Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  And then there was the fact that Ruks stank. Malachi steeled himself and kept from flinching as a Ruk from the caravan, evidently its trade captain, climbed to the crest of the trading hill and bowed. He was dressed, like all those in the caravan, in a plain tunic of scavenged fabric that reach to his knobby knees, and as the wind changed, the smell of him caught Malachi like a fist to the side of the head: sour and dank, like wine that had turned to vinegar mixed with mushrooms. Malachi’s polite smile never faltered, even as he heard his partners behind him shift and cough.

  “Welcome to trade, caravaneer,” Malachi said formally. “I am Malachi Asael’s son.”

  “Many thanks for your welcome,” the Ruk said. “I am Skuchi Var-Bel Frashaa.”

  Malachi wondered idly if he had met this particular Ruk at a previous year’s trade. He never remembered their names, given only as a formality, and they all looked the same to him: short like a child, with a bald and square head squatting neckless on lumpy shoulders, a pot belly pushing the tunic forward, and spindly arms poking out of the armholes to end in spadelike fingers hanging fully to the knees. This one, this Skuchi, had a necklace of horses’ teeth and twisted bits of metal, probably to show his status as chief trader for the caravan. Two of his lieutenants lingered on the slope of the hill; the rest of the Ruks hung back at the bottom with their wagons, their various beasts of burden stomping and whinnying.

  Skuchi folded himself to the ground and motioned to his lieutenants, who hurried forward, spread a blanket before him, and dropped several wrapped bundles before retreating. Malachi’s men did the same, setting covered baskets before him on the blanket they unrolled.

  In a sitting position, Malachi didn’t have nearly the advantage of height over the Ruk, and they saw almost eye to eye. Skuchi smiled, showing the gapped, rounded teeth common to all Ruks, and Malachi had a sudden vision of this Ruk or one like it slavering over a winsome maid. He pushed this afterimage of old wives’ tales out of his mind.

  “Let us trade,” Malachi said.

  ***

  Nothing unexpected was brought to the trading hill today. The Pure had grain and dried beans, cheese, and a few homespun blankets and bolts of cloth. This village was also renowned for having a master flute-maker and his apprentices living and working there, but Malachi knew not to bother bringing those wares up to the trading hill, for they’d only end up carrying them back; of the mutant peoples, only the Glossae had any sense or appreciation of music, and even then their tastes were so alien that only instruments made specifically for Glossae use interested them, and the village flutemaker refused to “profane” his craft to that end.

  The Ruks had implements and materials they had scavenged from the dead zones, areas which the Pure wouldn’t enter for fear of infertility or mutation. There were metal cooking pots and glass bowls, intact or mostly so; cables of copper and other materials with which the villagers could swap out perishable twine or leather for lashings, and some few garments and footwear, though usable examples of each were getting rarer. There were some ornaments and oddities, but Malachi had learned through hard experience in his early years never to barter for something whose utility wasn’t obvious to him, no matter what the Ruks promised.

  They shared fresh beer from the village as they traded, and by midday had cleared their wares. Malachi’s men loaded foodstuffs which the Ruks had purchased over to their caravan, and the Ruks filled the villagers’ empty wagons, though not wholly, with the wares that Malachi had bargained for.

  At last Malachi got stiffly to his feet as his men cleaned up his blanket. His lower back ached, and his head thumped with the heat of the sunlight and the beer. Skuchi hopped up like a frog.

  “It is always a pleasure, Malachi,” the Ruk said. “These many years, you have been a fair and friendly partner in trade.”

  At least the Ruks can tell us apart, Malachi thought. “I am honored,” Malachi replied. “And I always look forward to your appearance in trading season.” The heat of the sun had not improved the Ruk’s stench, and Malachi wished that the wind would change.

  Skuchi glanced behind Malachi to where his men were securing their purchases down to the wagons. “I have something for you, as one of our favorite traders,” he said in a lower voice. “I did not bring it out earlier, because I didn’t want it to become an item of trade. It is a gift.”

