Should I fear the noise in the walls?” I asked once.
“What do you think?”
I think Dr. Raley needs his own help. I think I’d even welcome the unknown, I have visitors so rarely — and none who stay the night, desiring a woman infected by fear. My phone rings seldom. What could I talk about, who never leave the house?
I could talk about the noise in the walls.
“Finding its cause could be a step toward conquering your larger fears.”
He thinks I should want to leave my home as badly as he does. I don’t. It is a biosphere, an homage to solo pursuits, the aftermath of war in a library. Its completeness disturbs him; it unnerves him as though haunted. Now, I suppose it is.
Three nights running I dreamed of warmth draped over me. The fourth morning I woke, sure of weight leaving my bed.
Raley didn’t smell the fragrance on my quilt. He didn’t see scratches on the window frame or plaster on the stairs. I didn’t tell him, because even more than walking through the door I feared being dragged.
“You’re progressing,” he said. “You don’t mind approaching the window now.”
I touched the scraped paint and related the dreams, keeping their truth to myself.
“Curious, don’t you think?”
He said, “Don’t you?”
The Noise came at nightfall, slitherglide soft. I pressed my hand on the wall to feel the shudder pass.
It didn’t. The wall . . . bulged . . . slightly. The Noise pushed back against my palm, then moved away. Slowly.
Leading me.
Down the hallway, up the stairs, fingers on wallpaper, trailing the tremors. Dancing with unseen partner. Into the guestroom, long-unused, to a painting of roses on snow. I’ve never liked it. I know how they feel.
I lifted the picture.
Green eyes, wide-shining and bright, looked out of the wall — and were gone in a breath. A long, pale body blurred past the hole as it flowed away.
When I could breathe again I put the painting back.
Did the police ever find the man who attacked you?”
“No.”
“Have you considered the possibility they might not?”
His teeth left scars. “It’s crossed my mind.”
“Can you live with the unknown?”
Please — the unknown lives with me. Despite the awareness in its gaze, it’s not human; nor animal, despite its build. What does that leave? I know the word alien. Also mutant and monster.
And I know when to still my tongue.
Does he find the walls uncomfortable? They’re not thick; there are places where even the rats must squeeze. But I’m sure they allow easy access; they must be dissolving inside by now.
The house does need work upstairs. I know how that feels, too.
Raley said, “I see a change in you.”
Me, too. Bags under my eyes.
“You’ve been making a real effort to confront your fear, haven’t you?”
No effort involved — it sleeps on my bed. I said, “Yes,” and looked out the window. A soft rain silvered the glass.
“Have you been doing your visualization exercises?”
“Yes.” I didn’t tell him what I’d been seeing.
“Are you ready for the next step?”
“No.”
First things first. Before steps can be taken you have to stand on your feet.
Raley left. The rain fell harder. I wished for a weapon, but even though I’ve no intention of leaving in a box, Raley suggested I not keep a gun in the house.
I don’t mind. I would’ve needed a gun by now if I’d need one at all.
Wouldn’t I?
I looked at him, coiled in the corner, peering from indistinct features, and wondered what now?
Raley would say, confront your fear.
So, face-to-face-I-couldn’t-quite-see, I told him about the loneliness that made me foolish. How it left me afraid of the world because he was in it.
“Listen.” The stirring in the corner ceased. Rain drummed on the roof, rattled the windows. “Hear that? I used to love going out in the storm.” I met those green eyes. “I miss the rain.”
He moved. I wasn’t on my feet before he slid over them. I paused as he curled at the door, but finally, I reached past him and opened it.
He poured himself into the squall. He thrashed through the wet with abandon.
He came sparkling up the steps, between my legs into the kitchen. Water sprayed as he shimmershook, and I caught myself laughing.
I understood.
Because I couldn’t go out in the rain, he brought the rain to me.
It took me another week to leave the house.
Now Raley and I have our sessions on the doorstep. He tells me, as if I need reminding, that it’s a strange world, full of the possibility of violence.
That was the deciding factor — so is my house. There’s no longer a difference between inside and out.
“Did you find out what caused the noise in the wall?”
“Not . . . exactly.” Which star, what vat — who can I ask who won’t suggest convalescence? My companion brought me the rain. He can injure me, but doesn’t. Sometimes I wake from dreams of teeth and nails and know I can hurt him if I choose. The need for company forces on you a certain measure of trust. The rest is unknown.
“And how are the carpenters doing?”
“Good. They’ll be done in a few days. They can’t fix all the cracks, though. They said in some houses seepage is just unavoidable.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that.”
But I do. Part of me hears him. The rest hears mutterskim rustleflow hum.
I can live with that.
Mark woke in the middle of the night and wrote this story about necromancers, magic, and dead things, in the spirit of Clark Ashton Smith. He’s a big toy enthusiast, too, and writes often about them. Fairwood Press published his story collection Across the Sky, for which Mark himself did the artwork. As for the artwork for the cover of #15, Paul Swenson contributed a surreal bright collage that really stood out and grabbed the reader.
