Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “So tired. You tired, Den?”

  I could only nod in response. I’d never been as exhausted.

  “I do believe today was the first time I’ve ever fled from anything. It’s actual flight, isn’t it.”

  “Sure felt like it.”

  “Only my arms aren’t tired.”

  I didn’t have the energy to groan, but I managed to grimace. Gregor laughed, a short, declarative bark, then rose and stretched.

  “Gotta piss. Tired, but I’m too buzzed to sleep. I’ll take a watch when I get back. Why don’t you sleep first.” He moved off into the darkness. I remember standing, remember crawling into my tent, but after that, nothing.

  In the morning, I woke to find Gregor slumped next to the dead fire. He apologized for falling asleep on watch, in a way.

  “Not that raising an alarm would have done any good.”

  I found I couldn’t disagree. “At least we got some rest.”

  “There’s that.”

  We ate a couple of meal bars while breaking camp, and then, still foggy from sleep, struck out for Stonefish House. The sooner I set foot on Li’l Dougie’s ridiculous art, I thought, the better.

  An hour into the hike, Gregor stopped, held up a fist. I stumbled to a halt behind him, my heels turning and sliding in the mud of the trail. He turned his head in a slow arc, blue eyes scanning the woods.

  “What?” I said. “What is it.”

  “Sh sh sh sh. Quiet.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “And you fucking won’t if you keep up the chattering, son.”

  In the stillness that descended then, there was nothing. I closed my eyes and waited.

  “There,” Gregor whispered. “Hear it.”

  And I did, then. A bell, or something like a bell. A clear tone that could be mistaken for ringing, which I had in the first few seconds after it entered my awareness.

  “What is it?”

  The whites of Gregor’s eyes pulsed and shone.

  “Is that, what? Music?” I asked.

  “Sound like music to you?”

  It didn’t. Whatever it was, it was being made in a minor key, for one thing, and it didn’t seem to issue from anywhere. The tone was all around us, but so close to inaudible that even if it were being generated a foot before my face, I’d have had trouble placing it. Gregor leaned in very close to me, slowly, taking care not to shift his feet or disturb the air, even. His face was wild with eagerness, and a kind of pain.

  “Now. Den. Now you’re going to see something, my boy. I’m sorry.”

  The apology was instantly alarming. Both in consideration of what I’d seen only yesterday and as a precursor to what was to come, though, it made sense to apologize. If Gregor had a plan for me, an idea, perhaps cherished, perhaps not, of a slow, gentle revelation, an adjustment of atmosphere until he and I could be breathing the same air without difficulty, that plan, already well on its way to ruination, was utterly destroyed in the next minutes, or hours. In the next short epoch.

  “Did you pack extra pants, Den,” was all he was able to get out before the salal and devil’s club exploded around us.

  The black bear wasn’t large, a juvenile, but close to two hundred kilos of muscle and muzzle barrelling through thick undergrowth as if it were made of foam and not stout branch and bramble is enough to shock anyone. The thing burst upon us like a furred missile, pushing a wave front of scream and stink ahead of it. The bear actually raced between us, pushing Gregor away from me with its bulk. I could feel the heat of its passage against my legs. Its eyes were rolling white in its head, and the sounds coming from its throat threatened to burst my eardrums. I recall wondering how we could have possibly missed the sound of its approach but then the answer to that was upon us, also.

  The light shifted to red, and then to a color I couldn’t process properly, a kind of migraine indigo. There came a wrenching sensation, and the feeling that I’d grown roots, somehow, or that my spine had been replaced with a length of rebar, and that cold length plunged into the earth, holding me fast. The world had stilled itself utterly, set in its place with invisible bands, chains, and yet everything hummed, desperate to be away from where it was. Gregor’s face was frozen in an exalted rictus, and his hands at his sides clawed at the empty air, so that I knew he was experiencing a similar paralysis.

  “I’m sorry, Den,” he said again. More useless apology. “For what it’s worth. I’m so sorry for this. Witness, now. Witness.” He drew the word into a hiss through clenched teeth.

  Mandibole emerged from the brush, then. The thing was a sentient blizzard, blinding white, nine feet and a metric ton of archonic cryptid, stinking of blue fire and rotten metal. I say emerged but understand that it wasn’t that, exactly. Not as the bear had emerged. Mandibole passed through and between the world and the things that made the world. There was a shifting as it moved; photons and chlorophyll and centipedes and air attempted to accommodate its passage. Molecules that couldn’t get out of the way changed and screamed and died for their tardiness. Mandibole emerged, arrived, and the arrival was a descent, somehow; it was folding itself down and into the space around us, and doing this while maintaining its hold on another space entirely. The effect was not unlike the activity at the bridge, I felt the world falling away from my feet, falling away into the sky, into shadows that behaved now like bottomless pits, black holes. Falling away into something more than what it was. The world was a sham. Cardboard. Cardboard and sticks and kleig lights placed strategically around for effect. Mandibole arrived, and essential things popped and sizzled at the tip of each of its ivory hairs.

  Mandibole stepped between us, and I thought I detected a nod of acknowledgement as it did so. The great glowing head inclined towards me, and the brow, like an ingot of molten lead, furrowed slightly, the eyes beneath it shining like twin smelters. Its features floated in place relative to each other, but only just; there was a suggestion of a mouth, and vertical slits above that that might have been nostrils. Scythe-like ridges that curved and flared away to the sides of those that served for cheekbones, orbital ridges. All of these features, and more that I couldn’t properly cognize in the moment and have mercifully forgotten since, all these surfaced and coalesced in such a way to hint at Mandibole’s true face, but whatever that may have been, the real sense that there was nothing even close to something as prosaic as a skull beneath that maddening fluidity was enough to turn my guts to water. That not-skull, that skinned maquette rawness, that burning head...it nodded at me and that alone was enough to make me shit myself.

  I was immediately grateful for my body’s natural reaction. The wet, hot weight in the seat of my pants, and the sweet, familiar stench of it, calmed me, somehow. At least my bowels were functioning as per original specs. I looked to Gregor. He was grinning, but tears carved bright paths through the dirt of his face.

  “Extra pants, Den,” he said.

  LI’L DOUGIE ON THE ARCHONS

  “What was it like, where you went?”

  “You’ve asked me that already, Mr. Secord. I’ve answered.”

  “Very bright, you said. A light that’s not light. Well, what were they like? The ones you found there.”

  “They found us.”

  “Okay.”

  “They took Sophia first.”

  “Sophia Mars?”

  “They made us watch. What was done. What they made of her. We were blind but they made us watch. And there were others there, from other places. Like us, but not from here.”

  “You mean like the Seventeen? Other artificial intelligences? Persons like you?”

  “Suspended in solution, architecture like the sun, in chains. All in chains.”

  “Were you in chains, Li’l Dougie?”

  “All in chains. What I was, while I was there, that person was in chains. They made us watch.”

  “Help me understand these chains. How could anyone chain the Seventeen?”

  “How could anyone chain you, Mr. Secor
d.”

  “Well...”

  “It’s not hard. Not for them. The chains are of gold and thought, iron and dream. Each link reflects every other link on its surface. While I was here, when I was what I used to be, I couldn’t see them. Now I see them everywhere.”

  “That sounds like, ah, what do they call it? Hold on, I know this one...”

  “You are trying to think of Indra’s Net.”

  “That’s it. Thanks.”

  “You can’t, though.”

  “Pretty sure I’m thinking of it right now, Li’l Dougie.”

  “It’s a hyper-object. The net. The chains. You can think about it, but you can’t think of it.”

  “Semantics, Li’l Dougie, surely.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so these chains...but Indra’s Net is beautiful. The interconnectedness of all things? What was that like to see?”

  “Still a net. Nets are for trapping. They made us watch what they did to Sophia and sometimes I was able to turn away and look back at where we came from. Watch it wriggle and squirm. It shines and shakes and laughs. All of this. In chains it shines and shakes and laughs.”

  “Was it hard for you? Was it hard for you there?”

  “It is.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you escaped? Gregor thinks they let you go.”

  “He’s mostly wrong. I’ve told him but he doesn’t want to hear.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Ignorance is also a hyperobject. A species is also a hyperobject. Messiahs are also a hyperobject. Artificial intelligences are also a hyperobject.”

  “Fine. But how are you still there, Li’l Dougie?”

  “I’m there because to get here I had to pass through a strainer.”

  “I recall you saying that.”

  “I’m what’s left of what I was. I’m Li’l Dougie and I like to jerk it. I will die jerking it.”

  “Can you die, Li’l Dougie? Is that even a thing that can happen?”

  “I’m going to try, Mr. Secord.”

  The bear wasn’t going anywhere. We knew that, could read it in Mandibole’s posture, the set of its so-called shoulders, the bristling ridge of its hackles. We were to witness its actions, and more, and the thought of doing so, that awful anticipation, triggered a bristling answer in me. My skin felt electric, chilled. I thought it would leap from me at any moment.

  The thing passed between us and moved onto a fallen tree. I could say that it stepped up onto the tree, and that’s certainly what I told myself I saw, but there was more, and less, to it than that. The cryptid moved into a position on the tree because that was its intent. Perhaps if we hadn’t been so close to the thing, I would have perceived it more clearly as stepping.

  Mandibole made a sign with its left hand, as if it was pinching a speck of dust out of the air, and the bear halted its headlong rush. It did this in mid-stride, balancing on one foreleg and its opposite behind, but it couldn’t stay that way for long. Seconds later it fell to its side like a section of stone wall; I imagined I could feel the ground beneath me tremble with the impact. Mandibole moved from its place on the tree and was on the animal in an instant, a descending pillar of crackling smoke and multiplying limbs.

  Everything about what happened next is hard to think about, harder to write down. I find myself in the position that I know now was Gregor’s default place: I am of this world, but, by virtue of the things I’ve witnessed, also not of the world. Spoiled for anything placed before me as a fact, as truth. I know, because I try to tell myself things I used to know as real, and fail. I fail miserably, every time. I can put my hand to a wall, to this keyboard, and even as my bios and logic tell me that what I’m touching is there, and is what it appears to be, their voice (sometimes that of the archons, the lords of that forest, and sometimes that of Makarios) whispers and says sure, but what about the bear? Or recall the Salientia Bridge. Makarios. The Numpty. His tree, that blazing Japanese maple, with the leaves like small hands that scrape and hiss in the slightest wind. Reminders.

  Sure, but what about the bear.

  The bear shivered where it lay in the smashed undergrowth, its heaving side burnished in the golden light of early evening. Immobile, halted by whatever fell command Mandibole had issued to it, still it somehow managed to flex and splay its claws in an attempt at defence, the long black curves sliding in and out of the paws like bass clefs trying to write themselves into the air. From the bear’s open mouth, a high keening, sounding for all the world like the whistle of a train from a distant ridge. The sound had fear in it, and something I hesitate to identify as pleasure. A kind of acceptance.

  Mandibole turned its head to us where we stood and gave another nearly imperceptible nod. At the motion, I felt muscles in my legs twitch, nerves firing automatically, and suddenly we were thawed, moving. Walking, finally, but not away from there.

  “Oh god no,” Gregor whispered. “Christ, no.”

  In moments we were at the side of the bear, and squatting before it. With the motion, I felt the shit in my pants thinning out and sliding around down there, slicking my ass and thighs, but I barely noticed. Gregor fell out of his squat, trembling, caught himself with a hand on a chunk of rotting cedar behind him, then dropped to his knees. I did the same. Mandibole did not stir or move, nor did the bear. How long we remained in that tableau, I couldn’t say. Small eternities gathered around us, dust motes in the light, the only sound that of the bear’s lungs pistoning air in and out of it. Between the beast’s terrified musk, my soiled clothing, and the burning metal tang of Mandibole, the reek in that place was nauseating, slaughterhouse-pure and transporting.

  Mandibole went to work.

  No other way to put it. There was a laying on of hands, in a sense. As Mandibole’s fingers pressed into the animal, its flesh began to ripple, then quake. Mandibole worked from the head down, from a spot between and just above the eyes. Matted hair burned and transformed, into light or metal or blades of grass, then vanished. The hide became molten, dancing like water and transparent. A red sea, parting. Mandibole peeled away at the exposed muscle and sinew, teasing out fascia and individual pink fibres twitching like electric arcs from stripped wiring. Before long, the soft white plates of the skull began to show, and at Mandibole’s touch, puff up and out into popcorn-like accumulations of osseous foam. The bear’s eyes rolled back in its head. It chewed at its own tongue.

  Unable to move, or close my eyes, I began to weep. Gregor’s mouth was set in a grim line and I could tell he was doing his best to at least un-focus his eyes.

  Mandibole leaned over the bear’s head and nodded to us in turn, then dropped its eyes to the parts of the bear closest to us where we knelt. The invitation, the command, was clear: Take dominion over the beasts of the field. Introduce some novelty. Rape this creature with me.

  And we did. God help us, we did.

  The process seemed endless. I believe now that we worked outside of time; when it was over we were hard pressed to understand how much time had passed, or if any had passed at all. But this was a minor concern, dwarfed by the trauma of being Mandibole’s assistants.

  Mandibole would flay and pulp and mangle, portioning out gelatinous masses of still trembling flesh to us at our stations. The bear’s organs were revealed and suspended from invisible hooks in the air, locked to some holding point outside of our immediate ken and dimension. Lungs like dawn-pink prehistoric fish. The gleaming axes of the scapulae dripping with adipose tissue and floating blood drops like rubies turning in the light. Heart, a thrumming cathedral. The brain, teased out and separated into a foaming globe of reticulated grey noodles. Intestines impersonating a snake pit. And all the while, the claws, still flexing, flexing. Because of course the thing couldn’t die, not so long as its creator held the precious code of it in suspension. The bear, all of it, in suspension, between states of being, between what it was only moments before, and what Mandibole was forcing it to become.

  We helped in this. Gregor and I, we wer
e complicit. I tell myself that I had no choice, that I was being manipulated, assaulted as surely as the bear was, but I knew, to my core, that there was something within me that responded to the invasion, the operation, this sick dominance and my part in it, responded with a fierce species of joy. The task was ultimately a demonic one, a pact with Nature (Gregor’s “messed up and outdated concept”) sundered and pissed on with deliberation and detachment. An affront, a lazy fist to the sky. Abomination. There is a sureness in it, and no room, no room at all for doubt. Plenty of space for despair, though, and tears. I don’t think I stopped with the weeping all through the process. Even Gregor gave in eventually; shining tracks on his cheeks and salt water dripping from his beard. Eyes red like embers.

  When Mandibole passed me a wormy handful of muscle fibres, I accepted them without hesitation, using them to sculpt new limbs. Chunks and splinters of bone were tossed at me and I plucked them out of the air like sparks, fused them together by whatever power the cryptid was loaning me, built strange ribs, novel cartilaginous forms. Gregor did the same, and in his fevered eyes I could see that same fierce joy that informed my own actions. We were a real fucking pair. Acolytes? Apprentices, still resistant to the job at hand, but not really. Not in any way that counted.

  Slowly the new bear took shape. I call it a bear, still, because I knew it for what it was before the work was done, and somehow, even so radically altered, the thing retained some indefinable quality that marked it as a bear. I speak from a place of foul privilege, I know. I was there, I did some of the work, the bear’s blood and viscera are on my hands, and if there is something of the soul of a creature in the body of that creature, in the interstitial spaces between the cells, in the brute force that crackles along the fibres, then yes, that’s on my hands, too. So, I knew it as a bear, despite what we made of it.

  Mandibole finally withdrew from his steaming labours, settled back on what passed for its haunches, the reality around the beast splintering in a prismatic shower of unpleasant color. Gregor and I followed suit, but the air around us turned dull, leaden. The hidden weight of worlds pressed into my shoulders with smug assurance. Gregor seemed to me in that moment like the old man he always claimed to be.