by Tricia Reeks
***
Nathan arrived ten minutes early, so Amy went downstairs while Dayna was still getting ready.
“Boo,” she said when she answered the door. He jumped hard, which made her frown. A low tolerance for surprises didn’t bode well.
He visibly collected himself. “Er. Hello. You must be Amy. Dayna’s friend.”
“Dayna has a lot of friends,” Amy said. “Strange but very protective friends, who’ve watched over her for a very long time. They like to keep an eye on her. To do things for her. It means they’re around a lot, and they see everything. Which means they’ll be watching you, too.”
Nathan blinked hard. “Right,” he said, then rallied and gave her a wide smile that only wavered a little. “So is this the point where you warn me that if I break her heart you’ll hunt me down and kill me?”
“Not me,” Amy said. “But someone will, yes. Or something, rather. So you should know that breaking her heart would be a very bad idea indeed.”
Nathan’s skin turned a shade paler, and the smile wavered even more.
Amy held the door open. “Anyway, Dayna won’t be long, so you can come in and wait. You’ll probably have a sense of being watched, and you might have a feeling that things are moving around when you’re not looking straight at them. Or possibly that they’re trying to tell you something. The toaster in particular can be a bit threatening, but if it comes on too strong just throw a tea towel over it. That usually shuts it up. If anything really strange happens, shout for me. I’ll be upstairs in the basement.”
She paused at the foot of the stairs and looked back. “Unless it’s the television turning on by itself. That’s just because the remote’s broken.”
Nathan made a small, slightly strangled noise that, although Amy waited politely, didn’t turn into actual words. Eventually she decided it probably signified agreement and left. People could be as hard to communicate with as the aliens sometimes.
***
On the drive back from the cinema, Dayna couldn’t help noticing Nathan was quieter than usual. When he eventually said, “I met Amy when I came to pick you up,” she relaxed. It explained a lot.
“Amy is a bit—” she began, then her mobile rang.
“Hold on,” she said, and put it on speaker. Minimizing distractions was just good motoring etiquette, even without alien backseat drivers.
“Hi Dayna, it’s Night Shift Sarah. Just wanted to let you know the police came ’round tonight. I think advertising my Midnight Massage Special might not have been such a good idea. They seem to think it’s a euphemism for something unseemly.”
“Okay, don’t worry,” Dayna said. “I’ll sort it out tomorrow. The police are usually very understanding once I talk to them.”
She hung up and noticed Nathan looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read.
“You have some strange friends,” he said.
Dayna shrugged. She couldn’t exactly argue with that.
***
Amy spent most of the next day meditating in the spa’s storage room. She quite liked it in there. It was smaller than her basement.
Dayna popped in regularly, to bring her water and talk about Nathan.
“I told him you were just joking,” she said. “And that you mean well, but you’re not highly socialized.”
“You say that as if it’s a flaw,” Amy said. She opened her eyes. “You know it’s a bad idea to have secrets in a relationship, don’t you?”
Dayna looked down. “So there are some things we can’t talk about. That’s normal. No couple shares everything.”
“But we’re not just talking about being a Barry Manilow fan, or having to shave your toes. This is big. This is a major part of your life—and if you’re in a relationship with him, then it’s a major part of his life, too.”
“Then I’ll tell him the truth.”
“That’s an even worse idea.”
“Why? He won’t hold it against me. He’ll understand.”
“No, he won’t. He won’t get a chance to. Come on, you should know how it works by now. Or do I have to remind you?”
Amy got up and poked her head out the door. “Sarah,” she called, “could you come and help us with something? Anyone, it doesn’t matter. In fact, all of you would be good. Take it in turns.”
Sci Fi Sarah came out of the waxing room. She scrunched up the plastic apron she’d been wearing and threw it in the bin. “What’s up?”
“Did we ever tell you about our alien stalkers?” Amy said.
Sci Fi Sarah’s mouth fell open. “Your what?”
“Alien stalkers. They’re always around, wherever we go. In fact, they’re probably here right—”
Sci Fi Sarah sniffed loudly and looked over her shoulder. “Can you smell that? Shit, I must’ve left the wax on. I think it’s overheating.” She turned and ran out of the room.
“Next,” Amy called.
Curly Sarah slipped out from behind the front desk. “Yes?”
“Did we ever tell you about our alien stalkers?”
“What?” Curly Sarah said. “Did you just say—oh, hang on, that’s the phone. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Baltimore Sarah took her place. Amy got as far as “Did we ever tell you about—” when Baltimore Sarah put her hand in her pocket then shrieked. “Damn, I didn’t realize I left my cuticle clippers in there.” She pulled her hand out and examined her finger. “Sorry, guys, I think I need to go get a Band-Aid.”
Amy looked at Dayna. “Shall I try ringing Night Shift Sarah? So that when she gets in later, she can tell you about the strange dream she had, where someone phoned her up to talk about aliens? Or have I made my point?”
Dayna’s shoulders slumped. “You’ve made your point.”
Curly Sarah came back over. “Nathan’s on the phone,” she said.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Dayna said. Then she looked back at Amy with a wounded expression. “And for the record, I do not have to shave my toes.”
