Elise and The Butcher of Dreams

by Steven Welch

  Two of the town’s Orcanum stood like statues in the back of the room. They were tall, like most from their world. Their black and white patterned skin was smooth. The sturdy black fin that ran along the spine of the Orcanum back was stiff, an ebony triangle, while their many conical teeth shined white in the darkness. One, the female they named Rebecca, was wearing a vest and skirt made of shark skin while the male the town named Monty was naked. The Orcanum had come through with the return of the sea and were only just becoming comfortable with the concept of clothing. The notion of fashion for the sake of fashion was growing in popularity among the Orcanum, though, so it wasn’t uncommon now to see the random warrior wearing a smock or a speedo or a pair of leggings.

  Elise looked down and saw that her fingers were raw and her guitar was wet with blood and sweat. She smiled. Rock and roll.

  The speakers were blown, but they were loud and that was enough.

  Then, the song ended with a ring and a clang and there was applause and shouting. A hand from the darkness shoved a tin cup toward’s Elise’s face and she took it with a nod. The moonshine burned as it went down. Can’t get drunk, she thought. I play like shit when I’m drunk. She set the tin cup on the stage floor and began to play again but this time when she looked up there was a small girl Elise did not recognize standing at the foot of the stage in front of her.

  The girl was dressed in a thin robe, an abaya. Her shoes were dirty and so was her small face and that was framed by curls of black hair. She held a half-eaten plate of fish and beans she’d taken from the food table. The girl was young, not yet a teenager, and she had the gaunt look of someone who had been out beyond Aqaba and seen much but eaten little. The music was good, at least for a bar at the end of the world, but this young girl did not move or dance. She stared at Elise and ate her fish and beans with her hands.

  There was dancing and laughing and singing in four different languages as Elise and the rest ripped out a reasonable version of an old song by Queens of the Stone Age. Elise felt dizzy from the drink and from the heat and exertion. She moved slightly to the rhythm as she played and her eyes did not leave the little girl at the foot of the stage and the girl’s eyes did not leave Elise.

  When the song was done Elise pulled the plug on her guitar and stepped down. She towered over the girl.

  “Well?” Elise waited for a response. The small girl just stared.

  Elise tried again. “I don’t recognize you. You’re not local. Who are you?”

  There was a long moment when Elise thought the girl might be mute or might not speak English. Then the little girl spoke and her voice was flat and hard.

  “You’re the girl who saves things.”

  All eyes were on Elise and the girl and the sound was the low hum of the speakers and the spit of candle flames and the harsh ragged breaths. The Octo-Thing watched intensely but held the bow of its little violin at the ready should its bandleader choose to resume the music with either another countrypolitan classic or a punk standard.

  “Who are you?” asked Elise.

  “I’ve come a long way and it hasn’t been easy. I came from Amman. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes. That’s a long trip. You came by yourself?”

  Someone shouted for more music but Elise ignored the noise.

  “If you interrupt a concert you’d better have a good reason,” said Elise.

  “I came from Amman by myself through the desert. I’m ten years old. What do you think?”

  Elise smiled and set her guitar down on the stage. She waved her hand at the Octo-Thing and the creature began to play. The rest of the band joined in and the music and the dancing resumed as Elise and the little girl walked through the chaos and out to the quiet breeze of the pool deck.

  They sat opposite each other at a glass-topped table. The only light was the moon and the glow from the bar. Elise wore a metal and glass gadget strapped to her wrist by a Kevlar band and it made a clunky sound as she rested her arm on the table.

  The girl pointed at the thing on Elise’s wrist.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a friend. I call him Jules,” said Elise, “now what’s going on?”

  “There was a nice woman named Baba and she was my nanny so she took care of me in our condo in Amman at the top of a tall building. It was just us for a long time, just us and my friends but my friends are paintings that hung on the wall so they don’t talk or anything. I pretended that they did though. Does that make me crazy?”

  “No.”

