by Tim Waggoner
“Hello, Jayce.”
Jayce smiled back. “Hello, Dad.”
Virgil’s smile widened into a grin. “Figured it out, huh?”
“Yeah. Not that it was any great trick, now that I know Mom’s inside me. She can’t hide anything from me anymore.”
“Want a beer?” Virgil asked. “I know it’s early, but I sure could use one.”
Without waiting for Jayce to reply, he came out from behind the counter, walked to one of the coolers – not the one containing the vessels – grabbed a couple Sam Adams, and returned. He held the bottles up to his mouth and breathed a small cloud of darkness onto the caps. He breathed in again, and the caps dissolved. He blew the black dust away from their mouths and then handed a bottle to Jayce. Jayce took it, pressed the cold glass rim to his lips, and drank. Nothing had ever tasted this good to him before. And it was emotionally satisfying, too. After all, what boy didn’t want to one day share a beer with his father?
“You were the man my mother slept with back when she was a Shadower. Except you weren’t a man, were you?”
Virgil took a long sip of his beer, and when he finished, he smacked his lips.
“Valerie was a good woman.” He frowned. “At least, I think she was. I’m not very good at judging that sort of thing. I appeared to her as human at first, in a different form than this one. But I soon revealed my true face to her, and when I did, she pledged her devotion to me, and I became like a god to her.”
“Just like with Nicola.”
“Except I never had sex with her. There was no need, since I’d already procreated. Valerie turned against me after you were born, though. She tried to protect you from me.” He snorted. “As if that were possible.”
“You were the one who drove the black van that picked up Nicola and her friend when they were kids, weren’t you? Why the van? Get tired of appearing and disappearing at will?”
“I use whatever methods – and guises – my work requires.” He gestured toward the face he currently wore. “Case in point.”
“What happened to the girl who was with Nicola?” He paused as he reached for her name. “Gretchen?”
“I only needed one of them, and Nicola was the stronger of the two.”
Jayce didn’t have to ask what had happened to Gretchen. He had a good idea.
“You posed as Virgil so you could meet Emory, right? Hell, you probably created this damn place just so she could get a job here. Maybe you steered her toward Crimson Splendor and The Hole Thing too, so she would be captured and I’d come looking for her.”
“I posed as the manager of Emory’s apartment complex as well. I needed to make absolutely certain that everything happened according to plan.”
“But why involve her?” Jayce demanded.
“Something changed in your mother after you were born. Once she held you, gazed into your wide, wondering eyes, fed you at her breast, she could no longer bear the thought of you one day taking my place. And so she left the Cannery and never returned.”
“If she wanted to keep me away from you so bad, why didn’t she move to a different town?”
“There was nowhere for her to go. Shadow is everywhere, to one degree or another. And wherever Shadow is, I am. She worked hard to keep you away from Shadow, and you were a big help to her. When, despite her best efforts, you caught a glimpse of Shadow, you were so damn good at forgetting it. Practically a genius, really. I knew you could never embrace your heritage on your own. You needed…encouragement. A push in the right direction. And so I gave it to you.” He smiled. “To help prepare you to take over the family business.”
“And Emory was that push.”
“Yes.”
“Was Ohio Pig part of your plan too? Was he one of your followers, like Nicola?”
Virgil shook his head. “No, but he did prove useful in the end, didn’t he? For his amusement factor, if nothing else.”
They drank in silence for several moments after that. Jayce was still human enough to hate his father for manipulating him all these years, and he hated him even more for what he’d done to Nicola, and especially for how he’d used Emory. But his emotions weren’t as strong as they should’ve been, and in fact, they didn’t seem altogether genuine. More like echoes of emotions he knew he should feel, but couldn’t quite. He’d changed too much, he realized. He wasn’t really Jayce Lewis anymore, only a walking ghost of that man.
Jayce finished his beer and sat the empty on the counter.
“Why do you need a successor?” he asked.
“Entropy,” Virgil said. “If we’re to keep the balance, we’re subject to it like anything else in existence. We might be able to put death off a little longer than most, but it catches up to us in the end. I knew my time would come one day, just as it did for my mother and for her father before her, all the way back to the screaming chaos that in its madness and agony birthed the universe. There have been Harvest Men and Women since this planet was only a ball of magma hurtling through space, and they will be here long after it’s nothing but a cold, empty rock continuing to spin out of blind habit.” He shrugged. “It is the way of things. You too will need a successor one day.”
“No offense, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to create a child knowing its only purpose is to become a monster.”
For an instant, Virgil’s eyes became large and glossy black, but they quickly became human once more.
“Good thing you already had a child then, isn’t it?” He finished the last of his beer and set the empty down. “Good talk, but it’s time I was moving on. And you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. A good harvest to you, my son.”
Jayce’s only reply was to nod. Then he breathed upon his father, and when he inhaled again, Virgil was gone, without even an ash figure to mark where he’d been. He lived inside his son now, as did all the Harvest Men and Women who had come before him. Jayce was like an infinitely receding collection of nesting dolls, one inside the other, and every being the Harvesters had collected since before the beginning of time dwelled within him as well.
It was magnificent.
Jayce – now bald, skin a mottled gray, eyes large black orbs, mouth a tooth-filled ring, hands cruel-looking claws – turned away from the counter and moved in a series of rapid jump-cuts to the door. He stepped outside and into the sunshine of a new day.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2018 Tim Waggoner.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, Mike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-013-8, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-011-4, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-014-5 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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FLAME TREE PRESS is the trade fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing, with editorial offices in London and New York. We launch in September 2018 with our first list of new titles, focusing on excellent writing in horror and the supernatural, crime and mystery thrillers, science fiction and fantasy. Our aim is to explore beyond the boundaries of the everyday, finding new pathways for the imagination, with tales from both award-winners, original voices and debut writers.
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