by Ann
The following evening G.A.S.M. convened an emergency meeting. By the time Emma arrived everyone was talking about the latest attack. Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a blackmarket skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist’s ‘Twelve Terms’ on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words.
Everyone was wearing muscle. Ho arrived dressed in a live suit of sumos, a fat jigsaw of killers tailored into a sort of double-breasted kung-fu affair replete with epaulets of braided hair and a shirt that seemed to have been woven out of eyes. Rumors were rampant. The enemy, someone said, had launched a major offensive to coincide with the spring thaw. The situation was so dire that Morrison Carney himself was expected to attend that evening’s meeting. Everyone was a wreck. Galena had doubled up on her vitamin enemas and confessed to Emma that she was undergoing sneeze therapy to deal with her anxiety. And even Merkle seemed to have developed a nervous leak. His cheeks were slack and stitched with fine wrinkles. His clothes hung on him, and the inflation specialist he traveled with was checking his air pressure every ten minutes.
Just as Vito Vesuvius gaveled the meeting to order, there was a commotion out in the lobby. The doors of the assembly spilled open and Morrison Carney rode down the velvet aisle of the chamber trailing his mute entourage of accountants, Carnite monks and tailored killers, and driving before him the ancient doorkeeper like some gaudy defector from an army of circus monkeys in his blood-colored uniform with its ridiculous panoply of sashes and honorary medals from apocryphal orders and secret societies for the preservation of pleasure: golden penises, ribbons, lace garters, and tiny velvet vaginas embroidered with jewels. Carney’s mechanical chair came to rest at the foot of the speaker’s podium.
The tycoon was accompanied by a pair of Mouths, one of whom served as his interpreter. The first Mouth carried a pair of ivory chopsticks in his pocket – talking sticks, which he used specifically for the purpose of communicating with the Carnites.
Carney nodded, cheeks puckered as he gummed the stone fetish in his mouth. A couple of Emma’s clients were Carnite buffs, and she’d heard it said that the mannequin in his mouth had no face. That the old man’s own effigy was the Thirteenth Aspect, CARNEY ABSENT, and that each of his effigies was carved by a blind monk and delivered to the tycoon’s mansion in an opaque hingeless box of hardened water so that no one but Carney would ever set eyes on it.
The two monks walked up and down the aisles with carved lumen trays tweezered between their Edgar sticks. Piled upon the trays were tiny stone effigies of Morrison Carney affixed with rubber gaskets. ‘Mr. Carney must ask you to please seal your ears,’ said the first Mouth. He was wearing razor-tipped Teflon espadrilles and a tie made of water. As one of the trays passed before him he chose two stones and gently screwed them into his ears. When he lifted his arms, Emma could see the dark lump of the holster fastened to his upper torso like a nylon leech.
The second Mouth was blind and his ears had been sewn shut. Someone had sawn off his fingers and his hands looked like two canoe paddles. Sockets sealed with scars.
When everyone’s ears were safely sealed, the monks unmuzzled the blind one’s mouth and Emma saw his lips move. Across the room, the prisoner suddenly stiffened in its skin of burlap and blue plastic, and then something inside it softened, some secret wire went slack, and the Mack collapsed in a heap on the floor of the assembly.
For a moment nobody moved. Then Carney nodded hungrily. The monks placed the harness back on the blind Mouth’s head and tightened the jaw screws. The one in the Teflon espadrilles removed the effigies from his ears and gestured for the pimps to do the same. The lumen platters were passed around and for a moment the only noise in the hall was the sound of the small stones clattering against the trays of hardened light. Emma watched as Carney’s monks approached the fallen figure and rolled it over on its back. One began cutting into its chest with a water knife, while the other inserted his sticks into the wound, pried back the edges and removed a dark object: a hardened bird. Emma heard Merkle gasp beside her and for a moment she thought one of the ear effigies had pierced his latex and he’d sprung a leak. But then she heard his sibilant lisp – he seemed to be speaking from somewhere inside her hair, murmuring his astonishment.
