Finch

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Hello again, Finch,” Shriek said.

  Finch, bitter: “They burned your body. Spread your ashes over the towers. You're dead,” Finch said. “You failed us. Thousands and thousands of people are going to die because of you.” Angry at himself.

  Shriek said, “Your body is shutting down, Finch. You cannot take more torture. You have to do something. All I can do for now is numb the pain.”

  Finch's legs were on fire. He couldn't put out the flames.

  “There's nothing I can do.”

  Shriek pulled him close. Until his face was inches from Finch's. Drawn into the power of those eyes that were both more and less than eyes. Into the magisterial force of the experience and pain there. “Find a way. And when you've done it, drink the vial you brought with you. Even if you do kill the Partial you'll die there on the floor, otherwise.”

  “The Photographer said the vial is poison.”

  “It is. But it's life as well. You'll die, and then I'll bring you back.”

  “You can't do anything,” Finch said. “You're just in my head.”

  “So are you,” Shriek said.

  He picked Finch up by the shoulders. Raised him high. Pushed and released him in the same motion. So violently that he was sent flying over the city. Where Shriek's hands had touched him, a healing numbness. Spreading.

  Below, the fires crackling on the Spit were snuffed out. The black smoke turned white and then broke apart. Still he soared, over the twinkling green of the Religious Quarter, over the dull white remains of the camps, over everything.

  So this is how it ends. How it really ends. But at least it ends.

  Woke to darkness. Woke to blood caked around his eyes. To a broken nose. To the knowledge that his bowels had loosened. That he'd pissed himself. Dribbling hot down his thighs, itching through the numbness. Was able to move his legs a little. A veil now between him and the pain. It registered as an even, serrated glow around his body. No part of him hurt more than any other part. Allowed him to concentrate. Gave him energy.

  “Not done with you. Not the right answers.” Mumbled like a prayer from somewhere in front of him.

  Right eye was swollen shut. Opened his left enough to squint.

  The Partial's face was up close through that slit of vision. The abyss of the fungal eye. The orange lichen of the other. The stark white landscape of that face. Staring at him. A hand shaking him. Trying to see if he was still alive.

  Too close.

  The gun was on the table. The knives were on the table.

  Erupted hard up and out. Caught the Partial on the chin with the top of his head. A grunt of surprise. Of pain. Finch fell on top of the Partial. Legs still too rubbery. Brought his forehead hard onto the fungal eye. Could feel it give. The Partial screamed. Tried to push Finch off of him. Battered his sides with his fists. But Finch felt none of it. Bit into the Partial's left cheek. Pulled back. Spit out the flesh. The Partial shrieking. Finch kept smashing his head into the right side of the Partial's face. Until the eye socket sagged and the Partial was moaning. The beating of hands at Finch's sides now more like the wings of a bird.

  Finally, the Partial stopped moving. Maybe he'd been saying something. Screaming something. Finch didn't know. Didn't care. The warm glow that surrounded him muffled sound. Muffled everything but itself.

  Was the Partial dead? He would be. Finch picked up a knife off the table with his mouth. Positioned it between his teeth. Knelt. Bent his head to the side. Came down hard. Jammed it hilt-deep in the Partial's throat. Got out of the way as the blood came quick and heavy. The Partial convulsed once, twice, back bucking. Then nothing.

  The pain was coming back. Everywhere. The veil fading. He backed up to the table. Got his hands around a knife. Tilted it downward. Cut himself free after a minute. Didn't care what he had to cut through to do it.

  Stumbled past the Partial. Past Heretic. To his jacket. Found the vial. Opened it. Stood there, trembling.

  The Photographer had said it was poison. Bliss had said in liquid form it would rejuvenate Shriek. Shriek was gone. But the figment in his mind had been right about one thing: one way or the other, he was going to die without help.

  Downed it in one gulp. Tasted like dirt and chocolate. Sprinkled with some sharp yet familiar herb.

