The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  From his right eye—the one at the keyhole—there protruded a long, slim, shiny knitting needle; only half of it visible, because the other half stuck in his face, piercing his brain like a skewer.

  The old lady had jabbed her knitting needle through the keyhole and right into his eye. Lotfi cried out, writhing on the carpet that lined the floor, and Marco, who could barely remember his name, tried to help him. The wooden door behind him creaked. Just over Marco’s shoulder he saw the small silhouette of the old house-owner.

  “Poor dear, is he hurt?” she asked lovingly as she pointed at Lotfi, who had stopped screaming and crouched in a corner, groaning, his head turned to the wall, his legs twitching.

  Marco stumbled over the body and broke into a run along the hallway without ever turning back but knowing, knowing all too well that a dark and evasive form hunted him down, just beyond the barely visible corner, and he ran and ran not even remembering his own surname, not even knowing what he was doing in that sick dream. Each time he tried to turn he saw that little silhouette moving quickly, popping up from around the corner; he could just catch a small detail—an old lady’s smile, a cotton wisp of white hair, a surgical boot; it was the old lady, the old lady who was always right behind him, always

  Godless dog, forsworn sodomite, that’s what you are.

  right behind him.

  At the last turn—and he turned back to look at the umpteenth hallway after the umpteenth turn—he crashed into a wooden door, knocking it down with a resounding bang. He landed on the other side like a human avalanche and he was in a new room. He knew who he was. His name was Marco, he was a plumbing technician, he was twenty-eight years old, he had a life, a girlfriend, friends, and he didn’t want to die like all the others, no way. He glanced around the room. He grabbed hold of a cupboard and tugged until it blocked the doorway. He gave one last look and he saw that dark silhouette bending around the corner and in an instant it was the old house-owner, wearing a grey, worn-out overcoat, her hands crossed in front of her, walking toward him with her little surgical boots, and she smiled at him, she smiled and maybe she would treat him to a cup of black tea and some butter cookies (remember what they’re made with) and he’d forget everything and he’d follow her, and then what would happen? Marco didn’t even want to think about it.

  He turned around. The room was long and narrow and there was a small window at eye-level. He ran toward it and looked outside. His spirits fell; the lattice was thick and it was impossible to get out, but someone was passing by out there. Cyclists. Damn cyclists.

  “Hello! Help! Hey!” He banged his fists against the glass. He looked around, seized a piece of wood from the broken door and struck the glass. It didn’t break. Marco was shattered. Devastated by anguish, he slumped down on the dusty floor, thinking it was over. He wanted to let go, to lie down and wait for the old lady to come in.

  Here I come, you stale little sperm.

  “Come with me!” yelled a voice. A man called from the opposite end of the narrow room. He wore a dark coat and had a long beard and moustache. His hair was black and also very long. “Come. She won’t stay out there forever. She’ll figure out a way in. She always does.”

  “What…what…”

  “Come on, man. If you want to live.”

  Marco got up and, in a fever, followed the man to the other exit, the other wooden door. He didn’t understand why but he knew he had to do it. “Who are you?” he asked as they moved through new, old shadowy hallways, over dark carpets, drenched with a stench of sour soup. Wood and chalk frames gave a nice touch to that nightmarish place.

  “Can you hear her? She’s above us now,” he said, ignoring him. Marco looked up and heard a slight creak from the floorboards above. “She always knows where I am but she can’t get at me everywhere. I know the way. I know how to move around without being caught. At first she always found me. She found me and tried to bite me.”

  “Who? Who the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The old lady. The house-owner. The one that killed your friends. I know the way. I know how to get to the places she can’t get into. There are rules. I don’t know who made them, man, but there are rules. There’s the greenhouse and then there’s the bedroom. There it is,” he said and they went around a corner, reaching a dark door. The man went in and showed Marco the small, cramped room, a cubicle full of tiny, dark, and lugubrious pieces of furniture, a sofa with a floral pattern in one corner, and a round window.

