Komodo

by Jeff VanderMeer

  KOMODO

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Cheeky Frawg Books

  Tallahassee, Florida

  This edition copyright © 2014, Jeff VanderMeer.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  This novelette first appeared in Arc Magazine.

  Cheeky Frawg is run by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

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  Ebook interior designed by Neil Clarke.

  Ebook cover designed by Jeremy Zerfoss.

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  KOMODO

  Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the band plays out in the courtyard . . . I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. Don’t worry—it won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

  I’ll admit my story starts in a strange place, but bear with me. It starts inside of a giant green plastic alien head because I was all dressed up and on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not just because of the party but because of the after party . The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

  The weight of the head made me stagger back and forth like a drunkard until I got used to it. The funky smell inside had a kind of intoxicating effect, which might also explain part of the staggering . . . and it made me feel a kind of extra-terrestrial clarity coming on, like the mysteries of the universe might soon be solved, or some small part of them. So this is what it’s like to be free, was one thought, with this giant head on my shoulders, my arms pinned, and the second thought was: it’s so green out there. Even the birds were green. The garbage collectors were green, and so were all the cars. Did I say I was moving fast? Staggering, yes. Running, yes.

  Such feelings overwhelmed me in that moment! The least among them a lingering sense of appreciation that the buildings accommodated people with giant green heads.

  The weight of the head increased as my path took me through a local shopping center, and soon I felt a pressure pulling on my neck, which puzzled me. When I managed to find a reflective surface, I discovered that a rag-tag band of green children had attached themselves to my giant head by means of crude homemade grappling hooks and were by their combined mass throwing off my balance. I had no choice but to take drastic action. I sat down on the pavement and cursed at a rapid rate, in a variety of local languages. After half an hour, the children began to find me less interesting, and left. I was able to continue in my rapid progress without further interference.

  No, child. No, I didn’t really sit down and curse. I rose in a fury and flung juveniles like ragdolls. The ones who had held onto their grappling hooks, which is always a fool’s chance.

  Did I say it was a shopping center? It wasn’t a shopping center, or even a farmer’s market. I only said that so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And they weren’t really children. But this is not entirely the truth, either. Your comfort level—and now I’m not talking to you, who can barely understand this language, but to the watchers , who, by the way, should know that this child has nothing to do with any of this; she’s just a bystander, and may or may not still grow up to be innocent . . . it’s beyond my control, mostly.

  But your comfort level is only one consideration because, after all, I’m the one bleeding out.

  So . . .

  The rest of my journey in the giant head went badly—I think you saw that coming. I walked to the river, lost my balance, and fell into the water, head-first. I bobbed downstream, legs in the air, staring at upside down tadpoles and fish (yes, let’s call them fish) with just enough air to breathe. A strange murky beauty to it all, and from that perspective the river weeds draped down and the alligators (yes, why not?) all pale belly, long throat, and legs weirdly paddling above their torsos. They looked just enough like komodos to alarm me for a moment.

  A while later, I managed to get caught in some branches just as the giant green head I was wearing filled up with water. Wedged thusly, I was able to get right-side up. By then, I was miles from the city and sopping wet. With difficulty, I made it up the steep bank, only to be confronted by a startling and horrible sight.

  I may need to back up and tell the truth again. There were other people involved. There always are. I left the house that morning in such a hurry for a reason—several of them. Someone was after me. Someone had caught up. I had no choice but to jump in the river.

  The head began to fill with water for another reason: the bullet.

  The ones who pursued me smelled funny. Not hilarious funny, but funny —like lime mixed with pumice and salt and then put in a blender for a thousand years and taken out, shaken with ice, placed in a glass with a sprig of basil. When they got angry, though, all of that got sweated away and they smelled like thick, fresh brine. They did not always hold their shape. They appeared far off in the sky hoping to catch me unawares by diving down with silver wings folded. By the time they reached the ground, their wings were gone. If not for that, I would never have been able to escape them . . . although there is always a chance that they wanted me to escape. Games within games. Wheels within wheels.

  Here’s another thing I haven’t said, child: I was expecting them. Just not so soon. Does that sound strange? It’s not nearly the strangest thing. You may have to brace yourself.

  Angels, child. They were angels, and as terrible and transcendent as you might imagine.

  In happier days, those descents, those burning wings, served to captivate me: the pratfalls of immortals. The dramatics that now were charged with fear and stress had, back then, made me love them, just a little bit.

