by Unknown
In two months of maintaining the ritual every time he opened any of the doors into the house, Ransom had yet to be met by anything. The precaution was one on which his son had insisted; the day of his departure north, Matt had pledged Ransom to maintaining it. With no intention of doing so, Ransom had agreed, only to find himself repeating the familiar motions the next time he was about to venture out to the garden. Now here he was, jabbing the end of the spear through the doorway to draw movement, waiting a count of ten, then advancing one slow step at a time, careful not to miss anything dangling from the underside of the porch roof. Once he was satisfied that the porch was clear, that nothing was lurking in the bush to its right, he called over his shoulder, “I’m on my way to check the garden, if you’d like to join me.”
A chorus of ringing announced the crab’s extricating itself from the sink. Legs clicking on the wood floors like so many tap shoes, it hurried along the hall and out beside him. Keeping the spear straight ahead, he reached back for one of the canvas bags piled inside the door, then pulled the door shut. The crab raced down the stairs and to the right, around the strip of lawn in front of the house. Watching its long legs spindle made the coffee churn at the back of his throat. He followed it off the porch.
Although he told himself that he had no desire to stare at the remnants of his neighbor Adam’s house—it was a distraction; it was ghoulish; it was not good for his mental health—Ransom was unable to keep his eyes from it. All that was left of the structure were fire-blackened fragments of the walls that had stood at the house’s northeast and southwest corners. Had Ransom not spent ten years living across the road from the white, two-story colonial whose lawn had been chronically overgrown—to the point he and Heather had spoken of it as their own little piece of the rainforest—he could not have guessed the details of the building the fire had consumed. While he was no expert at such matters, he had been surprised that the flames had taken so much of Adam’s house; even without the fire department to douse it, Ransom had the sense that the blaze should not have consumed this much of it. No doubt, the extent of the destruction owed something to the architects of the shape the house’s destruction had revealed.
(There’s something in Adam’s house, Matt had said. The eyes of the ten men and woman crowded around the kitchen table did not look at him. They’ve been there since before . . . everything. Before the Fracture. I’ve heard them moving around outside, in the trees. We have to do something about them.)
About a month after they had moved into their house, some ten years ago, Ransom had discovered a wasps’ nest clinging to a light on the far side of the garage. Had it been only himself, even himself and Heather, living there, he would have been tempted to live and let live. However, with an eight- year-old factored into the equation, one whose curiosity was recorded in the constellations of scars up his arms and down his legs, there was no choice. Ransom called the exterminator and the next day, the nest was still. He waited the three days the woman recommended, then removed the nest by unscrewing the frosted glass jar to which it was anchored. He estimated the side stoop the sunniest part of the property; he placed the nest there to dry out. His decision had not pleased Heather, who was concerned at poison-resistant wasps emerging enraged at the attack on their home, but after a week’s watch brought no super wasps, he considered it reasonable to examine it with Matt. It was the first time he had been this near to a nest, and he had been fascinated by it, the grey, papery material that covered it in strips wound up and to the right. Slicing it across the equator had disclosed a matrix of cells, a little less than half of them chambering larvae, and a host of motionless wasps. Every detail of the nest, he was aware, owed itself to some physiological necessity, evolutionary advantage, but he’d found it difficult to shake the impression that he was observing the result of an alien intelligence, an alien aesthetic, at work.
That same sensation, taken to a power of ten, gripped him at the sight of the structure that had hidden inside Adam’s house. Its shape reminded him of that long-ago wasps’ nest, only inverted, an irregular dome composed not of grey pulp but a porous substance whose texture suggested sponge. Where it was not charred black, its surface was dark umber. Unlike the house in which it had grown up, Ransom thought that the fire that had scoured this dwelling should have inflicted more damage on it, collapsed it. In spots, the reddish surface of the mound had cracked to reveal a darker substance beneath, something that trembled in the light like mercury. Perhaps this was the reason the place was still standing. What had been the overgrown yard was dirt baked and burnt brittle by the succession of fires. At half a dozen points around the yard, the large shells of what might have been lobsters—had each of those lobsters stood the size of a small pony—lay broken, split wide, the handles of axes, shovels, picks spouting from them.