  “Can we get out? Can we get out from there?” yelled Marco, running to that slit that looked out onto the outside world. Dark stains of dampness ate away at the ceiling. Desperation reigned in that place.

  The man guffawed. “Don’t you see? There is no way out of this place. I spent the first months banging on the windows. They won’t break and nobody out there can hear you. Cyclists pass by during the day and gypsies during the night but nobody can hear your cries. Sometimes some kids play soccer in that field over there, but in here we’re alone. We’re on our own with her.”

  Marco held his head. “No, no no…” he said, dismayed. He slumped onto the sofa, mumbling incoherently.

  “I sleep there. On that sofa. It’s not so bad. I mean, you get used to it.”

  “How long…how long have you…”

  “No idea. Years, I’d reckon.”

  “And how…how did you survive so…”

  The long-haired, long-bearded man banged his fist against the wall. Marco started. As if to reply through mimicry, the man looked at where his fist had landed—he had just squished a huge spider with extraordinarily long legs. He took its body between two fingers and popped it into his mouth. He swallowed it in one gulp. Marco stared at him, mouth agape. He was so disgusted that he felt like throwing up.

  “You get used to everything. If you want to live, that is.” The man leaned against the wall and slipped down on the floor into a sitting position.

  “Who is she?” Marco asked his new, unexpected companion.

  The man shrugged. “Who knows. Sometimes, even at night, even though day and night are the same thing, I can hear her walking upstairs, I can feel her sniffing me out, because she wants me, she wants to catch me, but she can’t…” he explained, his eyes wild, red all around, as he stared at the black stain on the wall where he had squished the spider. “…so I cling to that sofa, that sofa that reeks of death, I clench my eyes and I imagine that she’s just an animal, a very hungry animal. That’s all,” he said and turned to look at the round window and its lattice, beyond which flowed life and the Martesana. Exhausted, Marco looked toward the round window, too, and saw a group of cyclists passing by. He didn’t even have the strength to cry out.

  “Someone’s going to come looking for us eventually.” The man stared blankly at the round window. Marco couldn’t even answer as he focused on the cyclists passing just a few feet from them. He simply opened his mouth and moved his lips, soundlessly. They wouldn’t have heard him anyway.

  From above them came a furtive shuffle. It was the old lady. She could smell them.

  She couldn’t get to them, but she could wait.

  Tiger Baby

  JY Yang

  JY Yang is Singaporean author whose short stories have been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and many others.

  FELICITY WAKES FROM a dream of hunting. She moves her hands, sleep-heavy, and is surprised to find them human-shaped, with hairless fingers that curl and end in flat, dirty nails. Sheets tangle around her legs, clinging damply to fleshy thighs, knotting around an inert lump she comes to realize is her body.

  Sometimes, not always, she forgets she is human. Especially on mornings like this, with her mind’s eye still burning bright, breathing forests of the night. The taste of her true form lingers: not this body with its rock of pain nestling in between neck and shoulder and the blood pounding in the head and the rancid feel of its dry mouth. Feli closes her eyes, hoping to slip back into the wonderful light darkness, into
her true flesh, dread hands dread feet running across warm concrete, searching, singing, wind sluicing through striped fur as she streaks through the neighbourhood.

  The door makes a loud noise and she startles into wakefulness, craning her head to look. Her mother stands in the doorway, knuckles flush to wood. “You don’t need to work today? You’ll be late.”

  Resentment surges up like a storm wave, like a predator springing from the grass. Her mother does not understand, will never understand, standing in the doorway with her faded shirt and heavy pear-hips and shiny face beginning its irreversible droop. She sees her grandmother reflected in there, worn away by time until the eyes hold only emptiness. Wherever her wild streak comes from, it is not here. Feli drops a hand to the bedspread. “I’m awake.”

  She can’t remember when it started. Which came first, the dreams or the realization of what she was meant to be? How many youthful hours did she spend in corners, softly reciting Blake and feeling a weighty truth?

