Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “Or two,” I echoed.

  “Feeling any better?”

  “Should I be? Why are they still shitting? Jesus Christ, when does it stop?”

  “When they’re done, boy. When they’re done. I try not to think about their physiology, if they even have such a thing. And I’ve long since given up understanding why they like to be watched. Who can understand a coprophiliac?

  “Anyway. Think of the Jews, if you will. As a change of pace. So warm and human, y’know? Jacob’s descendants, because of course he also got a new name out of that night of wrasslin’. Is Rye Al, they called him afterwards. He Who Fights With God. Anyway, the whole gang free at last, free at last and straight outta Egypt, missing their leeks and their onions and loudly bitching about it. There they are, gathered in the shadow of Mount Sinai, with those things screaming at them from the crags! Imagine several hundred thousand humans shitting their collective loincloth at once. The ones who can still talk after that, well, they ask their boy Moses to intercede with the things on their behalf. A not unreasonable request! And so off he skips, the little hipster, spends a month and change up on the peaks flailing about and keeping his face covered, he claims, but when he comes back down with the famous commandments (where don’t murder people is number five on the list and you shall have no other gods before me is number one, go figure), when he comes down he’s fully irradiated, which I think is just fucking fascinating. Lots of focus on the tablets, but dude was glowing and no modern Christian ever mentions that, though it’s right there in Exodus, right there in the Renaissance statuary. Moses with a crown of horns because how else you gonna represent shining light in stone. Anyway.

  “The elohim they were called, then. And before that the Watchers. Nephilim. Giant in the earth. But let’s be clear, they’re archons. Archons with a capital A? I dunno. Maybe. Do I know from archons? Do I know anything, Den. Sasquatch is as sasquatch does, but no one ever got close enough to one to know what they do, or watch them long enough to see the camouflage melt away, so how could we know what they were? But I know. I know now.”

  Gregor stood up suddenly. The archons had finished their business on the other side of the alcove. Two soft mounds of shining feces were slowly merging at the edges. The grins on the shifting faces of Horvemoan and Anal Andy were awful to look at.

  “I hope you know a way out of here,” I whispered. He clapped a hand to my back.

  “Right behind you, Den. Same way we came up. Right now, it’s a waiting game. See how they move? That lensing quality to their forms, what light does around them? They’re here but only in the most provisional way. As much as they have to be here, they’re here. I think most of them, the bulk of what they are, is higher up and far away. What we’re seeing with our sad and squishy mammalian eyemeat is only an extension of them. A cross section. The tip of a finger, to make a poor analogy.

  “As such, I think they’re on a different time scale entirely. This bathroom break we’re watching might only be taking a second out of their inscrutable day wherever they are. Less than that, even. So, we wait until they decide to relocate themselves to another point on the crystalline space-time supersphere, which they will, because they bore easily.”

  “How long?” I moaned, squirming at the idea of having to watch the sickening antics much longer.

  “I was stuck witnessing for eighteen hours and change.”

  “God!”

  “I doubt we’ll be here that long. Any water in that pack? Have some.” He reached into the bag on my shoulders and handed me a bottle. I took it with shaking hands, managed to slop some past my lips, which felt numb and tingling.

  “Oop! Here we go,” he said.

  Horvemoan and Anal Andy now plunged their paddle hands into the steaming mess they’d made. I gagged again, and felt Gregor’s hand on my shoulder once more, gripping the edge of my scapula, whether from nerves or in support of me, I couldn’t tell. The smell was robust and coppery and made our eyes water.

  The archons stirred and stirred, and the muck mound quaked and shimmied, began to look less like a monstrous pile of shit and more like an indeterminate foam of particles, black and silver and other, less identifiable colors. “Goddamn alchemy,” I heard Gregor whisper.

  When the change happened, a minute or an hour later, it was instantaneous.

  Moths.

  The archons raised their hands to the air in another of their strange hieratic gestures, this one of mock benediction and greeting, as their shit took the form of a cloud of silvery moths that rained a fine, talc-like dust all around us. The cloud rose with a rustling, audible hiss into the alcove, and above to the sky beyond. Several of the insects landed on Gregor and me, and when I moved to slap one away from my arm, Gregor caught my hand, held a finger to his mouth. Three of the things crawled in his beard.