  “Really?” Malachi was too late in hiding his surprise. Ruks were known for being forthright traders, not for their generosity. The last of the beer had been drunk an hour before, and Malachi’s mouth was coated with dry stickiness.

  “Please, keep this to yourself,” Skuchi said, holding up a broad-fingered hand. “We Ruks have a reputation to uphold. Is there any way you can dismiss your men without arousing suspicion?”

  Malachi’s chest puffed up. He had already been steeling himself for a week of muttered complaints from those who thought that he hadn’t gained as much advantage in the trade as they thought reasonable. Not that any of them volunteered for the duty, no; they just assumed from their comfortable homes that they would trade more keenly with the stinking Ruks. At least someone appreciated his efforts at barter, and if it wasn’t one of the Pure, well, a gift was a gift.

  Malachi descended the hill halfway and called to his men, “Ho! The Ruks want me to help them with their maps! Go on without me!”

  The men signaled assent, and Malachi returned to where Skuchi was waiting. “Come,” Skuchi said, “we have kept it at the caravan.”

  Malachi followed the trollish mutant down the side of his hill, realizing with a start that he was going to be closer to the Ruk caravan, and to more than a single Ruk at a time, than he had ever been. The various wagons of the caravan were moving into single file for travel, their beasts of burdens as varied as the vehicles they pulled: open wagons, two-wheeled carts, wagons with fabric tents suspended above, and some which were like boxes on wheels, constructed of scavenged wood. The air got thicker with Ruk-stench as they came among the wagons, and Malachi found that even breathing through his mouth didn’t help overmuch; instead, he fancied he could taste the stink.

  Following Skuchi, he rounded a wagon which was wholly enclosed, with window spaces and a low doorway covered with shutters that barred from the outside. He half-wondered idly if locked wagons like this contributed to the tales of Ruk-abducted maidens; then he saw something out of the corner of his eye, something aimed toward his head. It struck before he could defend himself, and the world whirled into haze and blackness.

  ***

  Malachi only realized that he was approaching consciousness again because of the smell. He had thought he knew how bad Ruk-smell could be, but wherever he was now, the stink in his nostrils was so thick it almost choked the air from his lungs. He was afraid to open his eyes because the smell might actually be thick enough to see.

  He shifted his arms, intending to cradle his aching head, but his arms wouldn’t move; they were held out away from his body by something tied around his wrists. His ankles, too, were held immobile, spread apart from each other. His eyes opened, despite the promised pain when he did so, and he found himself in a small boxlike space, dark except by dim light creeping between ill-fitting boards. The floor of the box was covered with filthy straw; his arms and legs were gripped by manacles of materials from the Long Ago, metal and wire cobbled together.

  As his vision cleared gradually, he looked again at the space that held him, at the shuttered windows and low door, and realized that he was inside the wagon he had noticed right before— before what? Before he was attacked, obviously. But why?

  The door at the far end opened. Beyond it was night, with the glare of an unseen fire reflecting inside; he had obviously been unconscious for hours, long enough for the caravan to have moved far from the village. How long before anyone had become suspicious that his return from trading was taking so long?

  The doorway was filled with the silhouette of a Ruk who clambered inside. The door was closed from without, and Malachi co
uld hear the bar dropping. Then the Ruk uncovered a lantern, and the yellow light fell upon a necklace of horses’ teeth and metal around the Ruk’s neck.

  “I’m glad to see you awake,” Skuchi said. “I had half-feared that I had struck you too hard.”

  “S... Skuchi?” Malachi mumbled, finding that his mouth was still sluggish.

  “At last, you remember me!” Skuchi said, mouth distended in a wide, grotesque smile. “Every year, I can tell that I am new to you. Perhaps all Ruks look alike to you, heh?”