  Her earliest memory is of tigers, swimming in a moat. How she watched one, on the rock above, pace back and forth in the enclosure, while her father shouted warnings about staying put and her infant sister cried to no one in particular. She is too young to know the word majestic, but from that moment she compares everything to the effortless rippling of muscle under skin, and finds it inadequate.

  She was born in 1986, the Year of the Tiger, the Fire Tiger. These things happen for a reason.

  The knowledge of her true form has been with Feli so long, she’s stopped noticing how it flavours her life. In the shower, glass walls thick with fog, she imagines the water streaming down fur instead of pale, spotty skin. Breakfast—eggs and kaya toast—tastes like cardboard, like tree bark: she wants fresh meat, she wants heft she can tear into, she wants to drink lightly salted blood and not kopi, scalding and bitter. Walking to the train station, the cadence of her arms and legs falls into a feline rhythm, propelling her past the other commuters. Phantom muscles move under her skin, unhobble her from the limitations humanity picked up when it split from its mammalian ancestors. She read that on the internet.

  Robert from IT talks to her at work. He always talks to her at work. A Chinese man with a soft belly and a hairline wearing thin in the middle, he somehow manages to find time in his morning to hover over the semi-partitions of her cubicle, stringing together words that she makes monosyllabic replies to. In her first weeks on the job one of the ladies, a generic over-powdered law clerk who had moved on a few months later, had told her: “He only talks to you because you’re single.” That had been five years ago, when she’d still had her toes dipped in her twenties. Five years later, nothing much has changed, except the size of her trousers and Robert’s bald patch. It’s not that she finds him unpleasant. But Robert is like a wolf to her, strange and canine: she has no use for his loping gait and pricked ears and readily wagging tail.

  He tries to ask her if she’s doing anything tonight, without actually ever asking. She gives noncommittal replies without ever saying no. Her voice rumbles low as she says, “Robert, you know month-ends are very busy for Accounting,” and her throat tickles, as if there’s something stuck in it, like the flexible hyoid bone of big cats that allows them to roar where domestic cats cannot. The sound she wants to unleash would send this entire open-concept office scampering. Scaring Robert isn’t worth that.

  At night she brings the bag of feed down to the void deck. As she spills it on a spread of newsprint, the neighbourhood cats come up and rub against her legs, one after another, like subjects paying respects to their queen. She beckons to their de facto leader, the green-eyed orange moggie, who leaps into her lap and stretches. These times, with the weight of a cat in her lap and the smell of fur against her skin, are the realest parts of her day. She purrs and growls as they swarm around her, their eyes glittering sparks. They will eat only after she leaves.

  Her friends ask her sometimes why she doesn’t keep a cat, doesn’t invite one of the strays she loves so much into her home. But she looks at the eyes burning in the dusk and she knows that she could never inflict that on them.

  The moggie in her lap rumbles, the closest it can manage to a roar. “One day,” she says. “One day they’ll stop asking.”

  It’s funny how time slips past, in between the chunks of work and sleep and feeding the cats, and days roll into weeks roll into months and years. Feli continues the motions of getting up every morning and eating her cardboard breakfast and compressing herself on the way to work and back. The surface of calm she presents to the world hides the fearful symmetry she keeps in the roiling deep.

  The Lunar New Year comes around in an explosion of reds and golds, showers of drums and cymbals and recordings of the sound of firecrackers. Smiling relatives hide pot bellies in starched shirts and wrinkles in extra layers of makeup, passing around sweet, sour, salty, deep-fried excuses for affection in little plastic bottles with red screw-on lids. Years of going through these obligations have dulled the stabs of pain in Feli’s neck and shoulders that these reunions cause. She has learned to suppress her flight instincts, to put on a sickle-cell smile when asked the tickbox questions she gets every year.

  But this year the aunts and uncles leave her alone for the star of the exhibit, swarming around the younger sister who ripens like a fruit, peppering her with questions. About the new house, how big, the due date, did they know the sex? Her sister, with big veiny feet and hair swept into a loose homely bun, entertains them with toothy laughs and fluid sweeps of her straight white arms.