  They dared to take chances, which is what hooks you at first, even if you do find yourself among them largely by chance or fate. To return to their stronghold atop a living mountain—to really come all the way back home—they would eschew riddling their way through the Rips, and instead enter from the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it would take for their huge wings to burn up as they came hurtling down. Their wings were strong, but filigreed like a damselfly, and the flame tore holes. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careened down in droves. Most of the time, they guessed correctly and made it to the ground, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar. The wings would grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

  The unlucky or dumb ones would smash screaming into the lawn and would smolder there until others tended to them. These angels lay there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that wasn’t just pain. They looked like heaps of smoking, quivering tar with just a suggestion of a head with a mouth by then, but smelled like lilies. Such cases would take a long time to heal, but by their standards a decade was just a blink. When you’re immortal or near to it, your idea of play just isn’t the same. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions that take ages to carry out.

  I can guarantee you will be confused for a while, but hopefully it’ll pass.

  The startling, the horrible sight? Not the sudden field of what I’ll say were weeds and wildflowers, even though they writhed a bit more than you might expect. Not the two-story rotting shack beyond that lo
oked like it had once been part of a farm. No, it was what stood outside the door to the rotting shack: a huge brown bear with matted flanks, standing on its hind legs. Or an approximation of a bear. (Some would say that I saw it also as a door.) It had been dead for a long time, its sides caved in along with the right side of its head . . . but still it breathed. I could tell it breathed because its ribs pushed slowly through its fur and leaves swirled up and out and then, with the inhale, fell back inside, only to reappear again, before being lost once more.

  It had eyes that, even through the green wall that lay between us, looked human. Trapped in a staved-in bear skull. I had the impression that it had not been standing there, so tall, so un-hidden, until I had made my way up the river bank.

  For a moment, I hesitated. Wouldn’t anyone? But from behind me, down the riverbank, I heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Even without wings, the angels were fast. As I’ve said, they had no need to hold their shape.

  I approached the bear-thing, the dry sedge weeds of the field sandpaper rough against my trousers; let’s face it, they were nipping at my trousers, and they weren’t really even close to being weeds.

  Up-close, the bear’s eyes seemed green flecked with gold. Its muzzle revealed hints of greenish bone. Its paws looked soft, its yellow claws curling in toward cracked pads. Despite a crown of buzzing flies, the bear smelled like a body after the flesh had been worn away by weather and erosion and scavengers: clean but with some lingering hint of sharpness that bit into the nostrils. I knew this not from that moment, stuck in an alien head that suppressed my senses, but from all the other times. Oh yes, there had been other times. I wasn’t new to this, not anymore.

  “You’re a sad shit brick house!” I shouted at the bear through my giant green head.

  “You’re a pathetic puddle of flesh,” the bear rumbled.

  “You’re a run-down monster, a walking zombie, a ramshackle disgrace.”

  “Human.”

  “Horlak.”

  Never talked smack with a rotting bear? It’s quite the experience, especially we were speaking in his language, which takes a long time to master. But the bear and I shared a history of sorts, and I had been preparing for this moment for ages. Angels can’t control bears, and bears don’t particularly care for angels. It’s a grudging respect, a suspicious alliance. But in doing what I had done, what I planned to do, I had given up any pretense of angelhood.

  There came a sound then like shards of glass smashing into a brisk wind and two huge gangrenous paws fixed onto the sides of green head and, as I braced myself, yanked it off without disturbing the breathing apparatus clamped like gills to the side of my neck.

  The bear—Seether—tossed the head to the side. I stood there blinking in the sudden glare. Sodden. Real head bleeding from a bullet hole, the red leaking out. Hair slicked back from river water and sweat. Arms chaffed raw. Shoulder sore. I was humanoid, as usual. I could switch genders and emulate many races, but I always had to have four limbs, two of them made for walking. Which is one reason I’d required the green head.

  “I need safe passage—now ,” I said.

  A thin, drawn-out growl like a rusty gate being pulled open. “They’ll find you, no matter how I help.”

  “If I fail, you festering maggot-metropolis, it’s all over anyway,” I said, with a smile.

  “If you fail, I want your most succulent marrows,” Seether said with good humor. I think.

  Behind us, at the river bank, they came closer, with their mouths that could see and their eyes that could hear. Together, the bear and I entered the hut and closed the door behind us. Inside, it was, my child, if you can believe this, wider than on the outside: a vast, tumbling, dark space. I felt as if I took a step in the wrong direction—any direction—I would be falling off of a cliff into nothingness.

  “Are you ready?” I asked the bear that was not a bear, the corpse that wasn’t a corpse.

