ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  After a long time of dragging the box behind him (flash of a snail shell), plowing through the rustling fields of corrosion, he decided to rest. The wire hoops were cutting into his shoulders; it didn’t cause him pain, but he was afraid to cause himself a debilitating injury. He flexed his arms, meanwhile standing on his toes as if that might help him see further ahead. Was it? Yes. He could begin to make out the vaguest notion of a looming barrier ahead of him. He was coming upon one of the walls that made up the outer room.

  He took a second break later on, and when he finally decided to pitch camp, he could see the wall more clearly than he had on that previous excursion. It was all gray, one apparently solid surface rather than being composed of boards of wood or plates of metal, though it seemed chipped, pocked, even fissured with cracks. Those cracks might yawn like (flash: canyons) when he drew near enough. Might he escape through one of them?

  This portable shelter had no windows, but as he rested inside it, clutching his knees to his chest, he heard soft ticking sounds against its exterior, as if stealthy probing fingers were feeling for a way inside. His vision narrowed but never entirely closed up. He was too unnerved by that exploratory sound, and by the feeling of being so far from his village of boxes, the only home he could remember, even though he knew it was not the place he had been intended for. He must be brave. His duties lay elsewhere. He must rediscover his function, must traverse this broad lacuna. He must fill the empty bowl of his skull (cracked like that great wall). Somewhere, there were those that valued and needed him. Those beings who knew how to utilize the beautiful and mysterious metal objects that he had once fashioned out of formless ore. They were his Masters. They would be expecting him back. He must not disappoint them.

  Just when it seemed that the wire loops by which he drew his shelter along must slice into his shoulders, saw his very arms from him—and his weakening, overworked legs give out beneath him—he reached the base of the towering gray wall.

  The machinery high above him, lost in a heavy layer of steam, chugged and hammered with a regular rhythm. And while no molten metal dripped from it at the moment, it must be a common occurrence here: there was a hill of solidified slag, looking like a hummock made from intertwined worms fossilized in lead, slanting up against the wall like a ramp. Hardened streams of slag marred the wall where they had run down its flank. And there were indeed huge rents and fissures in the wall. They seemed to be concentrated in the area of the slag heap, leading him to conclude that the heat from this fluid metal had caused the wall’s material to split.

  The largest of these cracks jagged down to touch the summit of the slag hill. He could see darkness within it. Shrugging off the wire hoops that had dug into his body, he discarded his shelter behind him, the husk of a moth’s chrysalis. He moved to the foot of the slag mound, and began to clamber his way up it. . .using his hands to find purchase in the gray, convoluted mass.

  His long journey had left him fatigued. . .the climb was slow, and once he lost his hold and slid halfway down the hill again on his belly. But at last the crest of the slag hill was reached, and he straightened up, peering somewhat timidly into the fissure that yawned directly before him now. It was as black as the night cycle in there. Was it night in the world beyond? A warm, humming breeze blew out at him, stirring the frayed edges of his coarsely woven garments.

  Steeling himself, his head throbbing with a synchronized echo of that chugging clamor from above, he stepped into the fissure in the wall.

  He found himself not passing through the wall, but merely inside of it, where it proved hollow. Dust coated everything like the darkness, but enough faint gray light entered the rift to reveal to him a giant piston sliding greased and nearly soundless, which in turn smoothly rotated a self-oiled crank. And there was an immense grooved belt of segmented metal, which was circulating as a result of the piston’s pumping. This toothed band descended out of the murk above him, sandwiched between the two interior faces of the wall. It then looped and flowed upward again, back into the dissolving gloom.

  To his great disappointment, after he had journeyed so far to reach this place, there were no service ladders set into the inner walls. But his gaze returned to consider that looping belt.

  Perhaps he could reach the ceiling of machinery after all. . .that factory in the heavens.