  In his other hand, Skuchi held a small box made from more materials from Long Ago. He reached it out with his long spidery arms and flipped it open with a blunt thumb. Malachi couldn’t see what was inside it, but vapors fairly leapt out, a different smell that was piercing instead of cloying, sharp instead of bludgeoning. Malachi felt a wave of dizziness and heard his blood pounding in his temples, his neck, his loins, his whole body. Skuchi flipped the box closed, and Malachi lay there with his breath coming in gasps, his heart thumping, sweat starting out all over his body.

  Skuchi set the box and the lantern down in the far corner of the wagon. “You are one of our favorite traders,” he crooned, “certainly my favorite trader. And this is how we show our favor.”

  With both hands he lifted the lower edge of his tunic. Unable to look away, Malachi saw the protruding belly exposed, and beneath it, where he had expected to see a mutated version of his own manhood... he saw nothing.

  And against his will he understood.

  Skuchi held the tunic up beneath his—beneath her arms. “You have much we will take in trade, my sisters and I,” she chuckled.

  Malachi was gasping too convulsively even to scream.

  Wait

  The doctor’s waiting room smell like toilet bowl cleaner. Meredith sat uncomfortably in a chair molded from plastic, cushioned with a thin layer of synthetic rust-colored material the texture of burlap and bolted to three identical chairs before the row was broken by a featureless table on which were strewn a handful of magazines. There were more seats beyond that, and an identical arrangement on the opposite side of the room. The hands of the clock on the far wall said 10:24 A.M.

  She had no intention of touching the magazines, all of which looked well-thumbed and at least two months old. Handling the pages that had been groped for weeks by the sweaty, coughed-upon hands of sick people... The idea gave her a queasy shudder in her abdomen. She had no reading material with her, and there was no TV or radio in the waiting room. She stared at her fingernails. They weren’t very entertaining.

  On the other side of the magazine table sat an old man in black cargo pants and a black safari jacket. His arms were crossed over his stomach and he leaned forward, rocking slightly. Meredith hoped those weren’t the signs of nausea. He was more than old, she realized; he was very old. The hair sprouting from his ears was almost thicker than the few strands stubbornly clinging to his spotty scalp, and his eyes were lost in a corduroy sea of wrinkles. His lips were moving but made no sound.

  Across from Meredith sat a chubby woman with an infant in her arms, swaddled so completely it might have been wearing a baby burqa. The woman was peering into the blanketed bundle, her unconscious smile waxing and waning. Some people are endlessly fascinated by their own offspring. Meredith had no children, so she didn’t know if she was one of those people, but she suspected she was not. Still, a baby had to be more interesting than fingernails.

  The thin older lady in the far corner of the room was the only one browsing a magazine, although from the severe way she flipped the pages she seemed more to be judging the contents and finding them wanting. Her squarish glasses were the size of cathode ray tubes, her makeup was precise and meticulous, and her hair was dyed strawberry blonde to hide the gray and hairsprayed back into a simple straight style. For a moment, Meredith entertained the notion that it was actually the woman’s hair that smelled like toilet cleaner.

  The only sounds in the room were the constant electrical hum of the clock and the fluorescent lights, and breathing: the old man’s shallow breaths punctuated by the consonants of his silent monologue, the wordless cooing of the chubby woman to her baby, the dismissive snort from the thin woman’s nose as she flipped the pages of the magazine. Meredith couldn’t hear her own breath along with the other three occupants in the room; was she really that silent a breather? Or do people learn to tune out the sound of their own breath? Experimentally she inhaled more deeply, and was rewarded with the soft whish of air passing up her nostrils, and a tickle of dust. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and set it back in her lap.

  The old man’s rocking back and forth was becoming more animated, and Meredith almost caught what he was muttering to himself. If he was in as much distress as it looked like, he should probably have gone to the hospital instead of the doctor’s office. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it sounded repetitive, like a mantra or prayer.

