Terri Windling

by Borderland

  What you make belongs to you. He thought he knew where that help might lie.

  He mounted the bike, trying to ignore the pain in his lower back, his scraped leg, his thighs, and he began to pedal.

  He had an hour of daylight left.

  Anyone less desperate would have turned left at Crescent Canyon. Left led down into the valley, to the world Scooter knew and understood.

  Right led down deeper into the Borderlands.

  He stopped briefly at the intersection of the two roads. He glanced down at the city, though the view was not good from here, and let out a long breath. He looked right, where the way down was steeper and more winding.

  Someone had nailed three hand-painted signs to a telephone pole on his side of the street, near the concrete pole supporting the defunct traffic signal. In fluorescent red letters against white-painted wood, they read:

  HAUNTED FOREST!

  ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.!

  I’D GO BACK IF I WERE YOU!

  “Very funny,” said Scooter.

  And turned right.

  An organism does not require more than the most rudimentary awareness in order to need. Plants need sunlight, ants need chemical trails to form worker lines to food, infants are born with primal needs that will not abate until either they are satisfied or the infant is dead.

  It needed, and to satisfy that need it retraced the path marked by its creator during the day. It coursed slowly down Crescent Canyon. On Derrida it picked up speed and headed west.

  It came upon a man taking his evening jog with his Doberman pinscher. The dog sensed it well before it was on them and turned on its chain, snapping, growling guttural warnings, baring its fangs. The man turned, saw it gliding toward them, and froze in fear. His dog strained at the leash, but the man pulled it closer.

  It sensed them, and sensed that they were not what it needed. It would need to feed soon, but not yet. It passed them by.

  At Scene of the Crime it paused, circled the block of shops once, and stopped at the barred back door.

  Home.

  It went past the door and inside. The rooms were dimly lit with its dull glow of brooding browns and deep reds.

  There was nothing here, and it left.

  Tommy Lee headed toward the front doors of The Factory to open them for the evening. The crowd waited outside, louder than usual tonight.

  Tommy Lee stopped at a scream from outside. He had once seen a man gut-shot, and the agonized bellow that had come from the man had been nothing next to this.

  Something came through the door. It looked like a fucking stormcloud, squeezed into an amorphous shape that pulsed with an inner life, sometimes flaring deep inside. Tommy Lee had seen some weird shit in his life, especially in the last half-dozen years, but he’d never seen anything like this.

  It hovered there for a few seconds, then came toward him. Tommy Lee raised his bludgeon, then found himself wondering what, exactly, he was going to hit. He kept the club raised and waved his other hand. “Get outta here!” he said, feeling foolish. “Go on, get outta here!”

  The thing advanced on him.

  He backed up. One of the waitresses—Sheila—screamed.

  Not looking away from the thing, Tommy Lee told her to shut up.

  Marti appeared from the generator room, wiping her hands on her ever-present rag. “Whoa,” she said mildly.

  Still walking backward, Tommy Lee glanced back at her. He looked back at the thing, still advancing.

  He was beside Marti now, near the door to the generator room.

  His back pressed against the wall.

  They watched it approach the door to the generator room, which Marti had closed but not locked. It paused before the sign, as if reading it, then disappeared into the door without a sound.

  Marti and Tommy Lee exchanged a look.

  “Heat lightning,” she suggested.

  “Right.”

  She shrugged and gestured at the door handle.

  “Shit,” said Tommy Lee, and opened the door.

  It hovered near the generator. Tommy Lee entered, followed by Marti, who ran forward. “Hey,” she shouted. “Hey, you leave that alone!”

  It settled over the generator.

  They watched for another minute, until it rose from the generator and left the same way it had come in. Tommy Lee dashed ahead of it and opened both of the tall wooden doors. People were shouting outside; it got louder when the thing glided out among them.

  A body lay by the front door. It hardly looked human: the sockets around the eyes were hollow, the hands were skeletal, the skin paper thin over bone. It was mummified, grotesque. Its mouth was frozen open in a scream.

  A young woman—spiked hair, torn T-shirt, riding boot on left foot, right foot bare—crouched next to her dirty Malamute. She stood quickly and grabbed her dog by the spiked collar when it bolted, barking, and felt metal slice across her palm. “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  People ran. It showed no indication that it was even aware the crowd existed, but continued west, stronger now.

  Despite the coming of night, Scooter pressed on. The farther he went, the weirder it got. He nearly turned back, once, when something the size of a station wagon leaped across the road in front of him. But it had ignored him, disappearing into the brush and crashing away until he could no longer hear it, leaving no evidence that it had been there at all.

  It was dark now, but the moon was up, half full, and he could still see, a bit. He had gotten down Crescent before dark and without further incident, which he had been worried about, since the twisting road was in bad repair—in no repair at all, in fact. There had been mud and rockslides, and there were many cars rusting away along the road. But he had managed to get by them all and was now well past Sunett. As far as he could tell, the place still looked the same, despite its abandonment. As he crossed the boulevard the silhouettes of giant billboards rose to his right; to the left he saw what might have been torchlight in the distance.

  It was difficult to maintain any speed with the left pedal bent as it was, but he felt he was making perhaps fifteen miles an hour. From what few tales he’d heard of the Borderlands, his pace mjght get him across in three or four hours. But the bike was gradually growing harder to pedal, as if it were being steadily shifted into lower and lower gears.

  Scooter’s thigh muscles felt swollen, massive, and leaden. His lower back throbbed; his right knee burned from the gravel scrape. His stomach growled, and he had to stop and get off to throw up on the road. All he’d put in his stomach today had been half a loaf of bread and close to half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He was thirsty, and now the taste of vomit made it worse.

  A cry cut the night, and on his hands and knees Scooter looked up from the puddle before him. Something dark, not lit by the moon, with wings that flapped with a deep sound of unfurling sails, something the size of a Cessna, spread talons and landed atop a billboard advertising a movie that was coming soon.

  Scooter got on his bike and tried to make like a cat. But then again, maybe it liked cats.

  He pedal onward.

  Years from now Mrs. Hernandez would tell her grandchildren—a generation more familiar with miracles, who yawned at impossibilities—about the living cloud that demolished the trader’s heaven. She would tell them, sitting in her ancient La-Z-Boy recliner, about how she had been rushing to leave the building, and how worried she was because it was nearly dark and she had stayed to gossip and gab much later than was smart. She was walking up the escalator to leave from the second floor, where it was brighter, and she saw it gliding through the glass doors like an angry ghost, silently, seething with colors. Her grandchildren braided glowcotton into their hair as she described her fear and wonder. They glanced at one another as she told how it had enveloped the person closest to it, a man pushing a cart of goods who had stopped to watch when it entered the mall. She told them about the screams—screams of an adult turned into a baby by his terror, screams that came to her, sometimes, in her
sleep. The man had fallen to his knees and began clawing at his face. The few people remaining in the mall came rushing up the escalator. Mrs. Hernandex watched the man—who had traded her an envelope of powdered milk for a loaf of bread only an hour ago—bat at the intangible lights surrounding him. She wanted to turn away, to cover her ears from the screams, but the man saw her and held out a hand to her for help. She had prayed to God every day since then, thinking herself surely damned—because she had not helped him. She had watched his flesh sink down to bone, watched the life fading from his eyes, watched the eyes drained of color as the ghost took his soul and left behind a husk. Slipping into and out of English (which her grandchildren were used to), she told how the windows had blown out, even from the skylights at the top of the huge building, and the way the floor had rumbled.

  And then Gramma Hernandez would end as she always did, telling them to behave, to be good children who were always polite to elders like Gramma, or the ghost might come back after them.

