but firm, her tongue curling like a question mark across my body. She makes little cries that are so different from the orders she barks out ship-board that she might as well be a different person. We're all different people, depending.

  Rebecca can read. She has a few books from the hill people, taught herself with the help of an old man who remembered how. A couple of the books are even from the Empire - the New Empire, not the old. Sometimes I want to think she is not the Lady Salt, but the Lady Flight. That she wants to leave the village. That she seeks so much more. But I look into those eyes in the dimness of half-dawn, so close, so far, and realize she would never tell me, no matter how long I live here. Even in bed, there is a bit of Lady Salt in Rebecca.

  When we are finished, lying in each other's arms under the thick covers, her hair against my cheek, Rebecca asks me, "Is that thing from your world? Do you know what it is?"

  I have told her a little about my past, where I came from - mostly bedtime stories when she cannot sleep, little fantasies of golden spires and a million thronging people, fables of something so utterly different from the village that it must exist only in dream. Once upon a time there was a foolish man. Once upon a time there was an Empire. She tells me she doesn't believe me, and there's freedom in that. It's a strange pillow talk that can be so grim.

  I tell her the truth about Hanover: "It's nothing like what I remember." If it came from Empire, it came late, after I was already gone.

  "Can you really fix it?" she asks.

  I smile. "I can fix anything," and I really believe it. If I want to, I can fix anything. I'm just not sure yet I want Hanover fixed, because I don't know what he is.

  But my hands can't lie - they tremble to have at it, to explore, impatient for the task even then and there, in bed with Blake's lost love.

  I came from the same sea the Lady Salt loves. I came as salvage, and was fixed. Despite careful preparation, my vessel had been damaged first by a storm, and then a reef. Forced to the surface, I managed to escape into a raft just before my creation drowned. It was never meant for life above the waves, just as I was never meant for life below them. I washed up near the village, was found, and eventually accepted into their community; they did not sell me to the hill people.

  I never meant to stay. I didn't think I'd fled far enough. Even as I'd put distance between me and Empire, I'd set traps, put
up decoys, sent out false rumors. I'd done all I could to escape that former life, and yet some nights, sleepless, restless, it feels as if I am just waiting to be found.

  Even failure can be a kind of success, my father always said. But I still don't know if I believe that.

  Three days pass, and I'm still fixing Hanover, sometimes with help from Shyver, sometimes not. Shyver doesn't have much else to do until the fishing fleet goes out, but that doesn't mean he has to stay cooped up in a cluttered workshop with me. Not when, conveniently, the blacksmithy is next door, and with it the lovely daughter of Growder, whom he adores.

  Blake says he comes in to check my progress, but I think he comes to check on me. After the Lady Salt left him, he married another - a weaver - but she died in childbirth a year ago, and took the baby with her. Now Blake sees before him a different past: a life that might have been, with the Lady Salt at his side.

  I can still remember the generous Blake, the humorous Blake who would stand on a table with a mug of beer made by the hill people and tell an amusing story about being lost at sea, poking fun at himself. But now, because he still loves her, there is only me to hate. Now there is just the brambly fence of his beard to hide him, and the pressure of his eyes, the pursed, thin lips. If I were a different man. If I loved the Lady Salt less. If she wanted him.

  But instead it is him and me in the work room, Hanover on the table, surrounded by an autopsy of gears and coils and congealed bits of metal long past their purpose. Hanover up close, over time, smells of sea grasses and brine along with the oil. I still do not know him. Or what he does. Or why he is here. I think I recognize some of it as the work of Empire, but I can't be sure. Shyver still thinks Hanover is merely a sculpture from beneath the ocean. But no one makes a sculpture with so many moving parts.

  "Make it work," Blake says. "You're the expert. Fix it."

  Expert? I'm the only one with any knowledge in this area. For hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles.