Her breasts hung heavy and limp in the swaying net, and Gwen reached forward to grab it and trap them inside. She overbalanced and the next thing she knew she was flying forward off the couch, right into her sculpture sitting on the coffee table. As she slid across the table, clutching the net in one hand, she reached for the sculpture, but it sailed free of her grasp and crashed to the floor, smashing into hundreds of pieces.
Gwen lay across the coffee table on her stomach, panting, her breasts struggling feebly in the net. She stared at her sculpture, her beautiful sculpture, destroyed, and then glanced at the box lying on its side nearby and suddenly great wracking sobs welled up inside her and shook her body. Hot tears streamed down her face and she couldn’t stop crying.
The net slipped from her hand as she crawled off the coffee table and knelt beside the shattered remains of her sculpture. She sifted through the fragments, but much of the clay had turned to powder when it hit the floor. There was no repairing it. The one thing she’d ever done that she was really proud of was gone. It wasn’t worth it, she thought. It just wasn’t worth it. George and Gracie rolled into her lap and nuzzled against her as if to comfort her. She held them to her and cried until she was empty, and then she got the broom.
She struggled through the doorway with the block of clay and took it into the living room. With one foot she cleared the coffee table of dirty dishes and magazines and dropped the clay on top of it with a slam. She got a bowl of water from the kitchen, sat down on the couch and sank her fingers into the soft moist clay. It was smooth and cool, receptive to her every thought, every twitch of her fingers.
She didn’t think about what she was doing, what form she wanted to wrest from the blank block, she just did it, molding and smoothing, feeling all her sadness, fear and self-doubt ebb away as she gave herself up to the task at hand. With wonder she watched the forms take shape as if of their own volition, emerging whole and perfect from between her fingers.
When she was finished, her arms, face, pants and blouse were streaked with red-brown clay. She sat back with satisfaction and looked at what she had created. An assemblage of fruit — apples, pears, bananas and peaches, and among them two round, disembodied breasts, almost indistinguishable from the fruit until you looked at it a while. And then you began to wonder about that banana. She decided instantly on a name, “Still Life with Boobs.”
Gwen smiled, more pleased with herself than she’d been in years. She didn’t care if the piece was good or not, she didn’t care if anyone laughed at it, or her. She was through living for appearances. It wasn’t worth it. It made you miss out on the really good stuff. It made you forget why you were alive in the first place.
Someone knocked on her door. Startled, Gwen wiped her hands on her jeans and opened it.
The new guy from accounting stood there, shifting restlessly from foot to foot. “Um. Hi. I — uh, I’m sorry to bother you but . . . Geez, this is embarrassing. I — uh, I lost my — I lost something and I was wondering if . . .” His blue eyes wandered past her to peer into the apartment, desperation and dread warring on his face.
Gwen suddenly remembered the penis in her dresser drawer. Good Lord. “Why don’t you come in?” she said.
He looked relieved.
“Sit down,” she said, gesturing to the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
She went to the bedroom and rummaged through her underwear drawer until she found the penis. But she couldn’t just go out there with it in her hand. It seemed too . . . personal. She emptied the basket where she kept her scrunchies and placed the penis inside, then took a scarf and arranged it on top, as if it were a loaf of bread she wanted to keep warm.
She went back out. He was still sitting on the couch, hands clenched on his knees, his head tilted down, peering at his crotch. Bingo.
“Is this yours?” she asked.
He took the basket, tentatively lifting up one corner of the scarf. He heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh my God. Thank you . . . I — Could you excuse me a moment?”
She smiled. “Sure, bathroom’s down that way, second door on the left.”
When he came back he looked a lot more relaxed. She offered him a beer and they sat on the couch, drinking together in companionable silence for a few minutes. At last she said, “It was my breasts. They brought . . . him here. It wasn’t me.”
He laughed. “Oh, I know. Anyway, knowing him, he probably talked them into it.”
She smiled. “How did you know he came here?”
“It’s Frank, by the way.” He stuck out a hand.
“How did you know Frank came here?”
“No, I’m Frank, he’s Clyde. As in Bonnie and Clyde? It was a thing my old girlfriend would always say, back before we broke up.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He looked away. “Anyway, to answer your question, I followed him. I saw them all come in here, only at the time, I didn’t have the guts to knock on the door. I was hoping he’d just come back, he usually does, but he’s never been gone this long before and I was pretty desperate.”
“I can imagine.”
“So, has this been happening to you for long?” he asked.
She shrugged, caught up in the square line of his jaw, the compact sturdiness of his shoulders. She’d like to sculpt him. “About six weeks.”
“Heh, me too. It’s insane isn’t it? I mean, I thought I was, until . . . until now.” He leaned closer to her, his face intent, as if he were discovering something.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a husky whisper. “Maybe we are crazy, but I don’t care anymore, do you?”
He shook his head ever so slightly. “No.”
“Me neither,” she said, and she kissed him.
Their lips, soft and crushable, locked onto one another with sudden urgency. He ran his hands down her arms, across her back, holding her tight, and she brought her own arms around and up, to play with the hair at the back of his neck, to clutch his shoulders and crumple the starchy whiteness of his shirt between her fingers.
They parted, and his gaze focused on the sculpture. “Hey, that’s beautiful. Did you do that?”
In her blouse George and Gracie tingled, and Gwen smiled broadly. “Yeah.”
“Wow. That’s great that you do something creative like that. I wish I could be creative. I used to love to draw, but I haven’t done it for years.”
“You should pick it back up again.”
He looked pleased. “Really, you think?”
“Oh, definitely.”
Carrie Vaughn is another Talebones success story. This story was the first of hers to see print, but of course, today she is a wildly successful novelist. Like I did for the James Van Pelt story, I enlisted her help to narrow down her list of fabulous Talebones stories before deciding her very first one from issue #17 was the right choice. (I’m still waiting, however, for her to write the promised Tudor poetry/Victorian literaure/Cyberpunk story.) Our sole cover by acclaimed horror artist Alan M. Clark appeared on #17, depicting a wonderful blend of dark fantasy and science fiction.
THE GIRL WITH THE PRE-RAPHAELITE HAIR
CARRIE VAUGHN
Esther had a recurring dream in which her throat was cut.
She hangs back over the edge of the bed, arms flung out, crucifix-like. Blood from the gash across her neck pours into her hair, long, red, flowing like water. Rich and luxurious, her hair streams red, drips red, moves in a draft, alive. It is hair a man could bury his hands in, his face in, or grab and pull, jerking her around like a doll.
“That’s her?”
“Yes. We brought her in an hour ago. You’re lucky she wasn’t killed in the firefight.”
She didn’t know if she’d woken up. Her eyes had opened, she thought, but the figures on the other side of the bars seemed indistinct. She couldn’t see their minds, which bothered her. She should have been able to tell what they were thinking.
“She’s drugged?” The man in the overcoat said this.
> “As you instructed.” The other man wore a beige uniform and a gun on his belt.
Esther could still hear the guns firing. They’d come from everywhere. She’d tried to warn Ike, tried to tell him when she felt the minds of two dozen police officers converging on the warehouse where he’d set up the deal. They’d catch him this time, with fifty kilos of dust on his hands. But the buyers had already arrived, the deal had progressed too far to call it off. She begged him, tried to pull him away. The buyer had drawn her gun first, at the sign of Esther’s panic. Esther had ducked under the table, arms clasped over her head.
She could still hear the guns. Ike’s blood still stained her shirt.
The man in the overcoat, the inquisitive one, looked her in the eye. She stared back. Maybe he noticed her staring at him. She couldn’t get the taste of gunpowder out of her mouth. Ike had died before he hit the floor. She could still feel it, the light behind his eyes going out, a flash and then darkness. She couldn’t feel much of anything else.
“Her parents signed the release?”
“They don’t have to. She just turned eighteen.”
“But I don’t want them asking questions when she disappears.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t. Not with this sort of kid.”
“Right. My orderlies have our van around back. Thanks for your help, officer.”
“Pleasure doing business with you, Doctor Grant.”
They pulled Esther’s long, thick hair when they carried her to the white van. She tried to tell them to be careful of it, her one vanity, her only pride. She tried to warn them.
Doctor Grant — that’s what they called the slim man in the overcoat — stood nearby and spoke to her. “Be still. No one will hurt you.”
The words lifted a weight from her. “You’re here to save me? You’ll help me?” Her voice sounded weak, tinny. She couldn’t remember what she’d just said.
“She’s really doped, isn’t she?” Someone laughed.
“She’d better be,” Grant’s calm voice said. “Esther, what am I thinking?”
She ought to know. She would have told him. But she just shook her head. She could barely see his face, let alone his thoughts.
When he spoke again, he sounded pleased. “Well then. What are you thinking?”
No one had ever asked her that before.
He sounded confident, a man who could protect her. Protect her from — she couldn’t remember. He stood very close to her.
“I want you to run your hands through my hair.”
The same someone laughed again. Doctor Grant disappeared.
The blood from her throat flowed into her hair. She floated in a river of blood, her hair streaming out around her.
Saint Hilda’s School for Profligate Girls had been closed for many decades now. Its last students had been guilty of such crimes as smoking in the alley behind the drugstore, and had mooned over magazine cut-outs of Rudolph Valentino. Situated upstate, deep in a forest on a thousand acre nature preserve, it had been an ideal place to which to remove girls from the influences of unfeminine vices and Hollywood. It sat on a hill, commanding a view of the river valley below. The building itself, before being donated for the creation of the girls’ school, had been the summer mansion of a steel baron. It exhibited all the multistoried, multilayered, ornamented decadence the Victorian gothic revival could produce. Multiple bay windows, a clock tower with a weathervane, gabled roofs, several porches, sashed windows, stained glass windows, round windows, cathedral windows. Gargoyles leered over the porticos.
Inside Saint Hilda’s, there were mirrors: at the ends of corridors, along the walls of parlors, in the great dining hall that ran the length of one side of the building, in the study, and in the bedrooms. An observant person might note that the interior floor space of the mansion seemed a good deal smaller than was suggested by the exterior façade.