  The door at the far end of the waiting room opened, and the nurse filled it. She was a tall woman, probably quite comely before her lower half had expanded with age. She was dressed in one of the cartoon-pattern scrub shirts that all the medical personnel wear nowadays. She looked at her clipboard and said, “Mr. Lancaster?”

  The old man rocked onto his feet and stumbled toward the door, his arms still clasped across his stomach. The nurse put her arm around his shoulder to guide him as he stepped into the back. The door clicked shut, and the almost-silence resumed.

  Meredith glanced to where he had been sitting and was shocked to see dark wetness spreading on the rust-colored upholstery of the backrest and seat. She glanced at the chubby woman and the thin lady, but neither of them were looking the right direction to see it.

  Meredith got up and went to the reception counter beside the door into the back office. She could only see the girl sitting behind the counter when she was standing right at it. The girl had dark ringleted hair, and wore bright and feminine makeup like an old-style pinup. She was pretty enough to be a pinup, too, except for her crooked and yellowed teeth which showed when she was smiling, and she was always smiling. She looked up eagerly as Meredith approached.

  “Um,” said Meredith, “that man who just went in, I think he was injured and leaked on... There’s a spot...” she pointed back toward the chair.

  The receptionist smiled and nodded as is she had expected the news. “I’ll send someone out to take care of it right away.”

  “Great. Just... thought you should know.”

  She stepped back, and the receptionist was swallowed up behind the counter. As she turned to make her way back to her seat, the thin lady looked up from her magazine and stared at her through her enormous glasses.

  “They won’t let you out, you know,” she said in the voice Meredith imagined she’d use with a naughty child that she didn’t particularly like.

  “Excuse me?” Meredith said, but the lady had already gone back to her magazine, flipping the pages with a dissatisfied snort. Meredith looked back at her once when she got back to her own seat.

  The clock now said 10:27 A.M. Only that much time had passed? Meredith slumped in her seat. Doctor’s offices were a near-perfect mixture of anxiety and boredom. She clasped her hands on her stomach and actually twiddled her thumbs.

  The chubby woman was still whispering and cooing to her bundled-up baby, and the baby was mewing back. Mewing? Meredith stilled even her silent breath to listen more intently. Yes, mewing. The baby didn’t make much sound, but when it did it sounded more like a kitten than a human. At least it wasn’t crying; being stuck in this otherwise-quiet room with a crying baby would do things to her nerves.

  The outside door opened, and a man with two weeks’ beard came in carrying a metal utility case. He looked at the empty chairs around the room, then centered on the dark splotch on the old man’s seat.

  He knelt in front of the seat and set his utility case to the side. Meredith watched, not so much because cleaning was so interesting but becau
se he was the only thing moving in the room. He got down on the level of the seat and stared at the spot. Then he opened his case and pulled out a cotton swab and a clear plastic tube. He brushed the swab gently across the spot and held it up. The head of the swab was stained red.

  He dropped the swab into the tube and screwed its lid on, then dropped the tube back into the case. He snapped the catches on the case shut, hopped to his knees, and left the office. Meredith watched him go and heard his footsteps disappear down the hall. She turned back to the dark spot. She felt like moving over another seat, away from the bloody blotch.

  She sighed, leaned her head back against the wall, and looked again at the chubby woman. It took her a few seconds to realize that there was something different about her face. Along her jawline, just to the left of her chin, was a small bloody scratch. More than one scratch, actually, in parallel. It hadn’t been there before. The woman didn’t seem upset by it, but Meredith couldn’t look away as a slow bead of blood formed along the deepest scratch.

  The woman burbled into her baby bundle. Then she leaned her face down into the wrapped blankets, chin first. Meredith was almost sure she heard sucking sounds. When the woman raised her face again, the blood was gone, and the area around the scratches was moist.

  The maintenance man re-entered while Meredith was staring at the woman. In a repeat of his last visit, he crossed to the stained seat, knelt in front of it, and swabbed it. He left again with his bloody swab in his case. Meredith was still listening to his vanishing footsteps when she heard the office door open behind her.