  Fell heavily to the floor. Sat there as the energy left him. As his wounds laid him out flat on his back. As he gasped. Every inch of his body crying out in an endless agony.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  a

  inch and Shriek stood in the cavern by the underground sea. In front of Samuel Tonsure's one-room shelter.

  “You're a hallucination,” Finch said. Wouldn't look at Shriek. “I'm dying. I'm having a conversation with myself.”

  Shriek said, “Remember how Wyte had Otto inside of him? In a different way, you have me inside of you. I entered your mind when you ate my memory bulb.”

  Something had lived inside of Wyte. When it came out, Finch had shot it. Then sliced it apart as it squealed.

  “That's impossible.”

  “Do you really know what's impossible anymore?” Shriek asked. “Are you in a position to have an opinion that means anything anymore? You will still die there, on the floor, Finch, if you don't believe in me.” Felt an immense pressure in his skull. A kind of pulse. “That's me,” Shriek said. “Me, trying to get out.” His eyes burned with a deep and abiding fire. “I was still regenerating. Healing. But I altered the memory bulb. I encoded it with a copy of me. When you ate it, I entered your brain. If my body had lived, if the real me had lived, I would have eventually become less than an echo. A stray thought. An impulse for tea instead of coffee. Unexpected sadness or joy. You would have carried me, decaying, for the rest of your life. But that didn't happen. They've killed me and I'm all that's left. Now it's my mission.”

  Tea not coffee. The strange surge of energy during the shoot-out. Sadness or joy. Emotions not his own. Not Crossley's, either.

  “There is no mission now.”

  “You're wrong, Finch. Very wrong.”

  Finch, disgusted: “Like Wyte and Otto. I'll die and you'll come out of me. Like a fucking parasite.”

  Shriek frowned. “No. Not like Wyte and Otto. Not like that at all. Otto ate Wyte from the inside out. I'm just a passenger, gone soon enough. If you help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Manifest in the real world. Become flesh and blood. Complete the mission while there's still time.”

  “But you're just a ... an imitation.”

  “It's not the best way. It's just the only way now.”

  “My mind's playing tricks on me.”

  “Listen to me, Finch. It was Bliss who found me in this cavern. Who brought me to the rebels. I wasn't even human anymore. I wasn't, in any sane sense, alive. I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it. If I could come back from a hibernation of so many years, then maybe you'll understand why a copy of me might be able to re-enter the world.”

  Bliss again. On the walls of Zamilon. Finding Duncan Shriek. Bending the ear of the Lady in Blue.

  “When I wake up, you'll just be a memory of a dream.”

  “You're not hearing me. You won't wake up. Your body is shutting down.”

  “Then take over. It's a weak enough machine,” Finch said with selfcontempt. “How can I stop you?”

  Shriek waved his hand. They stood on the battlements of Zamilon. No one there but them. Cold and windy. Out in the desert: shadows gathering.

  “I can't force you. It would take too much time. We don't have that kind of time. You'd die first. And right now the Lady in Blue is holding off the invaders at Zamilon. She's waiting for a miracle. I'm that miracle.”

  “And if I said no? If I said no, you'd just fade away and this would all be over?”

  “Yes.”

  Thinking again about Wyte. About Stark under the influence of Wyte's memory bulb. At what price? And: You knew you might die. Why aren't yo
u willing to do this?

  Because it's not real.

  Looked out at the green lights beginning to appear. Above, the blurred gleam of stars obscured by dust.

  “It's up to you, Finch,” Shriek said.

  “How do we do it?” Finch asked. “I cut open my own head and you pop out?” And what happens to me then?

  “It's nothing like that,” Shriek said. “Nothing like that. You open yourself to me, and then I open myself to you. Then you sleep for awhile. When you wake up, I am out of you. I can feed off of moisture. Off of the air. What I take from you will be no larger than the weight of a baby. And I will do the rest. Then we go our separate ways. You'll never see me again.” Except when I look in the mirror. “I know you're afraid. But what happened to Wyte was invasive. Hostile. He had a parasite inside of him. Something made possible by the gray caps.”