  Inching carefully forward, he waited until he thought he could seize onto the moving belt firmly. After several false starts, during which he nearly lost his nerve, he lunged for it, caught it, hugged himself to it, grasping onto two of its blunt teeth. The belt easily bore his slight weight upwards, upwards inside the wall. Looking down, he saw the pale light from the outer room fade away until he was entirely swallowed in blackness, as if he had fallen to sleep. Or ascended into sleep.

  Upwards, upwards, and the air grew warmer, warmer, hot, hotter. He heard the increasing hiss of the steam somewhere on the other side of the wall. Higher, higher, the belt soaring with mindless confidence. He passed through a cloud of steam vented from somewhere. He passed through a cloud of loud gnashing sound. Tilting his head up, he saw that at last he was approaching a gray mirage of light, that became more real, more prevalent the higher he rose.

  There was a ledge near the top of the shaft, where the belt ran around a great turning wheel. He would have to leap off the belt and onto that narrow walkway. If he missed, he would fall. If he hesitated, the belt would sweep him downward again, if it didn’t tear him to shreds at its apex before that.

  He loosened his grip on the notched belt, stood on one of its teeth, leaned far out and prepared to fling himself into space. A bit higher. . .and now he jumped, an infinite abyss roaring with its emptiness beneath him, but then his feet alighted on the ledge, and he clawed his fingers across the wall desperately until they dug into pocks and found purchase. The belt continued rotating behind him, the teeth he had gripped slipping back down into the pit. Now that he was secure, he looked around him, and then up at the ceiling where the gray light filtered through gaps in a tight and complex weave of cobwebbed struts and girders, pipes and conduits, all of it caked thick with rust.

  One pipeline ran vertically up past the ledge, joining the mass above him. Plastered to the wall, he shifted gingerly toward it. He took hold of the pipe, jagged with its corroded skin, and began to hoist himself up along it. His efforts caused scabs of rust to sprinkle down to join the layer that covered the floor even inside the wall.

  After all the dreaming, the yearning, the hopeless hope, at last he touched the metal sky.

  It was a struggle, but he was able to pull himself up into the nest of pipes and supports, and squeeze his body between several strands in this metallic tapestry. He was through. . .

  He entered the gray light as if it were a sea he had been plunged into, a sea that stunned him with its coldness, that ripped the air from his chest.

  But the air was actually molten, rippling, with the heat generated by the machinery. And it wasn’t lack of air that nearly ceased the clockwork motions inside him, but the scene spread before his eyes. This unthinkable vastness of openness and freedom under a featureless sky the color of pewter.

  Around him, crumbling chimneys and brick smokestacks and humped, hulking sections of the factory reared and loomed. Distantly, he saw the misted outlines of a (flash: city). But most of all, he saw the forks.

  The forks were a sea. A landscape of snow, with drifts swept up against the factory’s external machinery. A desert, with dunes and hills. The forks swallowed the bases of the chimneys and smokestacks. The forks seemed to reach all the way to the distant city itself. They glimmered and glinted under the sunless gray sky. Thousands, millions, more, polished and without a (flash: fingerprint) smudged upon one of them. He knew suddenly what a fingerprint was, though his fingers did not possess them.

  The city was silent. But the factory itself chugged and pounded and rang with its ceaseless purpose, even as it crumbled into decay. A sudden crashing/clattering waterfall of sound, and h
e looked to see even more forks disgorged from a chute in the side of a black machine. They poured across the other forks, settled with a tinkling sound, lay still. For several moments there lingered in the air a loud, ringing hum of a piercingly high register, as if wailing (flash: spirits) had been raised from these mounds and cairns of forks, only to quickly dissipate. It had been the vibration of the many tines. For it was a treacherous vista of sharp tines, tines like myriad mysterious grins.

  Some of the forks had plain, unadorned handles, while others boasted flowery filigree. Dinner forks and salad forks and baby forks.

  Suddenly, the memory slotted into place with a definitive click. He knew what the forks were for. What the Masters had done with them.

  But the Masters were gone. Just the forks, now. The billion forks lying like heaped bones, or fallen stars, fragmented and gone cold.

