Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  “It’s as bad as I said, isn’t it?” asked Ronald as soon as I found him again.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” I admitted.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Can you help me?”

  “I don’t know. Can I?”

  He sighed mournfully and reached inside his zebra sheet. From inside one of the opaque patches he drew a small catch-sealed envelope. I shook it slightly as I took it. Plastic rattled inside.

  “Don’t worry, it’s generous,” Ronald said. I put it into the pocket in my belt. “Just make sure she doesn’t come to the next one, all right?”

  “Sure.” I clapped him on the arm and headed off for some much-needed throb.

  IVd.

  I watched Tetsu and his friends go, hoping I could leave soon myself, before they found enough courage to come back to test my claim about extra charges.

  And, apparently, my wish was about to be granted. I heard the pod doors behind me open for the first time since I had stepped out onto the platform.

  And then, music to my ears. I heard her voice, with no trace of superiority or even confidence for the first time, very timidly say—

  “Um, hello?”

  V.

  The next day Heaven vidded me. “Oh, it’s so awful!” she wailed.

  “What is?” I leaned forward attentively.

  She tried to go on but was caught by sobs. She had a silk sash tied under her chin again, but this one was an appropriate black. Even without her perfume in my nose, she was captivating.

  “Mummy,” she finally wheezed. “She got lost going to a party last night and... ended up in Lowtown.”

  “Say not!” I exclaimed. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s—she’s—dead!” she bawled and pulled the black cloth sash from her head to wipe her eyes. Though it was endearing, I thought it all pretty theatrical; I knew I wasn’t very high on her list of People To Call With Momentous News, so she had probably cried into her sash several times already. Like mother, like daughter. I played with a paperweight until she decided it was time to get hold of herself.

  “The Watch just brought her up a couple of hours ago,” she said, blinking and wiping her eyes. “The Lowtowners, they beat her, then killed her... They even stole her new ear!” She tried to burst out crying again, but her tear glands were apparently exhausted. She saw the futility of it, and went on with her message.

  “The funeral is tomorrow night. You’ll come, won’t you? We’re having it at Ronald’s place.” She smiled thinly, red-eyed. “It’s somehow appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, indeed.” More than you know. And maybe, I thought, there’s an extra perk to all this. “What about you? Will you be all right, on your own?”

  “Oh, I won’t be alone.” She dabbed again at her eyes perfunctorily. “I’ll be staying with Ronald for a while, a few weeks at least, until life gets back to normal.” She smiled again. “He’s so Edge, and very sweet, too, isn’t he?”

  “Unh... hunh.” Halfway through, I tried to turn my grunt into something positive-sounding; apparently it worked.

  “I’m so sorry to have bothered you with this news.”

  “No bother. Anything that I can do for you...”

  Her nod was perfectly polite, and it put that thought to rest. I snapped off and sat there in front of the vid, playing with my paperweight and thinking.

  It had been simple, really. A false invitation to a nonexistent party was all it took. I had figured that Allysia, like too many Hightowners, didn’t bother (or even know how) to read addresses, and depended on the pod to get her wherever she was going. And I had also counted on her overwhelming self-confidence to keep her from asking her increasingly-seedy fellow occupants of the pod where she was actually headed.

  I fiddled with my new paperweight between my fingers. It was beautiful, really; a delicate scallop-shell shape, made of ceramic, laced with gold thread that tickled my fingers as I flipped it over and over.

  Forbidden Aisles

  The expected jingle of bells was not what announced Jim’s entrance into the Asian goods store. It was instead a loud, hollow clacking sound. Jim looked up to see what looked like a mobile of bleached bone slats connected to the hinge of the door. Huh—different, Jim thought.

  The store was dim, but still brighter than the deepening evening outside. At the counter to the left of the door, an old Oriental man with his hair brushed back from his face like Chairman Mao looked up from a Chinese newspaper and said something Jim didn’t catch.

  “Uh, hi,” said Jim. “I’m looking for rice flour.”

  The man blinked at Jim.

  “Rice flour?” Jim repeated.

  The shopkeeper pointed further into the store, muttered something that sounded like it could have been “four,” and went back to his newspaper.

  “Right,” said Jim to himself, and grabbed a hand-held shopping basket from a stack beside the door. At the Asian market he normally shopped at, he knew exactly where to find those few items Lily sent him for, but Lily hadn’t called him until he was past that turnoff on the way home.

  “But I need some rice flour for this recipe,” Lily said.

  “Well, if you want me to turn around...”

  “No,” Lily said petulantly. “Then you’ll be late. Oh, I remember seeing a Chinese grocery in the strip mall south of the post office, the one with the German deli out front. You remember?”

  He remembered the German deli at least, so he had found the strip mall, and sure enough, there was the entrance to South Sea Asian Grocerys & Goods at the very back where the pavement was cracked, between an empty storefront and a bookkeeping service with a hand-lettered sign. The grocery’s name was the only English signage on the store; the rest looked like it was in at least six different scripts. At least there won’t be any complaints about the place not being authentic enough.

  Now Jim moved between narrow rows along crowded shelves. The signs above the aisles were in a language he didn’t read, so he just counted four rows back and turned. There was another shopper in that aisle, a thin slumped man with copper-brown skin and a hawk-like nose, and the aisle was so narrow that even turning sideways Jim felt he had come as close to a homosexual encounter as he ever wanted to get. The man smelled of jasmine, car exhaust, and something tangy.

  There were at least foodstuffs on the fourth aisle, though none of them looked like things that Jim would ever eat even on a dare. Front and center was a large section of duck eggs preserved in lye; the picture on the front of the cartons showed eggs marinated to a tarry black. That was one of the few products in front of him with English labeling on the package, though if the pictures on the boxes and cans on the shelves were to be believed, the contents of the containers ranged from bird’s feet to an unfamiliar pink-white fruit to an old fisherman in a downeaster. Jim knew from experience that rice flour usually occupied space along with other powdered cooking ingredients; this looked like the wrong aisle entirely.

  But at least it was a good place to start looking. The first three aisles he had passed were filled with porcelain bowl sets, electric fans, and various labor-saving appliances with young Asian women on the front of the boxes demonstrating their use. So he only had to work toward the back of the store to find what he was looking for.

  The goods on the next aisle were at least dry; there were various noodles and flakes with stylized pictures of fish and crustaceans on the fronts. Among the few packages labeled in Roman characters, Jim saw some whoppers of Chinglish translation: “It’s Very Goblin!” and “The Fruitcake Resides the Hole” were classics. He took pictures with his phone; who knows, they might end up on Engrish.com. No rice flour, though.

  The next aisle was shadowy, falling between the widely spaced strips of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Back to jars again, Jim thought, and though he could have written the aisle off and proceeded to the next one, his Chinglish discoveries made him stop and look at the contents of the jars. Again, fruits he co
uldn’t identify were crammed into various colors of brine. He saw one squat jar that appeared to be full of sardines, all staring out with sightless eyes. Another was full of octopus tentacles, their suckers pressed up white against the glass. Something that looked like a jellyfish with eyes floated in tea-colored syrup, the only jar of its kind on the shelf. Must be a local favorite, Jim thought, and then did a double-take at the jar; he immediately chided himself for his foolishness because, even with the dim light as an excuse, there was no way the jellything’s eyes had turned to look at him.

  His browsing was taking longer than he had planned; he pulled out his phone to call and reassure Lily, but there were no bars. He grunted in disappointment and instead skimmed the shelves quickly before moving on to the next aisle—the penultimate one of the store.

  As he rounded the corner of the aisle, he almost ran into the shopkeeper from the counter. The man looked at Jim with eyes that Jim couldn’t help but think of as “inscrutable”; in this light, Jim could see nothing but black behind the man’s eyelids. He was a full head shorter than Jim, and Jim felt himself bending at the waist to keep from towering over the man.

  “You doing?” the shopkeeper said. He pointed his long finger—freakishly long, given his otherwise short, stubby shape—at Jim’s phone.

  “I was trying to call my girlfriend,” Jim said. “But I can’t get a signal in here.”

  “Signal is not for you,” the shopkeeper said. He started past Jim, advancing back to the front counter. “Look a thing?”

  “Yeah,” said Jim, “rice flour. Remember? Rice flour?”

  The finger pointed again toward the back of the store. Then the man was gone.

  I guess I’ll get home with the rice flour and a story about the freaky-ass shop and its freaky-ass shopkeeper.

  He marched into the next aisle and stopped.

  Every whispered cliché about Asian cuisine was made concrete in front of his eyes. Dried squid hung from hooks dangling from the ceiling, their papery tentacles rattling together like the bone chimes on the front door. Several burlap sacks sat on the floor, their bottoms soggy and purple from the fluids of whatever they held. A pig’s head sealed in a layer of milky wax sat alone on its shelf like a bizarre trophy. A self-serve vat of some grainy white fluid sat open, and flies perched on the edges of the vat. The eye-level shelf was occupied by jars of fat locust-like insects, and as Jim gaped he saw the movement inside the jar; the bugs were alive.

  “Jesus H...” he muttered as he felt his stomach flip over.

  He backed up, then saw the storekeeper coming back down the aisle toward him. He carried a meat cleaver that was so large in his spidery hands it looked cartoonish.

  “No shop here before, yes?” the shopkeeper said. He was smiling.

  Jim backed into the final row. He felt cold air prickle the back of his neck and spun around.

  The far wall was lined with coolers, and the coolers were full of meat. Labels in day-glo colors announced cuts and prices in a squiggly script he couldn’t identify. The meat wasn’t wrapped in cellophane on styrofoam trays, or even tied up in brown paper with white string. It simply sat on the wire racks in the coolers, dripping and congealing onto the meat below it. The white inner walls of the coolers were wiped with blood, and there was a deep red-purple pool at the bottom of each.

  Most was just meat with bones protruding. But some was legs. And hands. And heads.

  “No rice flour,” said the shopkeeper behind him. Jim wanted to turn on the little man, overpower him, run like hell out of the store, but something behind his eyes felt too shocked and dazed. It was as if the cold from the coolers had seeped into his flesh, and all he could do was turn glacially to face the shopkeeper as the man pushed him with the hand not holding the cleaver. Jim stumbled back, directly into a two-foot space between two freezers hung with a split curtain.

  “But you like butcher-block see, eh?” said the storekeeper through his smile. “Very popular!”

  He pushed again, and Jim fell back through the curtains into darkness.

  Love Among the Kryil

  All right, then! Have all bellies been filled? Then let me turn my seat here, and you can all gather around. Yes, on the floor. Because I’m old, that’s why! You have to earn these comforts, you know.

  Well. This is a sight. I’ve never had all of my children and grandchildren here at once. It is a blessing that both the cliffapples and the tubers were ready for harvest the same week, to bring you in from your scattered homes, and that Jondahl brought his whole family with him this year to deliver his summerpelts to market. I’ll warrant that there’s not a more favored man among all the Grondahr this night than I am!

  Now, I’ve heard that some of you want to hear the story about how your grandmother and I came to be wed, with she a Kryil and all. I daresay that you have all heard the tale before, and most even from me on visits, but since you’ve never all heard it at once, I will repeat it once again.

  Now remember, this was back before the Grondahr had broken the Kryil and they became the vanished and furtive savages they are today, hiding in distant caves or lurking under beds to snatch wicked children who won’t sleep when bidden. Ha ha! No, they were then a fierce and depraved people, and made war with the Grondahr continuously. All our young men back then had a duty to fight against the Kryil to keep them out of our lands and waters, to slay the men and redeem the women. They were, and are still, a devious and perverse lot. My own father taught me from the cradle never to trust a Kryil, and he afterward learned the lesson of his own words—he was captured on a raid, and to shame him the Kryil sent him back with his hands chopped off and his manhood split.

  What’s that? Speak up, Dahnale. What does “redeem the women” mean? Ah, the fullblood Kryil are a dark-skinned and dark-blooded people, and beyond all honor and decency. But you see, the virtues of a Grondahr are in his blood and seed, and so our duty was to find the Kryil women when we could, after killing or luring away their men, and to force our seed upon them so that, by chance, some children would spring up among the Kryil with Grondahr blood in their veins.

  So now, back to the story. No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m old, but I’m not that old!

  One summer’s day, in the full flower of my youth, I was out with a raiding party, with our flints and our ironwood, and we chanced upon a Kryil camp. They were, I think, for trade with other Kryil rather than battle with the Grondahr, but that was no concern. We fell upon them to do our duty. And coming from one of the skin tents, that’s when I first spied your grandmother. She had dark skin and straight black hair, like all of her kin, but her deep eyes sparkled and her red lips were parted in a gasp, and just the look of her shot a flint through my heart. Even among the fullblood Kryil, where no virtue or honor resided, there was still great beauty—I hadn’t known until that day how great.

  I chased her from the camp into the forest, and when I had caught her, I forced my seed upon her. But this time was different from other raids, for she herself was different. I faced her as I took her, and I looked into her eyes, and we even spoke some words to each other, I forget what. And by the time we were done, I was snared. And she, too, didn’t fight like a Kryil woman normally did, not after a moment.

  And afterward we sat there, in a natural bower of spring leaves, and I haltingly confessed my love for her. Yes, love. And she was timid, but she too finally admitted that she felt much the same as I. A love between Grondahr and Kryil? A strange thing, yes, but stranger things have happened, at least in legend.

  Here now, Luhlani—no, I mean my daughter, not my granddaughter, yes—your mother is making noise from her room. Go and see if you can quiet her, there’s a girl.

  The Kryil village to which your grandmother was bound was close at hand, and I knew that there would be many survivors of our raid on the camp, for we were outnumbered from the start and only used the element of surprise to harry the Kryil. I knew where the village was, and I knew also of a small, deep lake nearby, isolated by the
hills. I told her of it and bid her to meet me there in two days, and she agreed. And so I left her, and rejoined my raiding part as we went back to Grondahr lands, and never said anything to them.

  I was in love, with a strength of passion that only the young have, and so I had forgotten everything that my father had taught me about never trusting a Kryil, and everything I had learned on my own from the day of my birth. On the next day, without telling my father, I went to the temple and declared my marriage before sun and earth. Even when a man takes a Kryil to wife, such a declaration is unbreakable by man or woman or god or devil. I meant to meet her at the lake, you see, and surprise her with our marriage and take her as my own.

  I swear, Luhlani, she’s louder now than she was before! Take her some of the tubers from dinner, there’s plenty left, and see if that will quiet her. Mash them well first, of course.

  So on the morning agreed, I made my way to the lake and found her waiting for me. I was blinded and stupefied by my love, and forgot entirely that I was a warrior, otherwise I wouldn’t have forgotten all of my woodcraft and been caught unawares.

  You see, your grandmother had two brothers with whom she was traveling. They were suspicious, as are all those who are as devious as the Kryil, and followed her out to the lake. She swore afterward that she had not said anything to them, that they had come on their own without her knowledge, but of what worth are Kryil oaths? They fell upon me while I was distracted by her, and their first stroke gave me this scar on my arm that took forever to heal.

  Your grandmother backed away as we fought. She knew not to plead with me for their lives, and of course she never pled with them for mine; they were all three Kryil. And though I had sworn love for your grandmother, that love didn’t extend to these two Kryil roughs who snuck out of the bush at me.