  “Almost done.”

  The cloud dispersed, finally, and within moments Horvemoan and Anal Andy also left. Their exit, though, was as different from their arrival as I could have imagined. They did not reassume their camouflage. That I could have handled, maybe.

  “They’re laddering, Den!” Gregor shouted. “Back up, back up, back up! Go!” He clutched at my jacket and hauled me along the trail.

  Laddering: Gregor’s term, inscrutable but somehow appropriate, as the vertiginous sensation of climbing suffused the moment. Whole sections of earth, the rock wall, forest litter, and chunks of the lower trunks of surrounding trees underwent a painful, screeching transubstantiation. The only entity that appeared unaffected was the red tree. The sasquatch, the archons themselves, seemed to dissipate in a slow-motion shower of vertical threads. A powerful bass note filled the glen as entire masses of atmosphere were vacuumed up and away, the air around these pockets rushing in to fill the space. Before my eyes, what was became what was not.

  You can watch a thousand movies. Play a thousand games. Pop some corn, settle in for the night, and embed your mind in a thousand noönet narratives. Allow grand cosmic operas of black holes and portals, vortices, dimensional gateways, all that swirling pyrotechnic glory, let that escapist garbage wash over you and think to yourself ooh! and ahh!, you can do all that and you’ll never come close to the feeling, deep in the gut and clawing away at the hindbrain, the feeling of watching something pretending to be like you, or something close to you, something at least comprehensible, moving up and away from and outside of everything you thought was real. You can watch a thousand movies, and never vomit all over yourself with the insult and nausea of watching an archon climb its ladder.

  And worse, the expressions on their faces as they left. Even knowing I was looking at a representation of their being, a cross-section as Gregor insisted, there was no mistaking the look, which flew from face to maddening face like a cloud. On Horvemoan, the look was one of dumb lust and sly perversion. The leer of a mentally ill rapist pulsed on the face of Anal Andy. They each seemed to take a moment to fix me with a look of mingled hatred and glee. They wore paradox as masks, and they traded these in the blink of an eye. Watching them, I began to wonder if they were even separate beings. Each of them made their gestures again as the world split and boiled around their forms. Within moments they were gone, the ground beneath them already groaning with the work of reasserting itself as ground. Leaves sighed with exhaustion. Bark coughed and gathered itself on naked tree flesh. Of the pile of shit, or the moth swarm it had become, there was no sign. Gregor stood up, brushed at the front of his canvas pants.

  “I’m postponing the hunt.”

  “You think?” I nearly screamed. My cheeks were wet and my jaw ached from the strain. Gregor pushed past me and headed back down the trail, collecting his rifle on the way.

  “I need a drink,” he said.

  LI’L DOUGIE ON THE JAPANESE MAPLE

  The tree fascinated me. So incongruous, up there in its tiny stone alcove, spreading leaves like small, prayerful hands to the occasional sun. So well-kept and tended to, so clearly of deep importance to Gregor Makarios. A gun
had been brandished. Uselessly, according to him, but brandished all the same. The archons had sought to rile up the man. They’d succeeded.

  Gregor wouldn’t talk about the tree, though, when I asked. A man I’d become used to seeing with his great smiling mouth open at all times, the better to facilitate the unimpeded flow of his speech, acted as if his jaws were wired shut when I brought up the alcove, the maple. He’d wave me away in a manner almost senile.

  So, I asked the AI. My luck was good that morning; I entered Li’l Dougie’s space while they were lucid and not otherwise engaged, though their form took some adjusting to. Li’l Dougie wore light like a migraine in that completely black space, and floated as a collection of unpleasant cubes that leaked a viscous, lumpen gel onto the floor. I thought of tapioca. Bubble tea.

  “What can you tell me about the alcove in the cliff, Li’l Dougie?”

  “Alcove?”

  “Gregor tends to a tree up there. It’s not far, actually.”