(Matt had been so excited, his cheeks flushed in that way that made his eyes glow. The left sleeve of his leather jacket, of the sweatshirt underneath it, had been sliced open, the skin below cut from wrist to shoulder by a claw the size of a tennis racket. He hadn’t cared, had barely noticed as Ransom had washed the wound, inspected it for any of the fluid (blood?) that had spattered the jacket, and wrapped it in gauze. Outside, whoops and hollers of celebration had filled the morning air. You should have come with us, Matt had said, the remark less a reproach and more an expression of regret for a missed opportunity. My plan worked. They never saw us coming. You should have been there. Despite the anxiety that had yet to drain from him, pride had swelled Ransom’s chest. Maybe everything wasn’t lost. Maybe his son . . . Yes, well, Ransom had said, someone has to be around to pick up the pieces.)
Ransom continued around the front lawn to what they had called the side yard, a wide slope of grass that stretched from the road up to the treeline of the rise behind the house. If the wreckage across the street was difficult to ignore, what lay beyond the edge of the yard compelled his attention. Everything that had extended north of the house: his next door neighbor Dan’s red house and barn, the volunteer fire station across from it, the houses that had continued on up both sides of the road to Wiltwyck, was gone, as was the very ground on which all of it had been built. As far ahead as Ransom could see, to either side, the earth had been scraped to bare rock, the dull surface of which bore hundred-yard gouges. Somewhere beyond his ability to guesstimate, planes of light like the one on the other side of his house were visible on the horizon. Ransom could not decide how many there were. Some days he thought at least four, staggered one behind the other; others he was certain there was only the one whose undulations produced the illusion of more. Far off as the aurora(e) was, its sheer size made the figures that occasionally filled it visible. These he found it easier to disregard, especially when, as today, they were something familiar: a quartet of tall stones at the top of a rounded mountain, one apparently fallen over, the remaining three set at irregular distances from one another, enough to suggest that their proximity might be no more than a fluke of geology; from within the arrangement, as if stepping down into it, an eye the size of a barn door peered and began to push out. Instead, he focused on the garden into which he, Matt, and a few of his neighbors had tilled the side yard.
While Ransom judged the crab capable of leaping the dry moat and clambering up the wire fence around the garden, it preferred to wait for him to set the plank over the trench, cross it, and unlock the front gate. Only then would it scuttle around him, up the rows of carrots and broccoli, the tomatoes caged in their conical frames, stopping on its rounds to inspect a leaf here, a stalk there, tilting its shell forward so that one of the limbs centered in its back could extend and take the object of its scrutiny in its claw. In general, Ransom attributed the crab’s study to simple curiosity, but there were moments he fancied that, prior to its arrival in his front yard the morning after Matt’s departure, in whatever strange place it had called home, the crab had tended a garden of its own.
Latching but not locking the gate behind him, Ransom said, “What about
Bruce? That was what we called our dog . . . the only dog we ever had. Heather picked out the name. She was a huge Springsteen fan. The dog didn’t look like a Bruce, not in the slightest. He was some kind of weird mix, Great Dane and greyhound, something like that. His body . . . it was as if the front of one dog had been sewed to the back of another. He had this enormous head—heavy jowls, brow, huge jaws—and these thick front legs, attached to a skinny trunk, back legs like pipe cleaners. His tail—I don’t know where that came from. It was so long it hung down almost to his feet. I kept expecting him to tip over, fall on his face. I wanted to call him Butch, that or something classical, Cerberus. Heather and Matt overruled me. Matt was all in favor of calling him Super Destroyer, or Fire Teeth, but Heather and I vetoed those. Somehow, this meant she got the final decision, and Bruce it was.”