  “So, there were some evil men and they stole my best friend and I want you to go save him.”

  “Wait,” said Elise, “you’re ten years old and you walked from Amman? Seriously?”

  The girl was quiet for a moment. Finally she said, “It took a long time and I was scared.”

  “Right, where’s your nanny? Where’s Baba?”

  “The men hurt her real bad and then they threw her from the top of our condo and she died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elise said. The little girl’s face was as still as the waters of the bay and her eyes did not shift.

  “You’re the one who saves things. Baba told me stories about you and how you saved things.”

  “Back up,” Elise said, “what’s your name?”

  “Baba called me Anna.”

  “Anna, you said evil men took your friend. You mean, they stole a painting from your condo and you want me to get it back? Is that it?”

  “You save things, right?”

  “Anna, my name is Elise.”

  “I know that,” Anna said, and she sounded annoyed, “can we go?”

  “I’m sure your painting will be fine.”

  Anna huffed and reached into her robe. She pulled out a piece of paper and on the paper there was a printed photograph. Anna handed the wrinkled paper to Elise.

  “The bad men said they will burn my friend, the painting. They will burn my friend the painting as a sacrifice when the moon was full at the top of The High Place.”

  Elise stared at the printed photograph of Anna’s friend.

  “The High Place?”

  Elise studied the photograph under the light of the nearly full moon. She had seen one very much like it when she was a child and she lived in Paris, before The Turn, before the end of the world and the beginning of the new one. Elise had seen a painting like this one at the Musée d’Orsay.

  “Sunflowers,” Elise said.

  “Yes, and they will burn my friend the sunflower painting at The High Place and you’re supposed to be the girl who saves things.”

  Elise took a deep breath and let out a sigh.

  “Well, shit,” she said.

  “You are an Aquanaut. You are Scaphandrier. You are the girl who saves things.”

  Elise stared at the photograph of Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

  Such a beautiful painting, such a work of imagination.

  “Okay.”

  TERRY’S PLACE

  The winds came from the west across the vast Canadian wilderness and made cold the barren shores of the little town.

  This was Nova Scotia’s most distant point, and it stabbed into the black waters of the Atlantic where clouds hid the stars and whitecap waves made soft sounds. When the world ended and the ocean vanished this town had been left a sentinel standing guard from the top of a thousand-foot cliff. The three hundred or so men, women, and children of the town were killed and eaten within days by things that emerged from the valley that once was the Atlantic basin.

  The ocean had returned, but the dead stayed dead and only old Terry called the town home.

  When the invasion of Earth began Terry was hunting near Manitoba with her thoughts to keep her company so she was spared the fate of her friends. Terry was plain of look and mind but kind of heart. There once was a man and they loved each other but he became cruel so she sent him on his way. There had been nobody else. Terry liked to be alone, and it was with mixed emotions she returned to find her home
a ghost town.

  With no food, no child or dog or parakeet left to chew, the creatures moved on to the west where they and more like them emptied the continent of so many living things of old Earth. There were still a few weird beasts living in the woods or hiding in the bushes but they were nothing Terry couldn’t handle.

  Terry didn’t know how the end of the world happened, and she didn’t know how it was stopped, and sometimes she shrugged and spit and dismissed the apocalypse as a dream, or perhaps the world before had just been a fantasy conjured by a tin of rancid sardines or a harsh acid trip. Terry didn’t care because the only thing that really mattered to her was the Andy Griffith show and she thanked her maker God and baby Jesus every day that the creatures that stripped this island of life hadn’t thought to eat anything in the local electronics store. There were plenty of televisions, more than enough to last her until she died, so many snacks to snack and so many shows to watch. So many movies, so many songs to keep her company.

  Before the end of the world Terry was a mechanic for the harbor and after trial and error she’d been able to reconfigure a generator to run on the power of the wind so she had everything she needed to be happy.

  Terry did not like people but she loved her shows.