  He wandered unsteadily across the landscape, the forks slithering and shifting under his feet. He didn’t venture far, however, instead sat himself down in the shadow of a smokestack, his back against it.

  His cracked eggshell head lowered. He felt his body stilling. There was no purpose for him up here, after all. He had not been prepared for that. He had nothing to insert in its place. The knowledge seemed to empty him, blank him.

  He hugged his knees to his chest, and lowered his forehead onto his knees, weary from his long journey. Weary from a disillusionment too hollowed-out to be despair.

  The circle of his vision began to diminish, close up, the light at the center growing smaller, smaller, more distant, until darkness consumed it altogether.

  Another waterfall of forks swarmed around him. Later, there came more. Gradually, he was buried. Only the top of his bare skull showed. After a long time, not even that.

  For a while, he continued to hear the churning of the factory, even in his blind interment. But at last, one day, there was another small click inside him. And then, restful silence.

  THE VOLATILIZED CEILING OF BARON MUNODI

  Rikki Ducornet

  Rikki Ducornet is one of the foremost surrealists of her generation, with short fiction appearing in dozens of literary magazines. Her critically acclaimed novels include Netsuke and The Fountains of Neptune.

  The museums of Europe keep curious portraits illustrating the assumption that the body gives the soul its shape. Da Vinci imagined a woman with a monkey’s face, Rubens human lions, Delia Porta a man with the profile of a ram. I myself am albino; I look like an angel and so inspire acute passions. Longing for a purifying fire, men would defile me, or, taking pleasure, be absolved of sin. If I have never shared their fevers, it is because a woman has stolen my heart. Black and clairvoyant, she claims that one day the world will shrivel in the sun like a plum. However, this is not the story of our love affair, but of an obsession justified by my friend’s bleak vision. Like my love for her, it has withstood the teeth of time.

  One evening in the early 1700s and shortly before the tragedy which was to deny the promise of Eden, the Baron Munodi described for his little son those metal mirrors made of four isosceles triangles once cherished by the Greeks. At the point where the triangles converged reigned a sacred and a potent (and potentially dangerous) conjunction: here air was transformed to fire.

  Later, in lieu of a bedtime story, the Baron took his son to see the temporary workshops installed in the arcades and galleries of a new palace near Naples. Little Gustavo had heard of the workshops, everybody had, and his curiosity could be contained no longer. Over ten thousand pieces destined to be incorporated into the geodesic marquetry of the ceilings were in the process of being conceived, cut, painted, and dusted with gold.

  The child perceived the workshops through a refractive fog; the air was saturated with particulated gold and he was dazzled.

  Baron Munodi told Gustavo that because of their beauty and the knowledge they conveyed, the paintings were deemed evil by a repugnant authority he did not choose to name, but which wielded a tragic power.

  “Some believe that these images can make beasts talk,” the Baron told his son, “in the manner of the serpent which tempted Eve; and that I have the power to excite tempests.” If it is true that the Baron was powerful, his power, like the ceiling which blossomed in the torchlight, oscillated on the verge of an abyss.

  With eager eyes Gustavo devoured green lions and gravid elephants, a submerged city of mermen shining beneath the moon, a laughing cupid, a man with the face of a camel, a girl as naked as a lily. From out of a blue oval the size and color of a puffin’s egg, a one-eyed sun gazed at him with such urgency that he blushed before he looked away. Then, peering around a smocked and spattered elbow, the boy saw an image which vibrated so mysteriously that he was not content to touch it, but must lick it with his tongue and, putting it to his quivering nostrils, deeply inhale.

  This potent picture imprinted itself not only on the child’s brain, but upon the imaginations of future generations. I have awakened from startling dreams which reveal to me just what was now being revealed to Gustavo:

  A mature albino ape, its heart pierced by an arrow, falls from a tropical tree. As he falls he attempts to catch the bloody ropes spouting from his breast. In truth his wound is fathomless, a mortal fracture in the body of the world. Gustavo sees that the ape’s hands are very like his own.

