by Brett Savory
NO FURTHER
MESSAGES
Stories by Brett Alexander Savory
ChiZine Publications
COPYRIGHT
No Further Messages © 2007 by Brett Alexander Savory
Cover artwork © 2007 by Michael Gibbs
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
Originally published in 2007 by Delirium Books
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-184-7
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]
Copy Edited by David Marty & Troy Knutson
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Messages
Scenario B
Apology
Freshets
Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event
Jimmy Dale
Jewels
Water-song
Danny Boy
Slipknot
Silica
A Diamond of Skin and Love
Subliminal Verses
The Collective
The Time Between Lights
Running Beneath the Skin
Marching the Hate Machines Into the Sun
Landscape
Wall
Bottom Drawer
Publication History
About the Author
For Don
My deepest thanks to the editors who originally bought these stories over the years: Shawna McCarthy, Gene Stewart, Michael Rowe, Gord Rollo, Seth Lindberg, Dave Nordhaus, Elizabeth & Tom Monteleone, William P. Simmons, William Smith, Steve Eller, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick, Shane Ryan Staley, Marsha Sisolak, and Mark Budman. Special thanks to Ellen Datlow for selecting “Messages” for inclusion in the 20th edition of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. Never thought I'd crack that table of contents in a million years. Cheers to you all.
MESSAGES
This time is no different. This time is exactly the same as the last hundred, the last thousand. Since paper was invented. Maybe before. Different people, but always the same objectives.
Because some words are more important than others.
Some words have the power to change history.
Written in red. As always.
She reads the words on the piece of paper, burns it, changes into black clothes, leaves her tiny apartment quickly and returns three hours later, shaking, with blood on her fists.
In the shower, more red as the blood washes off, swirls around the drain, vanishes.
When she steps out of the shower ten minutes later, this is written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “Next time, keep it clean.”
She wraps a bath towel around herself, walks into her bedroom.
Yeah, keep it clean, she thinks. Like I asked the fat bastard to bleed all over me.
“Joseph—”
“Shut up.”
“Joseph, listen—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
The man in the dark blue suit stares hard at Joseph. Contemplates whether he can risk another interruption. Knows he cannot. Decides he doesn’t care, anyway. So he just sits quietly and fiddles with a crease in his pants.
And waits.
Joseph holds a red pen in his right hand, taps it on his big wooden desk. Thinking.
“How did she know?” Joseph says, his voice a cracked rock.
The man in the dark blue suit knows there is no way out of this. He knows he is going to die. In this room. Soon.
“There’s no way she could have known about Jennings,” he says, knowing it’s a stupid thing to say.
Pointless. Just going through the motions. He imagines he feels the world slowing down, its creator finished with us, no longer watching, no longer caring what happens.
Joseph nods his head, holds his breath, purses his lips. He pulls a very long knife from a sheath taped to the underside of his desk. Shows it to the man in the dark blue suit.
“That manuscript was very important,” Joseph says. “Probably the most important manuscript we would ever have worked with. We’ve been doing this a long time, you and I. You’ve never fucked up like this. I don’t understand it. And don’t try to shift the blame. You’re the one who hired Jennings.”
The knife catches a flicker of light from a nearby lamp. Joseph taps it on the desk a few times, like he’d done with his pen. Breathing now. Just breathing. “And you’ve nothing from the brother, either? Nothing whatsoever?”
The man in the dark blue suit stays quiet. Just offers up a silent prayer to a god he has never believed in, and that he knows with absolute certainty is no longer watching.
A moment later, Joseph leans forward quickly, buries the knife to the hilt in the man’s neck.
“So what’s it say?”
“What’s what say?”
“What do you think? The manuscript. What’s it say this time? Staggering earthquake? The second coming of Hitler? Flood, drought, tidal wave, fucking plague of locust? What?”
Emma Philson stares down at her dinner plate. Her hair is still damp from her shower.
“Don’t know. Didn’t read it.” She looks back up. “It’s not my job to read them; it’s my job to steal them.”
The man across from her puts his fork down on his plate, tilts his head, looks at her with disbelief.
“You’ve never read any of them? The fate of the world right there in your hands and you don’t even sneak a bloody peek?”
Emma picks up her knife and fork, cuts into her fish. “I don’t want to know.”
The man still staring at her with incomprehension is Jim Leeds, her only contact in the organization. The restaurant they’re eating at is a five-star in Vancouver.
Neither of them is particularly enjoying the dishes they’ve ordered. They never do.
“So why do you bother?” Jim says, poking at his mussels.