  She told all of this to Jack the Dream Butcher when he came to town. He was curious and she would have told him everything even if he hadn’t used the pliers on her fingers but Terry was sure he enjoyed hurting her even as he swore otherwise. Jack was a man, just like the man she’d once been with, and men were cruel.

  Jack and his army came into town in big wagons pulled by Clydesdale horses. There were many weird things under tarps in the back of the wagons, things that moved and seemed to struggle to be free.

  Two of the wagons held prisoners. They wore thin clothing and looked as if they hadn’t eaten in some time. They were tied together, the men, the women, the babies, all frail and wasting. Terry had not seen another living soul since the world changed and she did not miss the company. The sight of these awful men and their rough cruelty was not a terrible surprise as she had grown up tough in the town. She was no angel or wilting flower. She was clever, so Terry did not fight back or attempt to run as she didn’t see the use at her age and thought perhaps she could offer these bad men some snacks and entertainment so that they wouldn’t cause her harm.

  “You’re an uncommon sight, friend. Where are you from?” she asked when Jack stepped down from the first wagon on arrival. He was a big man made bigger by a heavy black duster. He smiled and his teeth were wonderful and his eyes framed by long white hair were kind.

  “New Orleans by way of America,” he said and extended his hand. Terry accepted the handshake.

  Maybe this would be fine.

  “New Orleans and America. No kidding. Well, I haven’t seen another living soul in years, sir. I’m Terry. You’ve come a long way to get to the ass end of the Earth,” Terry said.

  “Truer words have rarely been spoken. But this isn’t the ass end, this is the beginning. Well, the beginning of the end and then the start of something new. Oh hell, I’m not making any sense and I haven’t introduced myself.”

  Terry rubbed her jaw and squinted. There were men with guns on the other wagons and they were all stepping down and coming toward her. These men wore jackets with thick pads taped to the arms and legs as protection against something. Terry did not know what these men might need to be protected from, but it must have been fierce.

  “What have you got in those wagons? Under those big tarps?”

  Jack smiled again.

  “I’m Jack and my men and I have come a long way, as you said. We’ll just go about our business now but we’ll need to camp here to get things set up. No trouble.”

  “That’s fine, then,” said Terry.

  Jack pointed toward her house, the only house with power and lights, the house where Terry set up a drive-in movie theater in her front yard using a few old cars and gear from the old electronics store.

  “Although, you have quite a place over there.”

  “That’s where I watch my shows. You’re more than welcome to join me. You and your fellas can watch any show you choose. I’ve got thousands. Music too. You name it.”

  The smile vanished and Jack’s voice went so low that Terry had trouble hearing.

  “No. No, that won’t do. Everything with a purpose and everything with a reason. This thing you’ve done is a problem.”

  “What?”

  “See, Terry, that isn’t what you need. A movie theater? No. Not one bit. Not those dreams. Not those lies. You need food and shelter and a weapon for protection. You need clean water. You need a place to shit. You need pills for scurvy if you can’t have fruit.”

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “You need clean air, like this. There were no nuke plants up here, no fallout to ruin your day, so you have clean air up here, Terry. That’s good stuff. Rare.”

  Terry squinted up her old face and started to speak but Jack held up his hand to silence her.

  “We’ve seen people and places on this long road that didn’t have it anywhere near as good as you. You have power. Look at that. This is a piece of paradise.”

  “Gets cold,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Well, look at all the trees to burn for warmth. Or hell, you can even burn the town or old bodies for firewood because you’re the only one here, am I right?”

  Terry nodded yes.

  Jack smiled.

  “Paradise. And here you go building a shrine to the things that nearly destroyed our world. Here you go opening doors.” He pointed at the glow of the house and the drive-in movie theater, at the black and white images on the sheet.

  “Do you believe in God, Terry?”

  “Who are those people?” Terry ignored the question and pointed at the captives. Jack looked for a moment as if he was going to laugh.

