“It’s the eyes,” Aten said, savoring the sensation of speech, willing his mind to remember every moment, so he could imagine it later. “The way they capture light. No matter how sophisticated our sensors get, they don’t quite match the process.”
“Shame, that.” Iolanthe’s hand found his and in moments they were embracing, clinging to each other in desperation, like drowning sailors hanging on to a piece of driftwood.
They made love, their bodies crushing the wildflowers, blades of grass pleasantly cold against the skin. He tried to lose himself in the bliss, but a small part of him remained aware of how little time they had left, how soon the energy source powering this environment would be exhausted, how they would be apart once again.
“I wish this could last forever,” Iolanthe whispered as they lay on the ground afterward, covered in sweat and morning dew.
“Me, too,” he said. “We’ll be back here soon. I’ll find a way. It won’t take nearly as long next time.”
“No,” she said. “We can’t keep doing this. There’s so little energy left, out there. We can’t squander it on a fantasy. There may be others who will need whatever is left for something bigger than this. Something …” she paused, searching for the right word. “Something real.”
“Our love is real,” Aten replied. “Who’s to say anything is more real than this, anyone more deserving?”
“Please,” Iolanthe said. “These brief moments we have together, they are only making my time on the ship that much more difficult. If you love me, you will stop. Promise me.”
Aten hesitated. He looked into Iolanthe’s eyes. She flashed him a weak smile, but there were tears running down her cheeks.
“I promise,” he finally whispered.
They held hands until the very end, until the environment ran out of power and shut off.
Aten was back aboard his spaceship. His mind spread itself across all the sophisticated equipment. He was once again discorporate, but powerful and immortal, like an ancient god. The ship’s sensors fed him more information per second than the human brain he’d inhabited moments ago could process in a lifetime. He could see in eight dimensions and think in a thousand languages. He’d lived for billions of years, from the time his people ascended to a post-physical existence until the last stages of the heat death of the universe. He was the last one alive in the cosmos, and while he was immeasurably powerful, he wasn’t omnipotent.
He couldn’t bring Iolanthe back to life. Her ship went too long without finding an energy source. He’d found it over a million years ago, floating in the dead of space, a proper tomb for his lover. The woman in the environment was only a simulation, and a promise made to a simulation wasn’t binding.
Aten’s sensors scanned the pitch-black vacuum, completely devoid of constellations and nebulae. He’d extinguished entire galaxies over the last million years. Soon there would be nothing left. He hoped that somewhere out there a few suns still burned. He needed their energy. A little would keep the ship going, and would allow him to create another environment. But to restrict his power, to limit his consciousness enough for it to exist in a human body even for a few minutes, that would require all of the energy he could drain from a star.
He dreamt of Iolanthe and searched the skies.
This story originally appeared in Stupefying Stories and was subsequently podcasted at Toasted Cake.
I lifted the name Iolanthe from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera. I must admit to never having heard the opera, but I thought the name was very cool.
A THOUSAND CUTS
In her dream, Emma is reliving a childhood memory. She is four years old, and she is locked in her room for the evening because Mother is having a visitor. She always asks, but this one isn’t her father, either.
Emma is picking at a week-old scab on her knee. She is peeling it back a little bit at a time, fascinated rather than scared by the small pain it causes. It begins to bleed.
A small part of her mind knows this to be a dream. She remembers that evening and there was no blood, only a patch of pink skin underneath the scab. But in her mind’s eye the bleeding is getting worse. She is trying to contain the flow with her little fingers, but the thick, red liquid gushes out, staining her dress. The blood flows faster and faster, until it’s pouring like water from a faucet, pooling in a small puddle by her feet. She screams.
Emma wakes up with a start. She is covered in sweat, her heart is racing, and she fights to untangle herself from the damp sheets. It takes her several moments to focus, to remember that she is half a world and two decades away from that memory. She stares at Mark, who is sleeping peacefully on his side of the bed, and the anxiety drains from her.
She was told that their relationship was doomed from the start.
“You have so little in common,” said her friends. “Not even the same language.”
“It’s a fling,” said Mother. “He will go back to America soon and forget all about you.”
Everyone expected Mark to break her heart but he proposed instead, and now here she is, in a large house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where sights and sounds and smells are all exotic to her, and no one speaks any Russian. She is adjusting well, she thinks, except for an occasional nightmare. She watches Mark sleep for a while, and eventually drifts back into slumber, uninterrupted by dreams.
Emma is home alone, waiting for Mark to return from work. She is chopping vegetables on a granite countertop in their kitchen when she sees the domovoi. She is startled and the knife bites deep into her index finger.
She recognizes it from her grandmother’s tales. Domovoi is a mischievous house spirit, a supernatural trickster that can help or hinder people on a whim. In Russia, every house is said to have one. Three inches tall, it watches from behind a coffee mug. It grins nastily as she tries to stem the blood with a paper towel.
“Dogs are attached to people and cats are attached to houses,” she remembers her grandmother saying. “Domovoi are something in-between. They could follow you to the ends of the earth, but only if wherever you go becomes a true home.”