Emma shrugs. “Your organization pays me very well.”
“That’s all that matters to you? The money?”
Emma says nothing. She forks a chunk of undercooked fish into her mouth and grimaces.
“I mean, don’t you ever think about how important your work is? Don’t you get any satisfaction from knowing that through this manuscript maneuvering—”
“I wish you’d stop calling it that,” Emma in
terrupts, her voice rising. “We kill people and steal their writings.”
Jim leans forward, looks at her hard. His fingers curl tight around the glass of red wine in his hand. “Keep. Your. Voice. Down.”
He leans back slowly, straightens his tie, sips from his wine, then glowers at his food, pushes his plate away.
Emma stares out the window, all pretence to enjoying a lovely dinner with a colleague vanished.
“They aren’t their writings anyway, Emma. They’re not owned by anyone.”
“Jim?” Emma says, leaning forward, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Listen to me, okay? I’m bored. And I’m tired of acting like this shit is somehow beneficial to the human race. Doesn’t matter how many people get killed as long as we get our manuscript. As long as these documents make it into the ‘right hands,’ everyone’s happy. Well, fuck that, I’m not happy.”
Emma leans back, takes a deep breath.
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I don’t want to do this anymore, Jim.”
Jim doesn’t blink, doesn’t waver. “But you will, won’t you.” Statement. Fact.
Emma sighs, looks out the window again, at city lights, at cars, trains, people. She nods slowly.
But Emma knows something Jim doesn’t. She lied; she has read the manuscript for which she slit the fat man’s throat.
Seth Philson fidgets in his seat. Not because he is afraid of flying, not even because he has to piss so bad his teeth are floating; Seth fidgets because he is six-footseven and airplane seats are not made for people his height. He squirms around in his aisle seat, cursing the fact that no one with a roomier emergency-exit seat would swap with him. He tries to get comfortable first with his little pillow—folding and scrunching it, placing it between his knees and on the back of the seat in front of him—then without it. No dice either way. And no matter which way he tries it, the guy in the seat ahead turns around and glares at him.
Five-foot fuck-all, Seth thinks. Must be real tough to get comfortable in that seat when you’re bloody well swimming in it, eh, shithead?
More fidgeting. Deep sighing. If he could afford firstclass, he’d be up there in a heartbeat, but writing jacket copy for crappy mainstream paperbacks sure isn’t going to buy him a ticket up there—he’s lucky he can afford this trip to Vancouver at all.
Seth needed a vacation. Seth was having very sharp, very clear images of ripping off his co-workers’ heads.
Mountains. Snow. Calming white. A visit with his sister whom he hasn’t seen in . . . how many years has it been? He has no idea.
As the plane taxies up the runway, Seth closes his eyes and pictures the resort he’s booked into. He inhales deeply, exhales slowly. The plane’s thrumming engines help with the overall effect, blurring his thoughts, mashing his anger at short people down, down . . . until he feels the plane lift off, its nose scoop upward.
He looks out the window to his right, across the aisle. The ground slowly gives way to blue sky, dotted with little puffs of cloud.
Pure white.
He keeps his breathing steady until the plane reaches its cruising altitude, waits for the pilot’s permission to operate assorted technological gadgets, and reaches down into the thin black bag at his feet.
Seth’s gadget of choice is a laptop. Using its word processing program, he writes stories and essays on it that he has never let anyone see. He figures he probably never will. Not because he thinks they’re bad, not because he has self-esteem issues, but because those words are his and his alone. They are not written for other people to see, and they are certainly not written for sale. He might well be able to sell his stories, but this doesn’t interest him in the least.
What interests him even less is writing jacket copy for other people’s shitty writing.
Seth powers up his laptop, waits for his Flying Spaghetti Monster desktop to come up, then opens his word processor, flicks to File, then Open. Clicks on “magicians_hangnail.rtf.” The title page pops up. He scrolls down to the first page, reads the three pages he wrote last night, cues up his cursor, and stares at it for the next five minutes.
Blink. Blink.
“You a writer?”
Guy next to him. Filthy bugger. Messy hair. Uneven beard the color of burnt chestnuts. Sloppy blue eyes too big for his ruddy, round face.
“Nope,” Seth says. Goes back to staring at the blinking cursor.
“So, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s that you’re working on?”
Fake cheer: Boy, I sure want to get to know you, even though I really don’t give a flying fuck what you’re doing or why.
“Short story,” Seth says, this time not turning his face away from the cursor.