  It took a moment to think that through. Was I really ready? A Seether is something ancient from the future, a refutation of everything you think you know about physics. It is not exactly immortal but not exactly mortal; it exists in a state between, continually resurrecting itself from the memory of the ghosts of its own decay. It absorbs the shadow of the valley of death to sustain itself, and for all I know it calls upon all the coiled energy of whatever black hole happens to be closest, too. You can forge an alliance but you must know that not all Seethers are sane. Not all Seethers can be controlled. When even the angels don’t know what end game the celestial bears are playing, you have a right to be wary about the ally you’ve chosen . . . especially one you’ve bribed with rotting honeycomb and a bag of ghost frogs.

  “I’m ready,” I said, because I had no choice, really, but to follow my plan. A terrible, stupid, complex, simple plan.

  As I said the words, Seether roared and tore out my throat with one slow smacking slap of his paw. Then, as I was dying, he leapt upon me and as I screamed in the surprise you can’t help expressing and became numb and lost consciousness, Seether feasted upon me, devouring my entire body until not even a pile of bones was left.

  Dying in this way did not much bother me because I could block out the pain, and I had no choice. This was the only way to escape my pursuers, even if I would have preferred more conventional travel.

  It did not bother me except for the terrible numb tugging and pulling.

  You may still be confused, which is allowed. It’s okay to be confused—the world’s a far stranger place than you can possibly imagine, and although I’m trying to allow you blinders, trying to ease you into it gently, some dislocation cannot be avoided. And, as I mentioned, I’m not really talking to you (or you, child, although you certainly seem mesmerized by my English).

  Questions, yes? Here are a few answers, for now.

  Were my pursuers really angels? No, as I’ve said just because they had wings didn’t make them angels. Do you know why they weren’t angels? Because there are no such things as angels, not the way your culture understands angels. Think of them as alien beings who had long ago forgotten where they had come from and where they were going to, who nonetheless maintained ears and eyes on millions of alt-Earths and other inhabited planets. Think of them as an omnipresent version of a prying Uncle Fred, if you like.

  Was I the only one wearing a giant green alien head in that place? No. Everyone was wearing a giant green alien head, except for the juveniles that had jumped me in the shopping center, driven by a pheromonal imperative common to their kind.

  Had the bullet hurt me badly? No. I was already slowly dying from another wound as I entered the hut with Seether, one I’d sustained well before I ever donned the green alien head. A stray bullet wound couldn’t stop me at that point, not when I was about to be devoured by a bear, and especially not from a bullet fired by the local police, who had picked up my scent because of my sojourn at the “shopping center.” The angels had taught me to seal off injured parts of my body from the rest. At least, for a time.

  What wound were you dying from, then? A bite on the calf from a transdimensional komodo. The normal variety of komodo, the type you might know, isn’t intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid. But the second kind—which are not really komodos at all, but that’s as close as I can come—are intelligent and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time. They’re of a size between a crocodile and a dinosaur—and they can exist in more than one reality at once. Their skin takes on the texture and color of whatever they’re seen against. These komodos can travel where they like, and are deadly mischievous. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule, and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might trouble someone living in a cabin. You can’t take it personally.

  Well, then, why should komodo poison trouble you more than a bullet? What you don’t know about the transdimensional properties of the komodo can kill you in more than one place. They can scent your wound through time, through s
pace; it sporls out before them, like a mist that curls and beckons, while you’re more like a rabbit with a pocket watch who’s been stuffed with sawdust . . . and now that sawdust, that essential matter, is falling out of you in chunks and you’re feeling more and more like part of the background, the scenery. Everything is receding, except for the komodo. The komodo’s getting closer and closer. Reeling you in through its sixth, its seventh senses. That tongue forking out. The bandy-legged progression over rough terrain. The smell of rotting flesh that you can’t quite tell. Is it you or the komodo? Is it your life on his breath? Is this the last thing you’ll ever see or feel? That ugly, pitted bullet-head? That shit-eating grin? Because the thing is, you have to die to escape a komodo. You have to let your wound take you, and not many people are up for that.

  Do you feel like you’re on solid ground now?

  What if I told you the harbingers of the komodos are ghost frogs, apparitions that appear in hovering fashion just prior to a komodo’s appearance and feed off of their energy?

  I didn’t think so.

  After being devoured by a Seether, you exist in absolute darkness and silence for a long time. You are alone, floating in nothing. This can be peaceful, especially since a moment before you were being eaten alive. Or it can be disconcerting, especially since a moment before you were being eaten alive.

  As I floated, unable to feel my body, as light and effortless as I would ever be, I relived my initial contact with the angels. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, even though you might want to. Their civilization has existed for millions and millions of years. Even as they pursue their purpose, they have somehow forgotten it. When you come into contact with them, you feel at first like you are encountering someone vastly powerful and vastly empty, as if their thoughts now only congregate along the thin inner surface of their skull, with the entirety of the rest of that space given over to . . . what ?