Grandmother taught that domovoi must be shown respect, or there’d be no end of trouble. She pours a bit of milk into a saucer and places it gently on the countertop. Domovoi struts out from behind the mug, walks over to the saucer and sniffs at the milk. It then looks up at Emma and points a diminutive hand at her cut finger.
“That,” it says in a voice that sounds like a rustle of leaves. “I want that.” It eyes hungrily the red blots that are blossoming on the sheet of paper towel wrapped around Emma’s finger. She hesitates.
“I only want a drop,” domovoi whines. “If you won’t give me some, I’ll have to find it elsewhere. Your man’s neck, it is so soft and exposed when he sleeps. One deep slice at the jugular, and I can gorge myself.”
Reluctantly, Emma unwraps her makeshift bandage and lets a large drop of blood fall into the saucer of milk.
Emma’s most vivid memory is from her adolescence back in Novgorod. She is in the bathroom, holding a razor blade. She watches her fifteen-year-old self in the mirror, watches as the sharp edge of the razor slowly parts the skin of her forearm. The pain is quite tolerable, sharp and delicious, almost pleasant. Nothing like the dull ache from the bruises her stepfather had caused.
Emma once read about something called the death of a thousand cuts. The original reference had to do with an ancient form of torture, but it was the concept of a thousand cuts that lodged itself firmly in her mind. She took to counting each incision, each instance of physical pain drowning out the greater hurt inside her. She keeps meticulous count, telling herself that she mustn’t ever reach a thousand.
The bathroom door squeaks in protest. Emma looks up sharply. In the mirror she sees the reflection of Mother in the doorway. The mix of disapproval and sadness in Mother’s widened eyes causes the worst kind of pain yet.
They never talk about it afterward.
By the time she’s nineteen, Emma approaches the dreade
d number. It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done, but she forces herself to stop at nine hundred and eighty cuts. Her left shoulder and forearm are a patchwork of tiny scars.
Now that she is feeding the domovoi every day, Emma has once again taken to keeping count. She makes the incisions on her feet and lower legs, where they are hidden behind socks and stockings.
Despite her best efforts, Mark must instinctively know that something is wrong. They are growing further apart with each passing month. Once a cheerful force of nature, he is now preoccupied, quiet, maybe even depressed. During the day he hardly ever looks directly into her eyes. At night they have sex infrequently and only in the dark.
For a time, she suspects there’s another woman. Perhaps Mark turns the lights off so he can imagine a different face and body when they’re together. She takes to sniffing his clothes for perfume and checking the call logs on his phone. She discovers nothing and is strangely disappointed because, absent an affair, she must be the cause of the problem.
Emma has trouble making new friends. She spends her days in the house, homesick and miserable. By the time the number of cuts reaches five hundred, she still hasn’t managed to become pregnant. Mark treads lightly on the subject, but she senses his disappointment.
Emma dreams of Mother standing in that bathroom doorway again, but in this dream Mother doesn’t walk away.
“You are hurting yourself again,” Mother says. “I thought you outgrew that.”
“I did,” Emma says. “I am. I have a good reason to, this time.”
“Nonsense,” Mother says. “Domovoi are mean tricksters but they aren’t killers. It won’t really hurt you, or your precious husband. It’s just an excuse for you to resume a disgusting habit.”
“No,” Emma glares at Mother’s reflection in the mirror. “You don’t know that creature’s mind. You don’t know what it might do. Why risk angering it over a few drops of blood?”
“I know you,” says Mother. “You are timid. Indecisive. Weak. You’ll lose your husband, one way or the other.”
Emma spins around to confront Mother face to face, to tell her that she is wrong, and to shout obscenities at her—but all she finds is an empty doorway.
On her twenty-seventh birthday, the count stands at nine hundred and six. Domovoi has grown fat on Emma’s daily offerings, bloated with her blood like a satiated mosquito. Things are going badly with Mark. There are never any fights, but they hardly speak to each other anymore. This morning he left for work and hadn’t even called to wish her a happy birthday. She wonders what will come first: a thousandth cut or an end to their marriage. She doesn’t want to find out.
She runs a scalding hot bath and climbs in with a razor blade. She read that bleeding out is nearly painless. Submerged in water, she slits her wrists, making the cuts number 907 and 908. It won’t be the thousandth cut that kills her, and she lets that be her act of defiance against fate.
She closes her eyes and imagines that she is once again an innocent four-year-old with a scraped knee. She is drifting in and out when Mark walks in. He drops the flowers he’d been carrying and snatches her from the tub. Mark cries as he does his best to bandage her wrists. White Lilies soak in blood-tinged water on the bathroom floor. He holds her tight until the ambulance arrives.
In the hospital room, she tells him everything.
Emma is very anxious. Mark might not believe her. He might say there is no such thing as a domovoi—after all, the word doesn’t even have an English translation. He might question her sanity. The fact that she cuts herself daily may be the final straw that breaks their already strained marriage. Emma lets go of her fears. She accepts all those possibilities and just talks to him.
Mark listens to everything without comment. He hugs her, and holds her to him for a very long time. Then he takes off his shirt and shows her the inside of his forearm. It is covered in hundreds of tiny scars.