  This isn't invasive?

  The green lights were closer. He could almost make out the forms of the creatures gathered out there in the desert. Waiting to take Zamilon for themselves. Who could say their cause was any less just? The Lady in Blue didn't even know what they were.

  “How do I know you're not hostile? I `open up' and you take over.”

  “I won't. I promise. I can't. It wouldn't last for long.”

  “What's the risk if I say yes?”

  Shriek hesitated. Then said, “I won't lie to you. It's a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you're already weak. You won't be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You'll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for awhile. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you'll be setting me free. And I won't take it from you unless you let me.”

  “You're saying it'll almost kill me.”

  “And heal you, too,” Shriek said. “In the short term, I can make your flesh knit faster. I can shield you from the aftershock of what the Partial did to you. And a part of you will always be with me. Even after you die, you will live on because I will still be alive.” Shriek grinned, showing his teeth. “I'm hard to kill.”

  Lost time. Lost worlds. A man who had lived for more than a hundred years, only to die in a crappy apartment as part of a larger game by a species that had come from a place so distant they'd spent centuries trying to find it again.

  A giving up. A giving in. That's what Shriek was offering him. It tempted him. He had nothing left. Nothing of worth. No master plan. No better life waiting. Just his own death. Too much for him, and too little, standing there on the battlements of a place re-created by a passenger in his brain.

  Finch searched the face of the dead man for honesty or deceit. Saw himself reflected back.

  “How do we start?” he asked.

  “For you, it's easy,” Shriek said. “A mental trick. Just think back to the time when you went from being Crossley to being Finch. Imagine that instant as exactly as you can. Every detail you can remember. While you concentrate on that, I will enter through the `gap' created. That's as simply as I can put it ... The rest you won't feel.”

  A hopeful expression on Shriek's face.

  The thought that maybe this was happening in the seconds before his death. That the last week had taken place in a single moment in his head. That none of it was real. Even the parts that seemed real. Those least of all.

  Finch shuddered. Closed his eyes.

  “Let's get this over with.”

  The creation of John Finch happened at night. Cold for once. The flares and tracers of battle over the darkened skyline. The roar of the tanks. The gunfire of attacking infantry. A percussive music playing all over southeast Ambergris. Near the Religious Quarter. Heavy losses for the Hoegbotton side. A series of tactical mistakes.

  They stood on the street behind the clinic, him and his father. Next to a burning trash can. His father was a hunched figure who kept coughing up blood. By then his father had been very sick.

  John Crossley had a folder full of documents for his son. James had a suitcase stuffed with identity cards, certificates, incriminating photographs. Had checked John Crossley into the clinic under the name “Stephen Mormeck.” Someone they'd picked out of the phone book.

  A clinic in Frankwrithe territory. Because of the rash of refugees. Because F&L had less reason to hate John Crossley.

  “Is there anyone you want me to contact?” he'd asked his father.

  A shake of the head, the great mane of gray hair. “No, no one. Make a clean break. For both of us.” A gruff laugh. By then, he was selfmedicating with whisky early in the day. That night next to the trash can, John Crossley had been drunk for two days.

  But his eyes were clear. His arm steady as he handed the folder to his son. “Everything you'll need. For John Finch. Including a way to rejoin the Hoegbotton Irregulars.”

  Two years before the Rising. Six months after Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe had joined forces against the gray caps. Five months since his father had been denounced as a Kalif spy and they'd had to go on the run. The posters were everywhere. One of a row of traitors.

  “I didn't do what they say I did. Not the way they say I did it. I never got anyone killed. I never ...”

  His father had never told James how they'd come to be betrayed. Which of the many people who had come to the house in the valley over the years. And James didn't have a clue, because his father kept pushing him further and further away from that part of his life.