“But I thought you just said—”
“I’m not a writer. I write things in this little computer here, but I’m not a writer. Writers sell their stories, join workshops to have their work critiqued for improvement. I do neither of those things. I do not consider myself a writer.”
“Oh,” the filthy guy says. Faces forward again.
Seth stares at the cursor and hopes that when he lands in Vancouver, his sister Emma won’t ask him about his writing. He has told her before not to, but she persists—Emma and whatever the hell it is she does for a living. Something that requires her to travel a lot—almost more than Seth, and Seth practically lives on airplanes. Whenever he asks for more information about her job, she asks for more information about his latest short story. And that’s where the conversation ends.
Though Seth is wholly unaware of it, a man in a dark blue suit sits three rows back and to the right of him. Ostensibly reading The Vancouver Sun, but watching. Waiting for Seth’s fingers to connect with the laptop’s keys.
Waiting for him to start writing.
“Give me the manuscript. I won’t ask again.”
“Fuck you, cunt.”
The fat man holding the sheaf of papers reeks like a compost heap. Emma’s head swims from the stench. She closes her eyes, steadies herself.
Always the same game: One side tracks the writer down, waits for the fugue to begin and end, kills the writer, makes off with the manuscript. The only difference is that the “good” side leaves the manuscript intact, the “bad” side edits it to serve its own agenda. The line between the two is blurry at best. Now, standing here in this disgusting man’s shithole apartment, listening to him call her a cunt, Emma has one clear thought: I want out. This is the last one. A voice in her head—not her own—telling her to pack it in.
She’ll bring it up with Jim tonight at dinner.
“Fuck me, huh?” Emma says, brings her gun out of her holster quickly, trains it on the fat man’s face. “Hand it over, and I let you walk. Simple deal.”
The man backs up, trips over a phone book on the floor behind him, but doesn’t fall. He raises his free hand, warding her off, his bravado leaking out of his pores along with his sweat. “Look . . . look, please don’t shoot. I’m sorry, okay?”
This is the best they have? Emma thinks. This snivelling mound of flab?
“I don’t want apologies,” she says, kicking the phone book out of the way, advancing on the enemy operative. “I want the manuscript.”
Back against the wall. No more name-calling, no more false courage: a man caught without his gun. Now just the stench of garbage, sweat rolling down a fat, pimply face, wrinkles like a pit bull. Apologetic. Pathetic.
But Emma has never killed anyone with a gun; its only use for her is intimidation. She pulls a knife from a sheath behind her back. Steps forward. Slashes at the man’s outstretched arm. It cuts the skin, the man cries out, drops his arm. Blood drips onto the plush beige carpet. The fat man’s other hand still clenches the manuscript for a moment, then drops it as he uses this hand to try to stop the flow of blood from his arm.
When he looks down at his wound, moves his free hand over to press on it, Emma steps forward quickly, drags the blade across
the man’s throat and moves out of reach again in one quick motion. Emma hits an artery, takes a heartbeat’s worth of spray in the face.
The fat man slumps, gurgles, drops.
Emma wipes her face with her forearm, reaches down, grabs the manuscript.
Normally, she would clean up. Carpet is a bitch, and it would take her most of the night, but normally she’d do it.
But this is the last one, she tells herself.
So she lets him bleed out.
The man in the dark blue suit should have known better than to hire that fat piece of shit Jennings, brother of one of their best. Nepotism and triple-checked referrals are the only way anyone gets in—and this blubbery fuck came highly recommended—but still, the man should have known. Just by looking at him. It wasn’t in his eyes: what it takes. To kill without flinching, to kill without knowing why. Could be built like a brick shit house and talk the hardest game in town, but when it came to murdering people for nothing more than a sheaf of paper, you had to see that capability in their eyes.
The man in the dark blue suit had not seen it in Jennings’ eyes, but he would have caught shit from every direction had he fought it, regardless of his experience, his years of moving manuscript.
And now he has to tell Joseph.
And Joseph will not be happy.
Leaving the clean-up crew behind him—hacking arms, legs, and head from the corpse—the man in the dark blue suit turns the incongruously fancy brass knob on the front door of Jennings’ hovel, steps out into the hallway.
He does not expect to live out the next twenty-four hours.
But there is one more potential fugue writer to track before he’s due back at headquarters, and that might give him something with which to placate his boss.
If he doesn’t get a move on, he’ll be late for his flight.
Emma sits at her kitchen table, stares at the manuscript in front of her. Black cup of coffee steaming in her right hand. Her left is shaky, fluttering, hovering over the first sheet of the 213-page manuscript.