“It threatened to hurt you if I refused,” he whispers.
At the usual time, the domovoi climbs onto the countertop, but the saucer isn’t there. It looks up to see Mark and Emma together, holding hands. The house spirit shrieks in frustration and stumbles back, retreating under their resolute gaze. It threatens and curses, and eventually slinks off into some dark corner.
Unafraid, Emma and Mark look into each other’s eyes and smile.
This story originally appeared in One Buck Horror.
Writing horror isn’t my wheelhouse, but occasionally I manage to fake it by crafting a dark fantasy story that’s “close enough.” Like in so many of my other stories, I mine my Russian cultural background here. A domovoi is a house spirit and a common fairy tale creature in Russia. According to tradition it can be helpful and protect the home if you treat it right (give it milk, etc.) but it does have a mean, mischievous streak, akin to the faerie of Germanic tales.
Domovoi aren’t overly familiar to Western readers, which made it all the more interesting to use one in a story.
RAVAGES OF TIME
Jake Turner sat behind his desk, eyes closed, letting the muted sounds of music and laughter that emanated from the street wash over him. Outside, people were celebrating Ship Week.
The government had declared a planet-wide holiday and everyone was having a good time, except for a handful of unfortunate souls stuck in their jobs. After all, Ship Week only happened once every forty-five years. Turner volunteered to work through the holiday and his superiors, desperate for manpower, approved his request to cancel medical leave and come back to work.
A light chime announced his next appointment, forcing him out of his reverie. The medication he took earlier was beginning to wear off, and small pings of pain were tingling deep within his bones.
The door opened to admit a middle-aged woman dressed in a style that was decades out of fashion.
“Mrs. Grobinski,” he rose to greet her. “I’m Security Chief Turner.”
Anna Grobinski smiled meekly and shook his hand.
“Please, sit.” Turner stared at the off-worlder. “I understand that there was an incident involving your son during the previous Ship Week. He was left behind?”
The Ship shuttled between the inhabited star systems, delivering everything from medical advances to films, books, music and gossip from the other planets. It also carried migrants, people looking for a fresh start on another world. Those traveling to planets further along on the Ship’s route welcomed the opportunity to spend a week exploring an exotic new world.
“It was an accident!” Her voice trembled. “By the time anyone realized Julek wasn’t on one of the shuttles, it was too late. The Captain wouldn’t delay departure …” She trailed off, her eyes filling with tears.
“I’m very sorry,” Turner said, keeping his voice even. “I realize that it’s only been a few months for you, since you lost him. But for your son, half a century has passed. He’s older than you now.”
Grobinski nodded, blotting under her eyes with a handkerchief.
“It says here,” Turner pointed at his screen, “that you refused to disembark at Astor Prime and remained on board while the Ship made its rounds and returned to our star system. You understand about the time dilation, that your son would be fifty-nine now, if he is still alive at all. So why have you come back?”
“I had to know,” she said. “Can you imagine being completely alone when you’re only fourteen? He must’ve been so scared. I had to know that he is all right. Know that he made a life for himself. That he forgives me.” The tears were beginning to well up again.
Turner tensed up. This was going to be the hard part. The pain in his bones was really flaring up now. He welcomed it, a fitting punishment for what he had to do.
“That is why we’re here,” said Turner. “I’ve located Julek, and can assure you that he has done well for himself. He was adopted by a nice family, grew up and started a family of his own. You’re a great-grandmother, Mrs. Grobinski.”
She exhaled, processing the news. “When can I
see him?” she asked eagerly.
“I’m sorry to say that he chose not to meet with you in person,” said Turner. “He felt that seeing him as an older man would be much too painful for you. Why, you probably wouldn’t even recognize him.”
Grobinski bit her lip, hard. “Do you have children, Mr. Turner?”
He nodded.
“Then you should understand. You’d always recognize them, no matter the ravages of time. Always. There’s a bond.”
“I’m only passing along his wishes,” said Turner. “He said you should continue on to Astor Prime. Make a new life for yourself there, like you always wanted to. It would make him happy to know that you’d moved on with your life.”
Turner rose from his chair to indicate that their appointment was at an end. There were so many other things to do, so many issues to deal with, during Ship Week. Grobinski made no move to leave. She remained seated in his office, staring at an undecorated wall with a forlorn expression on her face.
“Is there any message you’d like me to pass along,” Turner prodded. “A letter, perhaps? Forward it to my office, and I’ll make certain your son receives it.”
“No letter,” Grobinski finally said. “But… Would you give him this?” She retrieved an antique pocket watch from her purse. “It was his father’s. The lid was broken off and Julek always carried it with him, as a good luck charm.”
“I’ll pass it along,” Turner promised.
When she was gone, Turner brought up the photos of his own family on his monitor. There was his wife, his children and grandchildren, his adopted parents and his younger stepbrother, who couldn’t pronounce his name right as a three-year-old, and who was the first to begin calling him Jake.
Turner opened his desk drawer and took out the golden pocket-watch lid he kept there, next to the cancer pills. He pressed it to the watch and held the two pieces together for a long time, willing them to be whole.
Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories Page 15