  Feli feels pity for her and the comfort she feels. It’s the same pity she feels when she looks at the dull faces of the office workers who surround her on morning commutes. Her sister will never know what it’s like to be free, will never know the sensation of running in the night, will never know the pleasure of growling low and feeling it deep in the lungs.

  Feli wonders about the child growing in her sister’s belly. It, too, will be born in the Year of the Tiger. Will it be like its Auntie Feli? Impossible. And Auntie Feli. What an ugly collection of syllables.

  Her mother stands with her sister, glowing, looking younger than her sixty years. Afterwards, after the yu sheng has been tossed, her father speaks to her on the sidelines, as the bulk of the family gather around the television with disposable plates of the mess. Tells her how they are thinking of selling the flat, her mother and he, downgrading to one of those three-room flats. She’s turning 36 and now she’s finally eligible to buy government flats as a singleton, and there were a few public launches coming up with studio apartments, weren’t there?

  Cornered, she can only nod mutely, her hands flexing and unflexing. She can’t imagine a house, its confines suffocating her, weighing her down like a brick. She looks out of the window. Leaping away would be easier. Vanish into the night.

  Her parents are bothered because she hardly goes out anymore. She comes home right after work on weekdays (to feed the cats) and stays in most weekends (because she feels too lazy to go out cycling anymore and the board gaming sessions have become tedious). They invite her to their movie nights, try to get her interested in whatever’s on the television, as if that would settle the wild bones rattling inside her.

  She talks to Andy. “It’s that Blake poem,” she says, “I keep seeing and hearing it everywhere. Sometimes at work, I’ll see the words on my spreadsheet instead of numbers.”

  Andy was the only one who hadn’t laughed when Feli had told her the truth back in school. The sunlight catches in her hair as she leans back into the grass of the Botanic Gardens. “Is it just the poem bothering you?”

  “Everything is bothering me. I have dreams every night now. I feel like, I don’t know, something’s about to burst out of me. Like it’s getting harder to hold it back.”

  “You’re just getting more in sync with your true self. Becoming one with the tiger.” Andy’s fingers flutter. She likes animals, draws pictures of half-human creatures with animal heads, and talks about herself a
s though she were a lynx. Sometimes, listening to Andy babble on like a shopping mall water feature, she thinks they could have taken their friendship to a different level if she hadn’t ignored Andy’s advances. But Andy peppers their text conversations with nuggets like *flattens ears* and *offers sympathy paw*, and each one grates under the skin like badly fitting joints. Such things should be kept private; broadcasting them to the world is crass. Shameless.

  No, Andy understands, but she doesn’t understand. Feli smiles and stretches beside her, focusing on the smell of the grass, the sunlight warming her belly. The turmoil she has to keep inside herself. It’s like smothering a forest fire with a second-hand blanket.

  She knows something is wrong even before she pads into the senior partner’s cubicle. It’s the small hushes that have been descending in pockets of the office, the subtle shunting of emails and duties in the weeks before, the pow-wows that see upper management cloistered in one of their mahogany-lined rooms. Even Robert hadn’t come by that morning.

  The firm is run by two men, an older and a younger partner. She can talk to the older one, Yong Chew, a grandfatherly figure who sees reason and could be persuaded. But it is Walter, the younger partner, who wants to see her. He has a face like a marble sculpture, blank alien eyes. Her hands curve as she sits down, a curling motion playing at her lips.

  “There’s no good way to say this,” Walter begins.

  “Am I being fired?”

  A soft huff comes out of Walter as he leans back in his chair. “Well, if we’re going to be so direct.”

  Rushing heat spreads from her stomach to her fingertips, crackling softly. “I am being fired.”

  Walter sighs. Feli’s predator gaze focuses on the lines under his eyes, and the grey in his hair that hadn’t been there when she had started in the job. She feels sorry for him then, sorry for a life that is hollowing him out from the inside. “You know we’ve been trying to cut costs in the last few months. Times are tough. We need to downsize, it’s the only way.” Walter clears his throat. “It was a difficult decision, but the accounting department was one of the areas we identified. And we, uh, we made a decision.”