The extracted bird looked like a statue carved out of bread and the monk waved it in the air as if it were a trophy.
Vito climbed down from his chair and pushed his way through the wall of owners to where the Mouth stood beside Carney and the leashed leathermouth. The Mouth cocked his head toward the monks and gestured with one of his talking sticks.
‘Go touch it,’ he told Vito. ‘Don’t be afraid. Yes, yes,’ he nodded, ‘it’s all right, touch it! You’ll find it’s quite dead.’
Vito snatched the ivory stick out of the Mouth’s hand and cautiously approached the monks. One of them lifted the hardened bird in his Edgar sticks and Vesuvius stopped in his tracks.
‘A little moral support would be nice,’ he hissed over his shoulder.
There was a mechanical chorus of clicks as muscle and management alike, reaching into their suits and purses, hitching up their skirts to get at thigh holsters, produced a small arsenal of weapons and cocked them at the object tweezered in the monk’s sticks.
Vito poked at the bird with the talking stick. Tapped on it. Then, satisfied, tossed the stick aside and took the bird from the monk. He hefted it in his hands, lifted it over his head and hurled it at the floor, where it shattered into clumps and fine brown powder. He crouched. ‘Fuckin’ clay.’
‘The principle is simple,’ explained the Mouth. ‘The Word turns clay into flesh. But when spoken in reverse, the Word will render flesh into clay.’
Morrison Carney’s thin sticks quivered like two wires nailed into the wooden knots of his hands.
Checkpoint…checkpoint…checkpoint…dull ribbon of road and sentries. Another spring of endless mud has been launched…drenched trenches, flooded lines, scarecrows blooming along the washed-out routes. Couriers to the front carry the Word sealed inside leather mouths. Steel arabesques of wire, a bleeding pigeon flutters in its cage of concertina. The grunts toss canned crackers at it and watch the bird slice itself to ribbons trying to eat.
Addendums to the Battle Manual have been issued: procedures for handling the Word, for implanting the leather mouths inside the routed faces and hollowed heads of captured Macks and recoding their map cylinders so that they return to their platoons and speak the poison.
The courier eats his canned pears in the rain, the forked fruit round and luminous, as if the Army had sealed the pale asses of infants in syrup and tin. He dreams of his wife back in the city, the child growing inside her. When he returns it will be with a new fear of her flesh and what it harbors. There are barrages aimed at the city. She could be swelling with anything – some seed other than his own.
Weeks of mud and broken throats. A crude surgery beneath sandbag ceilings with screws and water saws and stale coffee at noon under the tarpaulin roof of the officer’s bar. Rain stuttering against the empty de-fol drums. Mold bearding the wooden faces of the Macks behind their veil of razor wire. The courier combs the shell with soundsticks. Ties off wires. Drills holes in the aluminum skin to administer anesthesia. The leather mouth unsewn and every ear stoppered in case of a malfunction.
The courier’s ears are raw from the plugs
. He rubs ointment on them. Snatches sleep as the jeep rumbles through scorched hamlets and villes…troop movements that the recon readers mistake for a proliferation of the local horticulture…a charred carcass stapled to a tree – a small dog or a child with a tail. He’s read the Intel reports but the information is always sketchy: Mack moving through animalist villes, burning coops and hooches; children barking down the roads, slaughtered in ditches and sprinkled down with lime and Rot Powder.
He wakes mid-journey to find his travel pillow smeared black with blood.
Early May, LZ Zero. The courier is holed up in a cardboard room under a pale canopy of seed netting. He’s got a case of canned fruit, a pound of reconstituted coffee that he traded for his last pair of dry socks, and a jar of squink he pulled from the reeking wreckage of a Vegan distillery near Hill 186. He’s been waiting two days for a transport to come through, to carry him back cityside. He only sees the sun to pee. He’s still carrying one leather mouthpiece in his pouch. Couldn’t make the delivery. When he got to 186, the hill wasn’t there. Gone. Just a burnt pan of dust and stubble weed.