ZOTHIQUE MI AMOR
MARK RICH
The woman at the table nearest the sea kept pulling my glances. I knew her from somewhere. Around us, light from the sky fell like a dying hope. The sky itself looked like the carved-out insides of a turnip, dully glistening and pale: more details of a dream. No one agrees with me on that score. Even so, I have seen nothing to dissuade me. I dream, dreamed, have dreamt: my life, my loves, and a sky like a turnip.
A necromancer at another table played with a squashed bird he had found on the road. Its awkward, dead-eyed antics between the teacups and sugar bowl delighted him. It had been hit — I overheard this — by one of the Xanthides, the cars that were such the rage two years ago. They had the first internal-combustion engines in the history of the world to use blood, a fuel both plentiful and cheap. A desert outpost manned by wizards magically kept supplies strong. Then their sources, whatever they were, slowed to a trickle. We all expected it, and put our investments elsewhere. Where this wild fellow now had found blood for his car I had no idea. It would have made for pleasant table-talk. He had already vanished far down the coast.
The sea sounded like dead hands clapping against the rocks. I have heard that very sound — few of us can say this now — on the shore of Nayat, formerly Naat and named before that Ichaborre, in honor of the old litch that kept a tin-pot rule there until the graveyards dried up. I visited the island once, in the days before the living were allowed there again on anything like a regular basis. I saw the famous coast. Not that way any more, of course. Things change.
The sea today on the pale rocks? Just waves. I had checked. I must have felt nervous.
The woman looked too young for this place. It may have been the light. Yet I saw the glow in her skin. She sat tearing articles out of a newspaper. She reread them, then dipped them in the liquor she sipped at occasionally, and set them afire in the a
shtray at her table. I never read newspapers myself any more. Words these days tend to burrow into my head and lodge there, like grains of sand. I cannot explain. Yet it fits with my dream theory. Words barely belong anywhere here.
Something about her nose and brow, which I saw in profile, appealed to me. I liked the rise of the upper lip. I could kiss there. Dark brows. Dark eyes. Hair color of the clean, bright sands of another time.
I decided to have more coffee, rather than leave. A bird had perched on my shoulder earlier in the day and had said, Go East, Go East! Yet I may have misheard. I may have wanted to hear those words, since I had been thinking of someone there, in the East. The bird smelled and may have been raised from the dead, anyway.
The dead, as the old saying goes, are as dependable concerning the truth as the living. The living are rotten at augury. The dead are just rotten.
The necromancer picked up his crumpled sparrow and walked over to my table. His friend had disappeared, leaving her wine glass half-full, and had never returned. I had observed her earlier. Skin like polished oak, and as old as the gnarled pine beside the restaurant whose clawed roots pointed to the sea out of the eroded cliff-side. She had gestured and talked with the necromancer, as animated as one of those rippling banners streaming above the Festival streets, pulled by a silent, mechanically flapping crow. I would have liked her company.
I got his.
His line of work had withered his left leg. Otherwise he looked fine, for a necromancer. My hopes lifted a little. I had sat with necromancers before. They flayed their dead topics mercilessly. I suppose they became what they did for that reason.
This one seemed to have some youth still about him.
“Go put some sugar in the man’s coffee, birdy,” the necromancer said when he sat down.
The half-flattened bird jerked and crept across the table toward the sugar bowl.
I drank mine black, but would take sweetening if it gave it to me, to make it feel better.
“Sorriest bird I’ve seen.”
“You take what you get,” he said. “Actually, I was glad to find it.”
“I could tell.”
“You just can’t find dead things like you used to.”
“I thought you were carrying a purse,” I said, to change the subject.
“Oh, this.” He raised his right arm so I could see better. The head of a small dog, its lips curled back, had its teeth deep in his arm, just above the wrist. The sight made me wince. The dog, with a round skull and tightly fitting skin beneath its fur, rolled its eyes at me. The necromancer had cut away the rest of the dog just below the head. The raw flesh there looked fresh, but it might have been a hundred years old.
“Just another curse,” he said.
“Must hurt.”
“I had my skin and nerves regrow around the teeth, so it’s fine. Gets kind of messy with all the saliva and dirt that gets caught in there, but I just use a high-pressure sprayer and flush out around his teeth and mouth. He seems to like it.” He shrugged, patted the dog with his other hand, and let his arm drop. “I’ve gotten used to it.”
“I know what you mean.”
Streaks of dull violet were growing across the western horizon. Looking toward the sea, I knew where I had seen the woman before.
In another life.
You could think nothing worse of a person, in a place like this. I looked away.
“Any idea who she is?” I said.
He looked over. A familiar coppery sheen settled over his eyes. He opened lips like a reptile’s: “Oh, I don’t think so. But back in the old days, why —”
I watched the dead bird throwing itself feebly at the up-curved edges of the sugar bowl. This necromancer would be the same as them all. He would natter on about the old times when you could find a whole village dead from plague, just awaiting a sorcerer like him, or how you could run an entire civil service entirely with dead people centrally controlled, or how dead horses pull the straightest plow, or how he made a fortune once with treasures lifted from the sea by divers who never needed to breathe and who would bring up sacks of pearls the size and color of his dead love’s eyes.
Then he surprised me:
“Have you ever had fresh blood?”
“Once, but that was long ago,” I said, “and now it’s as old as the rest of me.”
He had a silent, toothy laugh. I excused myself and went over to the woman’s table. She had looked ready to go.
“I looked at you and thought we had met,” I said. “Maybe in a previous life.”
“I had a nasty thought about you, too.”
“Really.”
She looked less offended than she should have.
The sea having receded, we walked far down to the rocks to the south, from which point you lose sight of the restaurant and the old tree that overlooks it and its small, stony beach.
We talked of many things of no consequence. Then I decided to test my theory on her.
“Just think of this place,” I said. “Last continent on Earth. But is it any continent that was here before? No. And take its size — it’s small enough a friend of mine walked across it, as a boy, from the Mykrasian Mountains to Shathair, one side to the other, from Cincor to Calyz, and it was a matter of weeks. So what kind of continent is that, anyway? No kind at all. This isn’t the last continent. That’s what I think. It’s a dying dream. Maybe the last one. The last of all the dying dreams of the world. We’re all that’s left of it.”
The sun stopped in its fall to the horizon. I saw the red light shine in her eye. She shared my thoughts. I could see it in her face. She looked now not as young as I had thought on first impression. But more beautiful, in that vivid light before the dark.
If she agreed, it would all end. The continent, this last one, would join the others beneath the sea.
Somehow I knew this.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Now you listen. When I was a kid we had a tree outside our house. It had spikes two feet long growing out of the trunk and lower branches. And because of something my great-grandmother did, my mother had to take me and impale me on the spikes of the tree. She had to impale me on a different spike each day, until all the spikes had my blood dried in their grooves. Thank the damned gods for the conservation of forces, because I always had a magical supply of blood, so long as it was that tree that was impaling me. I tell you I couldn’t do sit-ups until I was sixteen. And you know? There was this dreadful kid who came every day before school, because that’s when Mom had the time to impale me, and he stood beneath me and caught some of my blood in a cup and drank it. Every damned day. Now who the hell would ever want a dream like that? You tell me!”
The sun went on down. The stars emerged from between pasty strips of cloud.
“Not me,” I said. “Certainly not me.”
I had a sudden vision of marrying this woman. Maybe I could put off going East for a long time. I could see the two of us, hand in hand beside the sea, with the necromancer facing us and saying a few words on our behalf.
She kissed the tears on my cheek.
The continent trembled but held long enough for us to walk back to the restaurant by the sea.
Dominic Harman did the juggling alien cover for #23, and has since gone on to do a lot of book jackets and covers. Devon Monk’s story collection A Cup of Normal came out just a few months ahead of this anthology, and “Sugar ‘n’ Spice” was not in it, but I was able to use it here. She has set at least one other story in the same “nursery crime” world. If we’re lucky, Devon will give us a novel series about it some day.
SUGAR ‘N’ SPICE
DEVON MONK
This is the city of Las Fables. Some people live happily ever after, some sing the blues. I’m a cop and it’s my job to keep their stories straight. My name’s Detective Peter Peter — I put ’em in the shell.
It was 2:55 in the morning. The sky was still dark. I leaned against the rail of the police station’s steps and watched the sky for fallin
g cows. The man in the moon looked down on a street as empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.
I didn’t know what was on the moon’s mind, but I was thinking about dames.
It was no secret I had as much luck with gals as Humpty Dumpty had high-wire walking. In my line of work, it’s easy to fall for the first teary-eyed puss in boots that comes along. But I’d learned the hard way that gals are as complicated as fetching water off a mountain. When girls were good they were very, very good, and when they were bad, they were horrid.
It was hard for a guy like me to trust dames, especially since the Old Woman turned mass-murderer and knocked off the dwarves in the Shoe Bar. Lately though, I’d been trusting one gal in particular — Muffet.
She wasn’t like other frails. For one thing, she was a cop, and a good one. It was all in the line of duty — nothing but bug spray and bullets for that girl. She never went sensitive on me during any case, and I liked that about her. Maybe liked it more than I should.
Movement across the street drew my gaze to the yellow bricks. Two shadowy figures shifted toward a bright patch of moonlight. Just then a heifer hit optimal orbit and crossed the face of the moon. Cow shadow hid the street pair from my sight and blacked out the night. When old Bessie’s orbit deteriorated, the shadows were gone.
Somewhere in the distance, a little dog laughed.
I had a hunch that whoever was out at this time of morning wasn’t looking for lost sheep. A cold chill pricked the hair on the back of my neck and I knew, as sure as Sprat knows fat, that something was going down.
The town clock struck three. I glanced down the street one last time, but other than the clatter of running cutlery, all was quiet.
Time to get to work. I threw the cigarette down and ground it out with the toe of my shoe, then turned and walked into the station.
Sgt. Horner was in his corner, taking notes from the princess, Cindy. She didn’t look too upset, but I’m a bad judge when it comes to skirts, even the royal ones. If it was important, Horner would give me the facts.
The Best of Talebones Page 28