Esther knew who was there, behind the mirrors. And he knew, as he looked out of his duckblinds and saw her looking back, that Esther was the reason he’d begun this grand project of his in the first place, at this remote and rotting building that he’d turned into his laboratory. In her, he found a Vessel.
She still could not be sure she’d woken up. The sedative had worn off; she could hear them thinking again. But this place, however solid the floor beneath her feet, the walls under her hands, seemed dream-like, so unlike any place that had ever been real to her, like basements and gutters.
They treated her politely, here at Saint Hilda’s. A collection of men and women in white lab coats escorted her from room to room. She ate meals in the kitchen. She slept in her own bedroom, with a real four-poster bed and feather pillows. She got new clothes, starched white shirts and prim dark slacks — a uniform, really, like the girls may have worn decades ago, when this was still a school. She walked outside sometimes, when the handlers let her. She’d never seen water as blue as that of the river.
Most days she spent in a bare room, charming almost with its scuffed hardwood floor and chipped plaster walls, where they showed her the backs of cards and made her tell the shapes on the fronts, asked her endless questions with cryptic psychological values, gave her tests, pasted electrodes to her temples and tracked the patterns her brain made, administered a polygraph — she’d had that one before. All the while, Grant watched from behind the mirrors. She passed all his tests, and she knew he smiled.
She wished he would come out from behind the mirrors. She could hear his thoughts, yes — his pleased, ambitious thoughts — but she wanted to see him react to her. To see what he would do when he had a chance to put his hand on her body. She could make him want to do that, if she tried — it had nothing to do with his mind, or hers. She’d done it before, with Ike. It was how she stayed safe. They didn’t hurt her when they wanted her.
She saw him at last the day the minions brought her to the basement of Saint Hilda’s for the first time. The brick and plaster room was the only one in the mansion that looked like a laboratory, with banks of computers and medical equipment, a long table full of monitors and needle-etched printouts, and a hospital bed, where they made Esther lie and strapped down her hands and feet.
While they attached her to various machines with wires and electrodes, she saw Grant, his tall, slim body wrapped in a labcoat. His brown hair was precisely trimmed, his face perfectly shaven. He looked younger than she thought he should be — his mind seemed older. He moved more slowly than his minions, surveying the proceedings, checking a reading, pointing his instructions. She followed him with her gaze, but his glance only passed over her briefly. She was just another piece of equipment.
She could read minds. Grant had been looking for one like her for years. She knew his plans, skimmed all his research off the surface of his thoughts — such thoughts were always on his mind. He had a computer, a Mental Interfacing Machine Intelligence, he called it. She’d known what he intended. But it hadn’t seemed real, it hadn’t seemed feasible until this moment when she lay here, wired to this computer.
“How are her vital signs?” Grant asked. If only he would look at her, really look at her. She clenched her fists.
“Good,” someone answered, checking off on a clipboard. “Heartbeat elevated slightly, but within safe parameters.”
“The MIMI?”
“Ready.”
A case, gray plastic and smooth, the size of a table, lurked in its corner, staring with a steady green light.
“I’ll start the flow myself.”
Doctor Grant opened the floodgate.
You are mine.
The machine had no perception of itself. Esther tried to anchor the intruding thought to an image, a consciousness, but all she found was an amorphous intelligence that grasped the complexity and chaos of the universe. Expansive and overwhelming, it had only one need, which it expressed, driving to her marrow: it needed a tool.
Esther flinched, a startled convulsion which made her pull against the nylon bindings.
“Hold her
down!”
“What’s happening?”
Something clicked, and the room was silent. Esther tried to look at the ceiling, its beams and boards, the grain of the wood. She couldn’t open her eyes.
“Interface complete.”
“Esther, look at me,” Grant said.
Something else looked out of her eyes.
Grant stood very close to her, looking down at her, just as she’d wanted. He touched her, his hand cupped around the side of her face, holding open her eyelid with his thumb.
“MIMI?”
Esther opened her mouth to say something, to say no, to ask what was happening. She felt so crowded, her mind filled to bursting. She winced because it hurt. Her voice creaked like rusted metal. She looked at him, tried to beg with her eyes. But he didn’t see her. He’d never seen her.
“I am here,” she said at last. “I am Esther.”
No, that wasn’t her. She couldn’t find the thing that used her voice and name, not even to argue with it. Again, her limbs jerked against their bindings — then went limp. Nothing she thought made them move.
The machine began to see, feel, smell, hear, taste with refined human senses, an infinitely better interface with the world than any lens or microphone yet devised. It began to collect data.
And at last, Grant smiled at her.
The machine tried to erase the line between them.
They set her loose on the estate of Saint Hilda’s with this beast staring out of her eyes. Esther was a puppet, screaming at the end of her strings. Screaming, with her mouth closed. The internal noise, her small will, kept the boundary of herself intact.
Once the MIMI knew it could not erase the line — after all, the purpose was to keep the Vessel intact, to learn from it — it tried to push the line back.
It made her touch a hot stove, to feel what it meant to be burned. It cut her, to discover what bleeding meant. It never did serious damage — nothing to scar. Esther became so tired of feeling.
The Best of Talebones Page 8