***
Nathan arrived for dinner bearing a good bottle of Chablis and a slightly wilted bunch of flowers. Dayna very deliberately tried not to read anything from the arrangement of drooping leaves.
“Dinner’s just about ready,” she said. “I made slow roast pork belly with garden peas and celeriac pear mash.”
It would’ve been more accurate to say she’d discovered it in the oven rather than actually cooked it, but she decided to skip over that detail.
“It smells wonderful,” Nathan said, sitting at the table. The silverware flashed and sparkled. Dayna ignored it.
“Look,” she said. “I know my life is a bit weird.”
Nathan scratched his chin. The peas on his plate maneuvered themselves into a message that Dayna also ignored. Nathan gave them a sharp look.
“Well,” he said. “Yes. Things have been feeling a bit weird for me too, lately.” He picked up his fork, then put it down again. “I know your friend was just being protective, which is what friends do, but what she said, it’s kind of . . . played on my mind. Because I do feel like I’m being watched. Like, all the time. At work. In the gym. At home. In the bath. My bathroom is six feet square, and I can see every inch of it, and I know there’s nobody there, but it really, really feels like there is. And I keep thinking that my stuff’s being moved. I don’t mean losing my keys, it’s more than that. Even when things are exactly where they were before, they’re not. They’re different, somehow. And that—” he pointed at the toaster, “is giving me the evil eye. Why is it doing that, Dayna? How is it doing that?”
“Um . . .” Dayna said.
“I think I should go now,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like peas. Especially these peas. I don’t like them at all.”
He pushed his chair back so hard it toppled over. “Sorry,” he said again, and ran out of the room.
A few minutes after the front door slammed, Amy came down. “There, there,” she said, patting Dayna’s back. “Don’t get
upset. You know that’s a bad idea. It only leads to severed limbs and evisceration.”
She cleared the plates off the table. “I’ll put this outside for next door’s Rottweiler,” she said, holding up the untouched pork belly. “Or, you know, any wandering bears.”
Dayna stayed at the table and put her head in her hands.
***
The next day, Amy went to see Nathan. When he got home, he looked very surprised to find her sitting at his kitchen table. In fairness, Amy was reasonably surprised herself; she hadn’t ventured this far from the basement in years. But she’d walked, which really couldn’t do any harm to anyone. And it was a good cardiovascular workout.
“Amy? What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Your roommate let me in. I came to talk about Dayna.”
Nathan screwed his eyes shut and shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I was an arsehole last night. Running out like that, after she’d gone to all that trouble. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” He straightened up and looked Amy in the eye. “But it won’t happen again, you have my word on that. I’ll make it up to her.”
“So you still want to see her?”
“Yes. Of course I do.” He hesitated. “Has she . . . said anything, to you? About me? Does she . . . does she still like me?”
“Yes,” Amy said.
He broke into a wide smile. “Good, good. That’s great news.”
“No, it’s not. Not for you.”
“What do you mean?” He frowned at her. “And hang on, what roommate? I don’t have a roommate.”
“I was hoping you were going to give up and walk away,” Amy said, “but I see that’s not going to happen. So I’m going to have to save you. Trust me, this is for your own good.”
“What is? Amy, what are you talking about? You’re starting to make me nervous.”
“Good. You should be nervous.” Amy tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. For a second it was overlaid with an image of the ceiling in Rupert’s flat, and she looked down again. “You should be terrified.”
“Of you?”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “Of the aliens.”
Nathan stared at her. “I’m sorry, the what?”
“The aliens. That’s who I was talking about when you came to the house. Dayna’s friends. Our friends. They’re aliens. Unfathomable but powerful aliens.”
Somewhere in the flat, a phone began to ring. Nathan glanced round.
“Ignore that,” Amy said. “They’re trying to distract you, but you need to hear this. That’s how I got in here—the aliens let me in. They let me go anywhere I want to, which is exactly why I stay in the basement. Dayna and I, we’re not safe to be around. Because they’re not safe.”
“Amy, this is—”
He was cut off by the high, shrill beeping of the smoke alarm on the wall. “Ignore that, too,” Amy said. She got up, flipped it open and ripped the battery out. Silence fell for half a second, then Nathan’s mobile blared out the theme tune to The Twilight Zone.
Nathan put a hand to his jacket pocket, then frowned. “That’s not my ringtone.”
“They’ve been working on their sense of humor lately,” Amy said.
Nathan slowly withdrew his hand. “I’ll ignore it, shall I?”
Amy nodded. Maybe he was learning.
“Look,” he said, and his expression softened. “I know you care about Dayna. You’re her friend, I get it. But if all this is because you’re worried I’ll come between you, you don’t have to be. I don’t intend to do that, I promise.”
Amy sighed. Maybe not, then. “You won’t intend to do any of it, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll make you. I don’t know why, exactly—I don’t know what their agenda really is—but I know what they’ll do, and how it’ll end. So it’s a bad idea to try and see her again, Nathan. A really bad idea. You need to let it go. Let her go.”
Nathan shook his head. “I can’t.”