  And of course the children laughed and rolled their eyes at one another, liking their grandmother very much 'cuz she was such a weird old lady who told suj:h great stories, and they’d go out to play Vanish the Rabbit, leaving Gramma to sit in her recliner and stare at the cracked and water-stained ceiling, wondering just how much her memories had become embroidered by time.

  The bike had stopped working. The pedals wouldn’t turn. Scooter coasted to a stop, swung off, and turned it upside down. He tried to turn the pedals, but they wouldn’t budge.

  “Okay,” he said. He stood and looked around. On the right side of the road the sidewalk was broken into large chunks where tendril-like vines had forced their way past. One particularly long vine, thick as Scooter’s arm, wound up a speed-limit sign.

  There was something strange about the telephone poles. They extended horizontal spokes at irregular places along their tall lengths. Scooter looked back the way he had come and saw that on both sides of the road the telephone and light poles had these spokes, but that they diminished in length and frequency the farther back they went, until in the distance the spokes disappeared altogether and the poles looked like normal poles.

  He looked back at the poles near him. Somehow, behind him, they had lost the wires that had once been strung atop them.

  Cars were veined by some kind of crawling vine.

  In the distance he saw an irregular shape the size of a building.

  Scooter sighed. Shit—now he would have to walk through the night. He preferred to spend as little time as possible on his little odyssey; the deeper into the Borderlands he ventured, the more alien it became. He couldn’t imagine what might lie on the other side.

  But he wouldn’t find out unless he got moving. Scooter began to walk, regretfully leaving his bicycle behind.

  It paused at the entrance to the lobby of the Holiday Inn. Sensing the route of Scooter’s day had brought it here. These were the places Scooter had searched for what he desired; these were the places it sought out.

  There was life inside. The last place had had life inside, and it had fed, storing energy for what might be a long search. It was patient—at least, it was incapable of impatience—and as long as there was sustenance, it could seek.

  It went through the glass.

  Around it were voices. It knew voices because they were sound, and sound was part of its composition.

  “Freddy, goddamn—you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Oh, Freddy, don’t fuck with me, man. Really, don’t you—”

  And someone screamed, a white sound tinged with violet, colors it recognized, colors that had been elements of its genesis.

  It stayed for over an hour. They threw things at it, things that went through it, things it was oblivious to. One of the things was a bottle that smashed against the window and cracked the plate glass, leaving behind diamond-white pinpoints of sound that left behind slowly fading afterimages of bright red.

  “Hey, don’t make it mad, asshole,” and that was a tight sine-wave of deep blue.

  “Shee-it,” said a new voice. “I’m leavin’.” And that was a rumble of green.

  Finally it left, heading back the way it had come.

  The telephone poles had grown limbs. As he had walked on, the limbs had forked, the forks had lengthened, the lengths had sprouted branches, the branches sprouted twigs, the twigs sprouted leaves, the number of leaves had grown.

  The telephone poles had become a row of trees.

  The asphalt had grown crumbly, and grass had begun to grow through it. The grass grew longer and more abundant, the road grew harder to disunguish beneath it, the asphalt had been broken up into dark pebbles in the vitalic grass.

  The path had become pebbles in a tree-lined, grassy road.

  The vines veining automobiles had thickened. They had grown into webbing encasing the cars, with only a few glimmerings of moonlight on glass or metal to prove that anything was still under there, had grown mottled and faintly luminous like some carpet-thick fungus, had grown thicker still.

  What had been cars lining a street were now amorphous hedges near tall trees on a grassy path.

  The night had grown brighter with silver light. The moon had thickened, waxed, grown full, become blemished rather than pockmarked, smudged rather than blemished, smooth rather than smudged, and had raised from near the horizon to directly overhead.

  What had been a low half-moon with a cratered face was now a high, silver disk in the night sky.

  Scooter looked for Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper—the only three constellations he knew. He couldn’t find them.