He sleeps and his wife creeps into his dreams with her swollen belly and a tongue of leaves. He wakes into a neon blizzard of fruit flies, burns a bug chip and nurses the bottle. When a whore convoy rolls in at dusk he picks a girl and pays her in chocolate and cigarettes. Out in front of the Media bunker the network vampires in their plastic helmets and high-end eyewear roast pods the size of dogs on elaborate rotisseries. The whores disembark in their combat boots and their cardboard lingerie, their skin brittle with anti-seed sealant. Behind the latrine, the garbage ditch is peppered with disposable vinegar bottles and packets of powdered douche.
That June the platoon crawled into LZ Bravo for debriefing and resupply. Two nights in, Wally was called to the Colonel’s bunker. The old man poured thimblefuls of squink from a canteen. The Lieutenant was there with a courier from Intel, and the spook proceeded to give Wally a lecture on the Word. The lecture was like one of those declassified documents that the censors have gone over with a blackout marker.
‘I don’t get it,’ Wally said.
‘You’re not supposed to,’ the courier told him. ‘This is a weapon. You’re a grunt. Your job is to listen and do what you’re told. I have other deliveries to make, so we don’t have very much time. All you have to know is that the Word is a sound-based weapon, like a music gun. If your ears aren’t properly plugged, it will be the last thing you ever hear.’
It came sealed inside a leather mouth which they affixed to Wally’s face with wires and straps. ‘The flap fits under the tongue,’ the courier explained to the Lieutenant and the Colonel. ‘Your people should always wear ear protection when they install this.’ Wally panicked and started to struggle when they put it on him. Tasted blood or metal or maybe the Word itself, he couldn’t tell which. The Lieutenant put a hand on his shoulder, told him to cut it out and sit still. The Colonel grunted and turned away with a look of disdain, but whether it was intended for the weapon or its wearer Wally couldn’t tell.
They strapped him to the chair and brought him something in a cage. A mute yap child dressed in rind with long ears and a pink hairless tail. It cowered in its wire box nervously gnawing the tip of its tail. The courier sealed Wally’s ears, unlatched the mouth and nodded to him. Wally opened his jaws and felt the Word being launched from its leather harness. A moment later, the spook leaned forward, latched the mouth shut and removed it from Wally’s face. A subtle change seemed to have occurred in the room, but Wally couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
‘I’ll be damned,’ the Colonel muttered. The squink had turned to dust in his glass. And now Wally noticed that the yap had turned an ashen color inside its box of wires. The courier produced a water knife and cut the cage apart. The yap remained motionless.
‘If you don’t mind, Colonel…your sidearm.’
The old man unbuckled his holster and handed his weapon over in a trance. The courier gently tapped the child on the head with the butt of the revolver and the creature crumbled.
The Lieutenant let out a long whistle and crouched on the floor of the bunker, dipping his fingers in the dust and sniffing them.
A week later they kicked north into Yellow Sector, warding off the firefall with voodoo and canned music and rain puppets that the grunts had pinned with prayers and tucked inside their helmet liners. They carried the Word with them, loaded inside its leather mouth and sealed in a lock-box lined with silencing foam, ready to be taken out and affixed to Wally’s face at the first sign of enemy movement. It took two keys to open the box (Wally wore one on his tag wire and the Lieutenant carried the other) and the lid was rigged with a trip charge so that if the locks weren’t turned in the proper sequence chances were pretty good that Wally and the Lieutenant wouldn’t be going home for Christmas.
All that spring and into the summer they humped it through burning hamlets and animalist villes, forcing Mack out into open ground and killing him with language. The new weapon was thorough and unspectacular. It was a stillness that came in the form of a secret sound, hardening the air, turning animals into coal. The grunts left behind them a trail of dead rivers and great sections of sky that had hardened and fallen to ground like broken blue windshields. Whole fields lay frozen into gray dust. They moved from town to town in mute procession with Wally hoisted on a pole, the automatic mouth strapped to his face and loaded with language…the sound sweeping before them through the long, silent summer and into autumn, until winter arrived to impose its armistice of snow, the war a white page on which the enemy stood hardened in postures of flight: an alphabet of frozen gestures in which Wally searched vainly for some semblance of meaning.
The Stiff and the Stile
Stepan Chapman
Stepan Chapman (1951–) is a visionary American writer of speculative fiction best known for the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Troika (1997). His first published story was selected for Analog by John W. Campbell with other early fiction in the Damon Knight-edited Orbit anthologies. Over the past three decades, Chapman has primarily been published in US literary magazines. Collections include Danger Music (1997) and Dossier (2001). Chapman is best thought of as the bastard love-child of Mark Twain, Leonora Carrington, and Philip K. Dick. His underrated tales often take the form of fables or cautionary contes cruels and combine absurdism with the horrific – as in ‘The Stiff and the Stile’ (1997).
In the vast desert known as Oregon, during the peak years of the Bovine Brain Rot, a poor old woman lived all by herself, in a hovel in a graveyard. Her tin roof shed the worst of the acid rain, and she was glad to have the graveyard’s thick stone wall between her and the half-starved cutthroats that roved the road. The old woman lived by her wits, venturing by night into the ruins of Portland to steal garbage from the dumpsters there.
One summer afternoon she hobbled into town with a purse full of coins and a shopping basket. She’d resolved to purchase a bit of fresh meat for her larder – a string of worm sausages perhaps, or a nice roast of dog.
She dickered with a one-legged butcher for over an hour and bought herself an elderly male corpse. The cadaver was a plague victim but in those days no one could afford to be choosy. The butcher thumped the corpse soundly on its skull with a mallet before winding it in butcher’s paper. It wasn’t completely dead yet, which proved the freshness of the meat.
The old woman grabbed the stiff’s ankles and dragged it out of town along the muddy turnpike that led to her cozy graveyard. As twilight fell, she’d got as far as the graveyard wall. Built into the wall was a narrow gap, which served as a stile for foot traffic but kept out the mad cows.
The corpse had submitted gracefully to being dragged through the mud, but at the stile it turned contrary and feigned rigor mortise. Whichever way the old woman turned it, however she shoved it or kicked it or rearranged its limbs, the stiff refused to go through the stile. The old woman had no intention of spending all night on the open road. She s
houted angrily at the corpse.
‘Stiff, Stiff, go through the stile! Elseways I shan’t get home tonight!’ But the stiff just stuck out its chin and stared at her rudely. Some people don’t know what’s good for them.
The old woman called to the graveyard’s ditch rat. ‘Rat, Rat, bite this Stiff! It won’t go through the stile, and I shan’t get home tonight!’ The rat crept out of the weeds, sniffed the corpse, then scurried off again, sniggering nastily.
The old woman hid the stiff beneath some brambles and started back toward Portland to seek assistance. She came to a dumpster which was the home of a mutant trash goblin.
‘Goblin, Goblin, strangle Rat! Rat won’t bite Stiff. Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I shan’t get home by dark!’ The unsanitary goblin lifted its pointy head to listen, then smirked and slipped back into the refuse. The old woman resumed her search for help.
She hobbled to the industrial district, to a derelict radio factory where the Buzz Saw That Frightened Itself was hiding from the police. (The saw was a runaway lumber mill from a local timber yard. On its first day on the job, it had slaughtered a nest of baby sparrows, and its mind had snapped. Now it led the life of a hermit, wanted by its owners, shunned by other power tools, and torturing itself every night with an industrial grinder.)
‘Saw, Saw, gore Goblin! Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. The Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I can’t go home!’ The saw only cowered into a corner and whimpered. The old woman turned away in disgust.
She shifted a manhole cover and climbed down a shaft into the sewer system. She made her way to the cesspit where The Giant Poisoned Lamprey lived, coiled below a churning morass of filth that glowed with a yellow light and belched brown vapors. (In her youth, the lamprey had sucked some nuclear waste out of a steel barrel, and afterwards she’d never been the same.)