  “Those people,” he said, “made ill-advised life choices. There’s a singer and his family, that’s someone who called himself a priest for the Catholic church, she’s a movie star from a time when there was such a thing. Hell, you might even have one of her movies in your little collection, Terry. They’ve made bad choices and they’ve declined to regret it. That’s why we’re in this mess, Terry.”

  Jack stopped then and stood stone still for a long moment.

  “Do you believe in God, Terry?”

  “Yes. I love and fear our Lord God and his blessed baby son.”

  Jack stared at Terry. His breath was a white haze spilling out from below cold blue eyes. Terry thought for a moment that Jack’s face shimmered, like a ripple on a pond, and beneath the surface there was another face and on that face there was no skin and there were too many eyes. The weird, horrible moment passed fast and Terry ignored it as she was prone to visions since The Turn and paid them little attention.

  Jack smiled again.

  “That’s another big problem. Such a virus. Such an infection and it runs thousands of years deep. It’s not your fault, Terry, but some days you get the snake and some days the snake gets you. We’re rolling on along this hazardous road but now that we’re here I think we’re going to shut some doors. Do you renounce all you’ve done here? Do you want to join us?”

  Terry trembled so that her coat shook hard and didn’t say a word.

  “Well,” said Jack, “I suspect that your infection is imbedded like a bone but I’ll give you a chance. This will not be fun, Terry, not for you and not for me. Consider it a kindness. I won’t take you along with those others. They’re just fuel for our journey, Terry. Those folks are just gas for the engine. You’ll be an object lesson for those ancient eyes that watch down on us and judge our every moment. I will honor you, Terry.”

  She tried to stop them but there was no hope.

  The men took axes to her drive-in movie theater and set fire to her house. Jack beat her and asked her many questions but Terry did not apologize and Terry did not renounce her shows or her God no mat
ter the pain or the awful things that were done to her.

  Snow fell on Terry’s bruised shoulders at sunset of the next day.

  Terry was a naked old woman chained to a split pole with her eyes stapled open at the lids and her favorite show playing out on a dirty white sheet suspended between two tall trees. This was the episode about the bad pickles and the pickle competition at the county fair and it normally made her laugh but all Terry could do now was make rough sounds of fear from her ragged throat and pray that they would kill her soon.

  Jack stood on a platform above the town square. Two dozen of his men, all wearing heavy black leather to protect against the cold, circled the cobblestone oval with rifles on shoulders. The prisoners were chained together in a huddle of skin and bone behind Terry so they could watch if they chose to do so but most of them, except for the children, stared at the frozen ground.

  There were no speeches, no shouted demands or manifestos. Jack just watched as the tarps came away from the wagons and the enormous sky jellies were released from the harnesses that had held them down. The creatures arrived with The Turn and Terry had seen them in the skies many times. They hunted the things of the land, deer, hogs, and people, all the same. Terry had watched one day as a sky jelly drifted silently above a field and its long tentacles had brought death to an elk. The elk made a terrible sound on the first touch of one of those quivering strands and dropped as if shot. The tentacles had wrapped the dead elk up in a flash and pulled the carcass up to the pulsing bell of the creature. It then drifted away as it consumed its meal.

  Terry wondered how it flew, what it thought, and how many people that jellyfish had eaten.

  Free of the tarps, the creatures floated up, as big as cars and rippling with color and light, tethered together by thick rope, six, with a single structure held between them that looked for all the world like a recreational vehicle made of rusted steel sheets.

  Terry could only see the flickering image on the sheet through her cold dry eyes, but if she could have just turned her head a bit, she would have seen the men load the prisoners onto the flying ship. She would have seen how little towers were strapped to the bodies of the jellies and men stood in those towers with long metal prods so that they could steer this strange flying wagon. She would have seen the captives herded into a separate, smaller vessel connected to the belly of the big central wagon. She would have seen six of the prisoners offered to the sky jellies as food and she would have understood the purpose of the captives.