  When he finally reached the building-sized, irregular shape, it startled him so much that he stood staring at it for ten minutes.

  It had been a Bank of America building of steel and glass. It still was, after a fashion—but a tree had grown around it. Huge, many-limbed, gnarled, fringed with thick, ugly, spade-shaped leaves, the tree encased the building like an hallucinogenic vision of an octopus hugging a dollhouse.

  Moonlight glinted from glass shards between tree limbs thick as most tree trunks, and Scooter thought it was hard to tell whether it was a tree that had grown around a building or a building that had been constructed within a gargantuan, hydralike tree.

  Miles later Scooter sat in the fragrant grass at the side of the road and massaged his legs. He tried to ignore the sounds from .. . from the woods around him—screams like tortured cats, like starving babies, hissings of things slithering through long grasses, loud crunchings of heavy things with long strides, and, once, a faint murmur like children chanting.

  Scooter was getting tired. He needed water, would need food soon, and was terrified that he might have to lie down to sleep for a few hours. He lay back in the grass, let out a long breath, and shut his eyes.

  Roxanne stepped out from behind a tree. In her hand she held his Les Paul. Color darted about her head, formed a halo, dispersed, coalesced into a crown. He threw a whiskey bottle at her and she looked sad. The colors vanished and she turned away and headed back into the woods.

  “Roxanne! Roxanne, wait!”

  His shout woke him up. He sat up, heart pounding in his ears.

  Something the size of a dog, hairless and slick looking, with cat eyes and hands like a tree frog, was sniffing at his feet.

  He shot to his feet and let out a sound: “Hnnnn-aahhh!”

  The thing made a loud snoring noise at him, then turned and loped away.

  Scooter swallowed the knotted sock in his throat.

  No sleep. Not yet. Later. Big, fluffy pillows, soft feather bed, warm blanket, all waiting at the end of the road. Promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.

  He walked on.

  Home again.

  At Scene of the Crime it hovered above the air mattress, operating at a low level of energy, patient, searching but not moving. Scooter had come back here, it sensed, had gone from room to room, had stayed in this one spot for several hours. Attuned to Scooter, sens
itive to the traces of its maker, it drifted from room to room, pausing, hovering before the remaining two guitars, lighting the room with itself, now settling above the bed because this was where Scooter had settled. It had no sense of the order of events of Scooter’s day, merely an ability to feel his former presence in a place, to—know—that he had been here, had moved from this spot to that, had stayed in this spot for this long.

  At this lowered energy level the hunger, the need, was not so strong. But it would move again, and the need would be there.

  It would also need to feed.

  Scooter’s body won the fight with his mind; it was either find a place to sleep or drop where he was.

  He climbed a tree, one of those that had evolved from telephone poles during the course of his long walk.

  Arm muscles and lower back fairly screamed as he jumped up, grabbed a thick, low limb, and hoisted himself up. He swung a leg across and sat in the crotch, back against the rough bole, legs dangling on either side of the limb.

  Something toad-sized squawked beside him; he brushed it away without bothering to look at it, then wiped the blade of his hand dry against his now-filthy jeans.

  He shut his eyes and slept.

  * * *

  He stood atop Monaghie with his guitar across his belly. The valley was a sea of people—sell-out crowd, SRO. He held the guitar high and a cheer went up, a cheer that came from so many throats it sounded like the roar of a hurricane, and he jumped from the knoll with his guitar held out before him like a shield, and their upturned faces rose before him as he fell. He felt a deep happiness, knowing that they loved him, that they would catch him, but as he neared their faces grew clearer, and expressions he had thought were adoring resolved into horrified, open-mouthed looks, and fingers pointed up— “Look: he jumped! He jumped!” Happiness became terror as he realized that they weren't going to catch him at all, that they were fleeing from the spot where they saw he would land—

  Scooter woke up feeling awful. He had slept poorly. His neck was stiff; his legs throbbed; his back felt branded.