Amy scrubbed a hand over her cheek. “You know, I thought you might say that, which is why I told you all this in the first place. You might not have been listening to me, but they have. And they don’t like people knowing about them.”
She patted his arm. “I’m sorry about this, because it’s probably going to hurt. Hopefully it won’t turn out too bad, although you never know with head injuries. It’s not an exact science. But it’s better than the alternative, believe me.”
She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. Nathan ran after her. “What are you—” he started, but the rest of the words were choked off when his foot caught in the rug, and he went sprawling. His head hit the glass coffee table on the way down, and he landed in a heap on the floor with shards of glass surrounding him like glittering confetti.
Amy took his phone out of his pocket and called an ambulance, then left it lying by his hand and let herself out of the flat.
***
When Dayna got back from the hospital, Amy was waiting for her in the kitchen. “How’s Nathan?” she said.
Dayna gave a tiny shrug. “The same. The doctor said memory does return slowly, in a lot of cases, so she’s cautiously optimistic that it might not be a permanent loss. But she said it might be best if I didn’t visit for a while. He might not remember me, but for some reason he still gets very agitated when I’m there. It’s not good for his blood pressure. So I think I’m just going to, you know, stay away.”
“I’m sure she’s right,” Amy said. “By the way, this came for you earlier.”
She handed Dayna a padded envelope. Inside was a set of keys, a packet of flyers advertising a nightclub called Nefarious, and a sheaf of paperwork that said she owned it.
Dayna stared at it for a while, then slipped everything back in the envelope. “You know, I think I’ll skip going to the spa today,” she said slowly. “In fact, I think I’m going to just hand the whole thing over to Curly Sarah.”
Amy looked surprised. “Really?”
“Yes. I’ve got more important things to do.”
Amy eyed the envelope in her hand. “Like what?”
“Like some overdue spring cleaning.” Dayna pulled a bin bag out of the cupboard and dropped the padded envelope inside, then dumped the toaster on top. “And then I’m going to redecorate in here,” she added, tying up the bag. “Amy? What do you think? Want to come and help me buy a few dozen tins of black paint?”
After staring at her for a moment, Amy broke into a wide, approving smile. “I think that’s a great idea,” she said.
A Heart for Lucretia
Jeff VanderMeer
Originally appeared in the Silver Web, Winter/Spring 1993
This is the story of a brother, a sister, and a flesh dog, and how two found a heart for the third. The story has both oral and written traditions, with no two versions the same. It begins, for our purposes, with the city . . .
***
“The city, she has parts. The city, she is dead, but people live there, underground. They have parts . . .”
Gerard Mkumbi cared little for what Con Newman said, despite the man’s seniority and standing in the crèche. But, finally, the moans as the wheezing autodoc worked on his sister persuaded him. The autodoc said Lucretia needed a new heart. A strong heart, one that would allow her to spring up from their sandy burrows hale and willowy, to dance again under the harvest moon. Gerard had hoped to trade places so that the tubes would stick out from his chest, his nose, his arms, the bellows compression pumping in out, in out. But no. He had the same defect, though latent, the autodoc told him. A successful transplant would only begin the cycle anew.
In Lucretia’s room, at twilight, he read to her from old books: Bellafonte’s Quadraphelix, The Metal Dragon and Jessible, others of their kind. A dread would possess him as he watched his sister, the words dry and uncomforting on his lips. Lucretia had high cheekbones, smoky-green eyes, and mocha skin which had made all the young men of the crèche flock to her dance.
But
wrinkles crowded the corners of those eyes, and Gerard could detect a slackness to the skin, the flesh beneath, which hinted at decay. The resolve for health had faltered, the usually clenched chin now sliding into the neck; surely a trick of shadow. Anyone but Gerard would have thought her forty-five. He knew she was twenty-seven. They had been born minutes apart, had shared the same womb. Watching her deterioration was to watch his own. Would he look this way at forty-five?
“Gerard,” she would call out, her hand curling into his . . .
It had become a plea. He forced himself to hold her hand for hours, though the thought of such decay made him ill. The autodoc insisted on keeping her drugged so she could not feel the pain. Could she even recognize him anymore, caught as she was between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and death?
Flesh Dog, eyes hidden beneath the rolls of raw tissue which were its namesake, stayed always by his side. Flesh Dog shared few words with Gerard, but every twitch of its muzzle toward Lucretia or the squat metal autodoc reminded Gerard she would die soon—too soon, like their mother before her. Unless a miracle arose from the desert.
“The city, she has parts . . .”
And, finally, he had gone, taking Flesh Dog with him.
***
Thus it begins. The ending is another matter, a creature of fragments and glimpses that pieced together only tease . . .
***
That summer, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and danced like a will-o’-the-wisp over the shifting sands; a fitful dance, for she often dreamed of Gerard at night, and they were unpleasant dreams.
That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the crèche. He did not speak now. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and the city with no name, as though expecting strangers.
***
And the middle, finally, in which meat is placed upon the bone.
***
For twenty days and twenty nights, Gerard trudged the sands, subsisting on the dry toads which Flesh Dog dug up for them. They encountered no one on their journey, listened only to the dry winds of the desert.