  “I’ve seen it. He has me fly cameras up sometimes, to look for things.”

  “So you’ve seen the tree? The red tree?”

  “The tree is a Japanese maple.”

  “Oh?”

  “Atropurpureum, a cultivar of the acer palmatum, or purple Japanese maple. It is of the Sapindacae family. That one’s name is Jeremy.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It is called Jeremy.”

  “Who calls it that?”

  “Mr. Makarios does.”

  “Odd name for a tree. Do you know why he calls it that?”

  “Do you like music.”

  “Yeah. Do you like music, Li’l Dougie?”

  “Once. Not so much now. Not since the straining. The music above breaks into you and does things. Do you know Krimes?”

  Instantly the space was liquid with holographic clips of the EDM chanteuse, playing back without sound and at varying speeds. I could never get into her neon-lit vampire aesthetic but I knew Ceri and Inga liked her. As had Gregor.

  “They were married there for a while, weren’t they?” I offered. “Mr. Makarios and Krimes? Like, after her thing with Tusk.”

  “Yes. Kari Tataryn and Gregor Makarios were married in 2032. Jeremy was born a year later. They separated eleven years after that when—...”

  “Hold up! What?”

  “What what.”

  “There was a kid?”

  “Jeremy Makarios. Yes.”

  “Well, shit. Do you have a pic of the, I’m sorry, of Gregor’s son?” My head was reeling. I’d never heard of a Makarios heir but that wasn’t at issue. The fact was no one had. The marriage had been high-profile; the divorce tabloid fodder, thanks to the Tusk angle. There was no way Gregor and Krimes had a secret child.

  “There are no pics. There is only light and code.”

  “Okay?”

  “I built a simulacrum of the little shit.”

  “Wow. You built—...” Li’l Dougie’s voice began to take on that special edge of theirs. The substance dripping from their cubes thickened, and small shapes wriggled in the puddles of it below.

  “I will show you the simulacrum. OF THE LITTLE SHIT.”

  “Jesus, Li’l Dougie, you don’t ha—...”

  And there stood a perfect hologram of a young boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. Dark hair, dark eyes, slender and clean-limbed and smiling tentatively. Li’l Dougie’s holographic form circled me, humming and full of menace, as I examined their work; I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise with each pass.

  “The invisible boy,” the AI hissed. “Intangible, innocent of the world, intransient. There is no movement. They make things appear to move, so as to imitate events, make things appear to happen. Births and births but not born of woman. Not this one. The little shit.”

  “You need to step off, Li’l Dougie. Seriously.” They were jealous. That was the emotion I was hearing. “Who is this kid?”

  “The son. The heir. The little shit.”

  Questions cascaded to the tip of my tongue but only one managed to escape. “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing happened to him. He was. Then he wasn’t. Nothing is what he is and always was. And so, the tree. Mr. Makarios said he liked the tree, Jeremy, the tree they’d planted the week he was born, the tree he brought up here after his grave error, long after she was gravid. The crimes of Krimes.”

  “Where is he now? Jeremy?”

  “No where, I told you. Nothing and no where and this is all there is, some light and code Mr. Makarios had me shape for him to weep over. The boy never was. Only the tree, now, only memento mori tomorrow and after.” Li’l Dougie’s cube form rocked with geometric spasms and gouts of the fluid, like phosphorescent tar, sprayed the walls. I was no closer to understanding the bizarre revelation, and the AI’s behaviour was deteriorating before my eyes. Their obsession with sons was a factor, obviously, but here was this conflation with an ornamental plant that left me baffled. I’d had enough.

  “Dougie, what the hell. What is going on here? At this place? With you, with Gregor! The sasquatch! With this kid.”

  Hearing a machine intelligence approximate a tittering laugh is extremely disconcerting.

  “And you, Mr. Secord. And you, pickaninny.”

  “The fuck you say!” There had been a pause before the slur. For deliberation, or effect? Who could tell with Li’l Dougie.