The beer traps next to the lettuce were full of the large red slugs that had appeared in the last week. One near the top was still moving, swimming lazily around the PBR, the vent along its back expanding and contracting like a mouth attempting to speak. The traps could wait another day before emptying; he would have to remember to bring another can of beer with him tomorrow. He said, “Heather found the dog wandering in the road out front. He was in pretty rough shape: his coat was caked with dirt, rubbed raw in places; he was so thin, you could’ve used his ribs as a toast rack. Heather was a sucker for any kind of hard case; she said it was why she’d gone out with me, in the first place. Very funny, right? By the time Matt stepped off the schoolbus, she’d lured the dog inside with a plateful of chicken scraps (which he devoured), coaxed him into the downstairs shower (after which, she said, he looked positively skeletal), and heaped a couple of old blankets into a bed for him. She tried to convince him to lie down there, and he did subject the blankets to extensive sniffing, but he refused to allow Heather out of his sight. She was . . . at that point, she tired easily—to be honest, it was pretty remarkable that she’d been able to do everything she had—so she went out to the front porch to rest on the rocking chair and wait for Matt’s bus. When she did, the dog—Bruce, I might as well call him that; she’d already settled on the name—Bruce insisted on accompanying her. He plopped down beside her, and remained there until Matt was climbing the front steps. I would have been worried . . . concerned about how Bruce would react to Matt, whether he’d be jealous of Heather, that kind of thing. Not my wife: when Matt reached the top of the stairs, the dog stood, but that was all. Heather didn’t have to speak to him, let alone grab his collar.”
The lettuces weren’t ready to pick, nor were the cabbages or broccoli. A few tomatoes, however, were sufficiently red to merit plucking from the plants and dropping into the canvas bag. The crab was roaming the top of the garden, where they’d planted Dan’s apple trees. Ransom glanced over the last of the tomatoes, checked the frames. “That collar,” he said. “It was the first thing I noticed about the dog. Okay, maybe not the first, but it wasn’t too long before it caught my eye. This was after Matt had met me in the driveway with the news that we had a guest. The look on his face . . . he had always been a moody kid—Heather and I used to ask one another, How’s the weather in Mattsville?—and adolescence, its spiking hormones, had not improved his temperament. In all fairness, Heather being sick didn’t help matters any. This night, though, he was positively beaming, vibrating with nervous energy. When I saw him running up to the car, my heart jumped. I couldn’t conceive any reason for him to rush out the side door that wasn’t bad: at the very best, an argument with his mother over some school-related issue; at the very worst, another ambulance ride to the hospital for Heather.”
A blue centipede the size of his hand trundled across the dirt in front of him. He considered spearing it, couldn’t remember if it controlled any of the other species in the garden. Better to err on the side of caution—even now. He stepped over it, moved on to the beans. He said, “Matt refused to answer any of my questions; all he would say was, You’ll see. It had been a long day at work; my patience was frayed to a couple of threads and they weren’t looking any too strong. I was on the verge of snapping at him, telling him to cut the crap, grow up, but something, that grin, maybe, made me hold my tongue. And once I was inside, there was Heather sitting on the couch, the dog sprawled out beside her, his head in her lap. He didn’t so much as open an eye to me.
“For the life of me, I could not figure out how Heather had gotten him. I assumed she had been to the pound, but we owned only the one car, which I’d had at work all day. She took the longest time telling me where the dog had come from. I had to keep guessing, and didn’t Matt think that was the funniest thing ever? It was kind of funny . . . my explanations grew increasingly bizarre, fanciful. Someone had delivered the dog in a steamer trunk. Heather had discovered him living in one of the trees out front. He’d been packed away in the attic. I think she and Matt wanted to hear my next story.”
Ransom had forgotten the name of the beans they had planted. Not green beans: these grew in dark purple; although Dan had assured him that they turned green once you cooked them. The beans had come in big, which Dan had predicted: each was easily six, seven inches long. Of the twenty- five or thirty that were ready to pick, however, four had split at the bottom, burst by gelid, inky coils that hung down as long again as the bean. The ends of the coils raised towards him, unfolding petals lined with tiny teeth.