  James reached down, opened the suitcase. Felt the click of the clasps against his fingers. “It's all here. Every last document. Every last photograph.” From the old house in the valley. James had gone there earlier that night, snuck in. Returned to the clinic in an army truck, along with a few other civilians with ties to Hoegbotton's trading arm. Wyte had stood watch for him, then gone out the back way and melted into the night. Wyte knew every street in the city. He'd have been back home with his wife before midnight.

  Two in the morning now.

  “What are you waiting for? Start shoveling this stuff into the fire,” his father said.

  Still, he hesitated. Watched the smoky flames rising into the darkness, the sparks mimicking the flares in the distance.

  “If we burn all of the photographs, I'll forget what you look like.”

  His father didn't miss a beat. “But not who I am. And if you don't do it, there's no clean break, son.”

  His father reached down, picked up a handful of documents and IDs. Shoved them into the fire. Which flared up for a moment.

  “This is the best way.” John Crossley had said it a dozen times that day.

  Anything else of value that couldn't tie the son to the father had been put in a storeroom on the edge of the merchant district. A neutral area. James could retrieve it at any time. The whisky. The cigars. The books. The map. The ceremonial scimitar his father had gotten while fighting against the Kalif. “Keep it hidden, son, but use it when you have to.”

  After a moment, James joined him. Started tossing handfuls into the flames. Photographs from the offensive into Kalif territory. John Crossley on a tank. In a window. Walking through the desert. Old journal entries. Even the little tobacco pipe he'd shown James as a youth.

  “They'll never forget, never forgive, no matter who the enemy is, son. Better just to start a new life. Be someone else.”

  They'd never talked about his betrayal. The son had felt that asking would have meant admitting that the father had done something horribly wrong. He didn't want to let that into their world.

  “Is there anyone you want me to contact,” he'd asked his father. “No, no one,” the old man had insisted.

  When the suitcase was empty, James stood back. Beside his father. Watched the flames die down. Then hugged his father close. Sour breath. Shaking arms. The rasp at the back of his throat. Knew he was going to lose him soon.

  “Welcome to Ambergris, John Finch,” his father whispered in his ear.

  Finch by Jeff
VanderMeer

  3

  till dark when he woke, except for the lanterns. Except for a hint of gray from the window. He lay on the floor. Felt hungry. Thirsty. As much as he'd ever felt in his life. Hollow, too. As if he were made of spores. Would blow away. Over all of that, the constant complaint of his nerves. Reporting pain. Everywhere.

  The Partial lay facedown beside the gray cap. Arms out to the sides. On the table, the bloody knives, the pot of water. The empty vial.

  He sat up and saw himself, naked, propped up on two elbows opposite. Feet almost touching. Shock. Sudden horror. Even in the dim light, the same dark hair. The rakish yet thickening features. The solid build on the edge of fat. But Shriek's features rose out of his own. The cheekbones a little higher. The eyes different. This other Finch had green eyes. This other Finch had a strange smoothness to him, a blankness. None of Finch's scars had manifested on him. Few of the wrinkles. Finch shuddered. Shriek-Finch looked like a man who had reached middle age without the physical signs of experience.

  “The resemblance will fade,” Shriek said. “I'll be able to take any form I like, soon.” A scratchy voice. As if getting used to his vocal cords.

  Shriek rose, and Finch rose with him. An imperfect reflection. Shriek held himself differently than Finch. Shoulders hunched from some invisible weight. A stare less guarded. More expressive hands. Light gathered around Shriek in unnatural ways. A gentle iridescent strobing rippled across his body. It reminded Finch of the starfish in the cavern by the underground sea.

  “How do you feel?” Shriek asked.

  “I feel light ... and yet heavy,” Finch said. Could sense Shriek's overlay lifted from his mind. Its presence only confirmed by absence. While all of those things he'd thought himself numb to came rushing back in with a near-fatal intensity. Sintra. Wyte.