  They tittered again. The cubes flew apart, disassembling and vanishing. The room went black. I paced back and forth, trying to reconcile my incomprehension with a growing rage. I hollered at the thing.

  “That it, boy? You done? We done here?”

  “No.” Their voice fell softly from a point high above, apologetic and a shade asthmatic. “Not yet. They will want you for their work, Mr. Secord. You should choose to do it, when they ask, or you will be small like Li’l Dougie, insane in the membrane like Mr. Makarios.”

  “The archons.”

  “Mr. Makarios chose not to.”

  A deep silence entered the space, expanded, pushing all air and thought away and out. Rage became fear, instantly.

  “And now, the tree. Purple Japanese maple. Family Sapindacae. Palmately-lobed leaves and small, red-purple flowers in spring, inconspicuous, followed by winged, purple fruits...”

  I left the AI listing off botanical facts. A migraine instantly settled like a hot ring of metal on my skull the moment I stepped outside. Gregor would have to wait.

  GREGOR ON THE ARCHONS

  “How do you deal with it, Gregor? We’re surrounded here. I mean, I know they’re outside as we’re speaking. Like, intellectually I know it. But I’ve seen you go with them.”

  “When?”

  “On the video. Several times. And I’ve seen you speak with them. I can’t even imagine the place you’re at, that you can understand that kind of...speech.”

  “You won’t have to, soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Den, do you think you’re getting out of here without a real meeting? Lessons? All things considered?”

  “I’d rather not consider it, Gregor. Please don’t let that happen. I’ll stay, for your story, and then I’m out.”

  “It’s not up to me, kid.”

  “Can we come back to this?”

  “Sure we can. You’re the reporter.”

  “Okay. I’m just...Jesus. I will want to talk about this, but not now. I can’t just now.”

  “Totally understandable. I was the same way. Once Li’l Dougie made sense and I started to put two and two together.”

  “All right. So, the sasquatch...”

  “Archons, Den.”

  “Archons. I met someone on Haida Gwaii...she called them landotters. Landotter people.”

  “Did you now.”

  “Did I what?”

  “Meet someone on Haida Gwaii. She nice?”

  “Sure. I guess?” Betrayals like scattered seed on stony soil. I coughed and went on, but he had my number. Was I that transparent? “Sh
e said that landotters take their victims out of some primal cycle of rebirth.”

  “I’m familiar with the legend. Yeah, that scans. Many names, I’m thinking. Lots of ways to approach them, lots of stories. Landotters. Sasquatch. Sure.”

  “But you like archons. Which is, what? You said the Gnostics, up at the tree. Gnosticism, I can’t even...? But you didn’t always call them that, surely?”

  “Hell no. That would have required an understanding I did not have at the time. Early on, they were sasquatch to me. Cryptids. Here we see the gentle wood ape in its native habitat and so on. But then they really let their hair down and I received, as you say, their terrible gnosis. I saw what they were, truly.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “They’re not from around here, Den, as I’ve explained. In every possible sense.”

  “Alien.”

  “Ultimately, yes. Beyond even that. I can approximate something close to an answer, but you need to get this through that thick skull of yours, Den, that’s all I can give you. A collection of ideas and suspicions mashed together to look like an answer. To feel like it, smell like it. When what it is, son, is a nightmare dressed up like an answer. Camouflaged.

  “First off, they’re from nowhere. They exist, so far as we can understand such an existence, outside of the spacetime super-sphere. The hairy fuckers can access it at any point, rotate the entire hyperobject like you or I would spin a top, then drop in to check on things. Which is to say they are here and they are not here.

  “Which is to say, further, that we see them all the time. That’s what I think. How many billions of individuals are we on this planet, right now? Nine? Nine billion? And that’s just our species. Understand that when I talk about their presence here I’m not even bothering to bring in their possible avatars in the other kingdoms. Mycelial avatars. Mineral. Their presence in the media. The meme-shoals. Not to mention actual animals. They’re fucking everywhere, Den, because they can be. What would you do with an all-access pass to Creation itself? Yeah, so. Just the human-seeming ones. Tell me, what’s your social network like, Den? A decent size?”