“Shit.” He stepped back, lowering the spear. The coils swayed from side to side, their petals opening further. He studied their stalks. All four sprang from the same plant. He swept the blade of the spear through the beans dangling from the plants to either side of the affected one. They dinged faintly on the metal. The rest of the crop appeared untouched; that was something. He adjusted the canvas bag onto his shoulder. Taking the spear in both hands, he set the edge of the blade against the middle plant’s stem. His first cut drew viscous green liquid and the smell of spoiled eggs. While he sawed, the coils whipped this way and that, and another three beans shook frantically. The stem severed, he used the spear to loosen the plant from its wire supports, then to carry it to the compost pile at the top of the garden, in the corner opposite the apple trees. There was lighter fluid left in the bottle beside the fence; the dark coils continued to writhe as he sprayed them with it. The plant was too green to burn well, but Ransom reckoned the application of fire to it, however briefly, couldn’t hurt. He reached in his shirt pocket for the matches. The lighter fluid flared with a satisfying whump.
The crab was circling the apple trees. Eyes on the leaves curling in the flames, Ransom said, “By the time Heather finally told me how Bruce had arrived at the house, I’d been won over. Honestly, within a couple of minutes of watching her sitting there with the dog, I was ready for him to move in. Not because I was such a great dog person—I’d grown up with cats, and if I’d been inclined to adopt a pet, a kitten would have been my first choice. Heather was the one who’d been raised with a houseful of dogs. No, what decided me in Bruce’s favor was Heather, her . . . demeanor, I suppose. You could see it in the way she was seated. She didn’t look as if she were holding herself as still as possible, as if someone were pressing a knife against the small of her back. She wasn’t relaxed—that would be an overstatement—but she was calmer.
“The change in Matt didn’t hurt, either.” Ransom squeezed another jet of lighter fluid onto the fire, which leapt up in response. The gelid coils thrashed as if trying to tear themselves free of the plant. “How long had that boy wanted a dog . . . By now, we’d settled into a routine with Heather’s meds, her doctors’ visits—it had settled onto us, more like. I think we knew . . . I wouldn’t say we had given up hope; Heather’s latest tests had returned better than expected results. But we—the three of us were in a place we had been in for a long time and didn’t know when we were going to get out of. A dog was refreshing, new.”
With liquid pops, the four coils burst one after the other. The trio of suspect beans followed close behind. “That collar, though . . .” B
ringing the lighter fluid with him, Ransom left the fire for the spot where the affected plant had been rooted. Emerald fluid thick as honey topped the stump, slid down its sides in slow fingers. He should dig it out, he knew, and probably the plants to either side of it, for good measure, but without the protection of a pair of gloves, he was reluctant to expose his bare skin to it. He reversed the spear and drove its point into the stump. Leaving the blade in, he twisted the handle around to widen the cut, then poured lighter fluid into and around it. He wasn’t about to risk dropping a match over here, but he guessed the accelerant should, at a minimum, prove sufficiently toxic to hinder the plant from regrowing until he could return suitably protected and with a shovel.
There was still the question of whether to harvest the plants to either side. Fresh vegetables would be nice, but prudence was the rule of the day. Before they’d set out for the polar city with Matt, his neighbors had moved their various stores to his basement, for safe keeping; it wasn’t as if he were going to run out of canned food anytime soon. Ransom withdrew the spear and returned to the compost, where the fire had not yet subsided. Its business with the apple trees completed, the crab crouched at a safe remove from the flames. Ransom said, “It was a new collar, this blue, fibrous stuff, and there was a round metal tag hanging from it. The tag was incised with a name, ‘Noble,’ and a number to call in case this dog was found. It was a Wiltwyck number. I said, What about the owner? Shouldn’t we call them?
“Heather must have been preparing her answer all day, from the moment she read the tag. Do you see the condition this animal is in? she said. Either his owner is dead, or they don’t deserve him. As far as Heather was concerned, that was that. I didn’t argue, but shortly thereafter, I unbuckled the collar and threw it in a drawer in the laundry room. Given Bruce’s state, I didn’t imagine his owner would be sorry to find him gone, but you never know.