  As in the swelter of torchlight Gustavo gazed enamored of the ape, the image was gently taken from him and the cipher 666 painted on the back. Then it was set down among many hundreds of others which lay scattered in the manner of the zodiacs which animate the vaults of Heaven. Soon the features of the room and the painters’ faces dissolved in a vortex as red as the wings of angels: a swarm of apprentices had descended upon a freshly varnished set of pictures to dust them with gold.

  That night a conflagration raged throughout the Baron’s workshops. By morning all that remained of the palace was char, and of the painters a fistful of calcinated teeth. The ten thousand images were reduced to smoke; the secret of Baron Munodi’s ceiling had volatilized.

  Proof of the catastrophe’s perfidious nature, the Baron was found assassinated, his heart pierced by a long nail with such force that his body was secured to the boards of his bed. Awakening drenched in her beloved’s blood, the Baroness—whose lucidity was legendary—was bound and carried off as one possessed to a madhouse. There she gave birth to my ancestor who, I know from one famous portrait in the Prado, I do not resemble. Gustavo died before reaching maturity; I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can in black ink on white paper.

  Baron Munodi’s properties and his little son Gustavo were seized by the executive officers of the Inquisition. After an exhaustive search, a pentagon was found freshly painted in an attic, and among the Baron’s things a ball of feathers and a shoe studded with pins. A globe was found also, and a map of the heavens that showed the planets in orbit.

  Gustavo was stripped of his silk shirt and dressed in a penitent’s shift of sacking. The vivid curls of his infancy were shorn from his head, and he was forced to spend the lion’s part of his days among God-fearing arsonists in prayer.

  As he had neither pastimes nor companions to ease the morbid placidity of monastic life, Gustavo courted vertigo in the shape of a memory. From incessant practice he could within an instant conjure the ape and carry it perpetually before him. Image 666 was his own elementary secret, the exact center of his mind’s incarnate mirror. Try as they did to discover the exact nature of the umbilicus that joined Gustavo to his past, his father’s assassins had to admit to failure.

  The monks explained to the Grand Inquisitor that they did not know the object of the child’s worship and so could not subvert it. They knew only that it was an alien practice. The heresiarch’s own son was prey to an incomprehensible exultation which had nothing to do with Jesus Christ; his fervent prayers were all his own. No one knew that as the others fixed the cross, Gustavo gaz
ed inward upon that image of the ape which was Baron Munodi’s metaphor for loss, dolorous spiritual mishap and detour, and a primary element in a vast, coded message of incendiary significance. Just as the Baron’s enemies feared, the ceiling was no idle inventory, but the revelation of an itinerary. Now as I write this, as the very atmosphere escapes into sidereal space and the world’s balloon deflates, I fear its vanished alphabets spelled out the only itinerary. Gustavo had seen the unassembled pages of the Book of Salvation. Envy, greed, and groundless fear had destroyed it.

  One rare afternoon of peace in the monastery gardens, Gustavo need to witness a bitter argument about the nature of the creature evoked in chapter thirteen of John’s Apocalypse which reads: May he who is intelligent calculate the number of the beas number is that of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.

  Delirious with joy, Gustavo ran to the circle of contentious monks and cried out:

  “I know! For I have seen it! And see him even now! He is an ape! Oh! A beautiful ape!”

  Lifted into the air by an ear, Gustavo received such a slap the ear was nearly torn from his head. Then he was kicked down corridors of stone and thrust into a cell, windowless but vertical aperture just wide enough to send an arrow into the heart of the forest.

  From that time on Gustavo, in concordance with the Instructio, was struck each night to hammer the cruel nail of piety into his skull, and again at daybreak to banish whatever might have slipped down his festering ear as he slept. It was said that the Baron’s son could not be saved, not even by an extraordinary act of grace, that his words had divulged an unforgivable heresy: