Hub
Issue 31
3rd November 2007
Editors: Lee Harris, Alasdair Stuart and Trudi Topham.
Proofreader: Ellen Phillips
Published by The Right Hand.
Sponsored by Orbit.
Issue 31 Contents
Fiction: Sleepless, Nameless by Brett Tallman
Reviews: Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Collector’s Edition
The Feeding of the 5,000
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Every week we publish a piece of short fiction, along with at least one review and sometimes a feature or interview. We can afford to do this largely due to the generosity of our sponsors over at Orbit. If you like what you read here, please consider making a donation over at www.hub-mag.co.uk. We pay our writers, and anything you donate helps us to continue to attract high quality fiction and non-fiction.
Sleepless, Nameless
by Bret Tallman
Christopher Fish just wasn’t built for a normal life, though he did his best. He tried to ignore the stares his pale skin, white hair and faded gray eyes earned him. He learned to stop following certain people around whenever he caught some strangely familiar scent of decay clinging to their skin. He pretended in conversation that he slept like regular folks do, knowing better than to tell people that he had never lost consciousness in his entire life and wasn’t the worse for it.
But there were times that it was just so clearly not working and he would lose his temper and spew such rage that he soon had a reputation for being cruel as well as ugly and weird. It was probably for the best that three weeks after his twenty-second birthday, his attempted life, the time wasted sweating at Chester Cheese’s and lurching around campus and just the whole charade, came to an end.
It was one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so of course Chester Cheese’s was a prepubescent madhouse. Fish nimbly weaved his way through the schools of darting, shrieking children in the dining hall and shouldered through the kitchen’s swinging doors into the reassuring smell of burning cheese and grease. Nobody in the kitchen greeted him or even looked up as he passed through to the rough little lounge in the back room.
There, lying draped across the stained couch like some cartoon-world hunting trophy, he found the Chester Cheese costume it was his job to endure. He would wear the suffocating, sweltering mouse suit and serve birthday kids their pizza and try not to run away when he saw the resentment in the parents’ eyes, the hatred they had for their own offspring. Christopher Fish lacked that part of the mind that shields the heart from what people truly are and was, as a result, something of a hate detector.
He dressed with morbid resignation and was prepared to heft Chester’s bulbous, grinning head over his own when a metallic squeak sounded behind him. He turned to see Jared Gladstone struggling free of one of the lounge’s rusted lockers. Fish could only gape as the little man jerked his second foot free and then stood there staring back, swaying slightly.
“There you are, Christopher.” Gladstone’s voice wasn’t the nervous hum it usually was; in fact, he sounded a little raspy, almost parched.
“Were you hiding in that locker?” Fish had to fight the urge to slap the restaurant’s assistant manager. “Have you lost your mind? Spying little creep. This is too much even for you.”
“Why did you leave home, Christopher? I planted you, like a little banzai tree, in Chicago but here you are in Denver. What were you thinking?”
Fish was nonplussed all over again. Gladstone was a hectoring little jerk who made far too many off-color comments, but he didn’t usually talk nonsense.
Gladstone took an unsteady step towards him and continued, “I was delayed, distracted. But now I’m back and I’m going to need you in Chicago.”
“What are you talking about?” Fish asked, noticing now that the other man’s nametag was on upside-down and that his shoes were tied in strange, ugly knots instead of bows. “Jared, are you feeling alright?”
Gladstone awkwardly crammed a hand into his pants pocket. “Oh, don’t worry about Jared, he’s a happy whore-hopper. It’s Mr. Nine who needs special consideration now.”
Fish’s world went quiet; the clanging in the kitchen and the distant music of the animatronic animal band fell away. Fish clutched Chester’s hollow head like a child does his teddy and couldn’t speak.
Gladstone yanked his hand from his pocket and haphazardly brandished a snub-nosed .38. “It’s mostly my own fault. I should have been back for you years ago but there was this shaman, the memory of a shaman really, with sand for skin and reef for bones. He chased me across a chain of islands that ran a ring around a world; he chased me until we reached a living tar pit and there I undid him, finally.”
Gladstone paused expectantly, as if waiting for congratulations. Fish managed a weak, “No. Don’t do this.”
Gladstone scowled and took another two steps closer. “Yes. We do this now.”
“No.”
Gladstone pressed the gun against his own temple. “Come back to Chicago.”
“No.”
Gladstone shrugged. “I don’t want to have to do this again.” And then he pulled the trigger.
Fish lowered Chester’s head over his own and instead of suffocating, the suit felt safe, like soft armor. He would go and serve birthday kids their pizza now. He walked through the kitchen and ignored the questions from the cook. What was that noise in there? It was a gunshot, silly.
He walked out into the dining hall and waved to the kids watching the unliving figures twitch onstage. He heard a high little voice say, “Look, Mommy, it’s Chester! He spilled pizza on hisself!”
Evening was creeping into the city by the time Fish finally wandered home, his mind still a numb jumble. It was heartening then to walk through the door of his absurd little apartment filled with paper maché oddities and see Daryl, his roommate, embedded in a green beanbag chair, playing a videogame on the hulking television that dominated their living room. It was regular, if not completely normal.
“How was work?” Daryl asked, without turning around.
Fish finished throwing the three locks on their door and kicked aside one of the capering figures he made in the silent night hours. “Gladstone killed himself today.”
Daryl maneuvered the little character on the tv screen right off a cliff. “Wow. But that’s probably how managers of Chester Cheese’s usually die.”
Fish grunted appreciatively. Daryl used to be shocked by Fish’s own displays of black humor but he was coming along nicely now. He kicked off his shoes, padded into the kitchen and started rummaging around in a cupboard. There was no mention of Mr. Nine as he narrated the day’s events while microwaving a bowl of spaghetti-ohs. When he finished and the steam from the bowl was wafting pleasantly around his face, he saw Daryl walk his game character over the edge of a lava-filled pit.
“Man, you suck tonight.”
“My eyes are a little sore,” Daryl admitted, turning around so Fish could see his face, see what was done to it.
Fish dropped the bowl, splattering his feet in tomato sauce.
“Come back to Chicago, Christopher,” Daryl said, mild as can be. “Come back or we can just keep doing this.”
Fish fo
und his voice and his rage at the same time; Daryl was as close to a friend as he had. “What the hell do you want from me?” he snarled and snatched the toaster up as if to use it as a weapon, a faintly ridiculous move considering the problem.
“One favor. Just one little favor and then we’re forever done with each other.” Daryl held up a straight-razor and said in a squeaky voice, “Golly, Mr. Nine, I’d sure love to open Daryl’s jugular. Can I? Can I?” Then he answered in his regular voice. “Not yet, my little friend. Let’s give Christopher a chance to do the right thing.”
Fish hurled the toaster just inches past Daryl’s head, hitting the television screen smack in the center. The game’s repetitious guitar soundtrack cut off with an explosion of glass and crackling sparks. “You win. Go ahead and tell me how to find you but you’re not going to like it when I do.”
Daryl frowned. “Perhaps. You are immune to just about anything I can do but I bet you’ll lose interest in harming me when you see what I have to show you. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Be there or I kill this square.”
It was nearly a solid day’s drive to the Windy City, even for a driver who didn’t need to sleep. The entire way there, Fish brooded on how to kill his enemy; he had never before taken a life but he knew himself, knew that murder could fit his soul reasonably well. By the time he parked his car, a dented and dinged old Saab, two blocks away from the hospital, however, the vague scenarios he had concocted dissipated like smoke.
Late-spring was already hot in Chicago and he hated the city year round anyway. Only a handful of memories from here warmed him and they all involved a woman and her unexplained interest in an orphan; her visits always meant green jell-o salad, tenderness and seemingly outlandish tales. The rest of his childhood was a collage of savage children, vaguely hostile adults and periodic encounters with a madman.
The madman in question was waiting for him outside of general admittance. He still dressed the same in unremarkable dark clothes, a long raincoat and fedora, like a man trying so hard to be inconspicuous that he was instead completely the opposite. A collection of bone flutes still hung from a thick leather belt around his waist. He leered enormously when he spotted Fish, revealing the same ivory teeth, each engraved with a different sigil; these were the tools that sent his voice across leagues and made his words move like quicksilver, liquid and lethal.
He had aged, though, become thinner and a bit more lined. And as they moved towards each other, Fish noticed a discordance in what had once been the most assured stride he had ever seen, a slight limp in the right leg.
So Fish greeted the other man with a lunge, hoping to inflict some quick damage to whatever injuries he had, but Mr. Nine hopped back, narrowly escaping Fish’s grab for his collar.
“No more of that now. No more,” he laughed, unhooking a long ivory pipe from his belt and twirling it like a baton. “Made from the femur of a will-o-the-waves, knight of the ocean lost and the spiny sunless. On this, I could blow a single note of such despair that every tumor would will itself malignant, every strained heart would burst, every patient balanced between life and death would double back flip into the next world. Keep your hands to yourself, please.”
Fish angrily returned some of the stares they were getting from passersby until the scrutiny passed, then asked, “Why am I here?”
Mr. Nine flashed his nightmarish smile again. “Good. Look at you, so tall but so washed out. I didn’t see that happening. Did you bring those books I gave you?”
“Nope. I didn’t bother to take them when I left the foster home.” This was a lie; he had sold them for several thousand dollars to an eager, twitching little occultist whom he never saw again.
Mr. Nine looked stricken. “But you remember what we talked about? What I taught you?”
“You didn’t teach me anything. You would just show up and rant about magic as mathematic systems and music as equations. I remember a whole bunch of garbage about language as keys…”
“Garbage!” Mr. Nine spat. “After all the things I have shown you, you doubt?”
“No, but what good has it done you? What do you have to show for yourself? You-”
“Shut up!” Mr. Nine roared and the ageless voices of the Ravenous Thousand roared with him. A momentary hush fell over the city. Fish went silent too but only because he chose to.
Mr. Nine turned abruptly and began limping towards general admissions. “Follow me,” he muttered over his shoulder.
He produced another instrument, gray and barely longer than his hand, and played two alternating, undulating notes all the way to the elevator and then again from the elevator to the sixth floor room that was their destination. Nobody stopped them or even noticed their passage.
The room’s lone occupant was a sunken relic of a man, old and still, a lifeless mass under stiff white sheets. In the slack, jaundiced features of the patient’s face, Fish saw the bluntness of his own nose, the sharp slope of his own jaw-line and brevity of his own mouth.
Mr. Nine watched Fish watch the old man, eyes shining with eagerness. “Well?”
“Who is he?” Fish whispered.
Mr. Nine waved a thin hand. “You can be as loud as you want, he’s not waking up.”
“Coma?”
“No. He’s sleeping. He’s been sleeping for the past twenty-two years and he’ll sleep till the day he dies; I’ve seen to that.”
Fish felt as if the room were suffused with some strange cloud of possibilities and wondered if this was hope; a world that made a little more sense seemed just around the corner. “This is my father, isn’t it?”
Mr. Nine swept all that away with a flippant shake of his head. “Nope, not at all.” He removed his fedora and ran a hand over the swirl of symbols and numbers branded and scarred into his bald scalp. “He’s you, actually. The real you. His dreaming mind is the engine that generates you.”
Fish blinked. The he laughed in disbelief. Then he stood there gazing at nothing until his expression collapsed in anguish and Mr. Nine grinned like a half-moon.
“I don’t really need to convince you, do I? Truth is a knife that slips so easily between the ribs.
“His name is Christopher Fowler.” Mr. Nine’s lips curled downward in amused chagrin. “You know, I had some kind of witticism in mind when I named you, a specific line I was going to say on this day of days. But twenty-two years on I can’t remember how it went, the exact wording of it.”
“Why?” Fish slumped onto an aggressively orange plastic chair and gazed at the slumbering wreck in the bed. “Why would you do this?”
“Because he betrayed me and did something only he can undo.” There was no trace of humor in Mr. Nine’s voice now. He put his fedora back on and pulled it low over his eyes. “No matter what I did, he wouldn’t undo it, wouldn’t even acknowledge that he had cheated me. Insufferable arrogant bastard. I couldn’t force him to; we were too evenly matched.
“But I could give him something he wanted, deep down in the polluted pool of his mind. It’s not even that unusual, though. Who doesn’t want a chance to live their life all over again?
“So I put him to sleep and conjured a dream that leaves footprints in mud and snow and ash. A simultaneous reincarnation. You don’t want to know about all the sacrifices the magic required, not a project to be undertaken lightly.”
Fish held his head in his hands. “So am I real? Do I even need to eat?”
“How the hell should I know? I’ve never done anything like you before or since.”
“When he dies-”
“The dream ends. Something to keep in mind, yes? If you cooperate, I won’t hold a pillow over his face and you might live for another twenty years.” Mr. Nine paused a moment, letting that sink in. “I planned on raising you myself-”
“But you couldn’t be bothered,” Fish interrupted. “Thank God for that much, at least.”
“I was busy,” Mr. Nine corrected. “There were other worlds to walk and other projects to run.” He knelt before Fish
and his next words were unnaturally earnest. “Christopher, that life back in Denver would never have worked; my return has saved you from wasting your few years trying to be something that you’ll never be.
“Tonight, you’re going to return the favor. You’re going to untie the Knot your older self tied.”
The moon hung high and white amidst bruise-colored clouds, illuminating the deep green grassy mounds and winding gravel paths stretching out before the two men. Fish had been in Garfield Park as a child and never cared for it, but night and lonesomeness made it beautiful. They had entered from the west side, the east being far too exposed to the street.
Mr. Nine was so excited he was practically skipping and Fish had to work to keep up.
“This is it,” the older man babbled, “the heart of the city that is the heart of this land. We’re on the continental divide, you know. Men have always settled here, this place of power, of transition. It’s the center of movement within your great American empire but even before-” He froze suddenly, his feet and his tongue coming to an abrupt halt at the same time.
He stood there, his eyes wider than Fish had ever seen them, until he spun and dove behind a mound, hissing frantically at Fish to follow him. Fish let out a grumbling, exasperated breath and did so.
“I can’t believe he’s still here,” Mr. Nine muttered as Fish crouched down next to him.
“Who? I didn’t hear anything.”
“This place was once prehistoric marsh and shades of those things that ruled here still linger deep in the layers that remember them. Years ago, when I tried to force the Knot open myself, the land spat something up and drove me off.” He cautiously crept up the slope of the mound and peeked through blades of grass
Fish heard him gasp and had to look for himself. He saw a barely discernible naked figure standing in the center of an unbelievably thick cloud of insects just thirty yards away. It strode towards them with stiff, inexorable purpose.
Hub - Issue 31 Page 1