Eclipse One

by Jonathan Strahan

  And then—it was as if someone put a tap to a hole in the top of my head, and ran some kind of cold syrup through me—four figures stepped from four different directions into that part of the road. And I suppose it came from their throats, but the music—the four different notes of it, holding on and on without taking any new breaths, and making, if a harmony, so foreign a notion of harmony to my ears that my teeth clenched and creaked on one another to hear it and my mouth watered—the music seemed as sourceless as the light.

  But it was the sight as much as the sound. How can I communicate, I wonder, the sight of those? They were as innocent as babies, and as hairless. They were white-skinned, for goodness' sake! They were nearly naked, which was alarming; they were bare chested, bare breasted I thought; from here I could not see proper whether they were women or men. Each wore a cloth around its middle and a hat upon its head. The pale cloths were strange enough—one apricot, one yellowish, one faded blue, one pink—and draped and tucked-up like a Hindoo-man's, or a baby's napkin between the legs. But the hats, each matching its owner's cloth, oh! How could it be, such simple things, no more than tubes going up from the heads—but tall, tall, and cut in two points at the top—could strike such fear into a heart?

  They did not quite meet, the four. They came to the middle-ish and stood, facing each other and holding each his or her loathsomely offset note. It was a terrible song—not even a song, a terrible cold caterwaul. It was the voice you might hear if you flew up close to the sky, the voice that echoed in the ears of larks and sent them downward trilling and wittering with fright and excitement.

  Out of the dark road beyond them stalked their queen, and this one there was no mistaking the sex. And you might think it a wonderful thing to be in secret watching and some splendid woman appear, fine and full-rounded, stripped to the waist and the nipples on her gleaming unsucked, ungnawed by any child ever, but I tell you this did not man me up. Rather the reverse: I shrank, and the knacks on me fought to be first back into my body, so that I had to cup myself with my hands as I stood there, to warm and protect them, to ease the sick feeling that struck up from them on the sight of that dreadful woman.

  And just as I was too far back and yet I seen those nipples no mistaking, I was well out of hearing, yet Dassel made this little sound in his throat and I heard it. Everything heard it, every owl and leaf and foxlet and bit of grit stuck to my boot. Every one of those infernals heard it; though I did not see them move they were in woken stances now, and their music was suddenly half as loud as had been. Stormcloud beside me were stiff as a wooden donkey, all his relaxment and laziness gone.

  It were like some nightmare. They all turned and had faces, and their arms and their renewed music reached and wavered out like some monstrous sea-nemminy torn itself up from its deep-sunk rock and come lumbering out across the hills, and now must catch some land-fish to swallow. I couldn't see neither of the boys a moment, and then, I see him; it is like the air is water and Dass is being tide-pulled along, like he is already a dead body hauled by his middle and his limbs and head dragging behind.

  All of them was women—how could I have thought them other? I never found that shape more terrifying, the tits like eyes, the hips all blowsed out by that garment, by that cloth. Where was their hair? They must have tucked it up inside them dreadful dumb-caps.

  They gathered poor Dass in—oh!—into that nemminy of flesh and bending voices. I were nearly sick at the moment they first touched him; I saw clear as you see in a tree cut nearly through and poised to fall the approaching of the moment I would go unhinged. The feeling, I thought—with a horror you would not credit were you new-manned and all a-lust for normal women—the feeling of all them breasts, pressing and eyeing you, them stomachs, that ring of weird faces—the hats, oh the hats! leaning and touching and crossing above you!

  "God help me," I said almost soundless, for now that they had Dass it were safe to speak; he had taken their attention off the rest of us. And I stood there clutching mouth and conkers both, fighting off the music that pushed me like that axe-bit tree about to squeak and topple.

  I don't know what they did with his shirt and trews—ate them? Magicked them off o' him somehow; I did not see them throw them out. All I saw, they laid him out among them at their waists and he were bare and vulnerable to them, two each side and the queen at his feet and his arms and head out my end in this dreadful, stupid, moving-underwater way—you dazzle a fowl and it will move just so, slow, enchanted, knowing in some dimmed corner of its mind it ought to struggle. Though they would have been plenty strong to carry him, I did not see in their muscles and movement that they took the weight of him; he lay there on the air and their hands moved above and below him busy, describing upon the space around him and against the skin of his body all the signs that needed making to keep a man afloat. So many, so entangled and entangling! How was he ever to escape?

  Then they came to their decision, and lifted him, and as I watched and moaned they rose to their bare toes. The weight went out of their feet and their toes left the earth and slowly, slowly . . .

  But it were like they were the waist of a skirt, and we the hem, or burrs caught to the hem, the donkey, Bertoldo and me. And as the creatures rose, the folds of the skirt, vast, invisible, drew inward and upward after them, and Stormcloud stumbled from his woodenness and I, I who had not drunk a drop in two days, I scuffed and staggered with the dragging, airy cloth, that was made of their horrid music, that was made of their weird intentions and their nakedness, the gathers of it conjured of their gathering.

  Bertoldo wept and shouted; Bertoldo was mad; he clutched his head as something inside it exploded. You know him; you saw him before. Have he ever been the same? All the punch went out of him, all the snarl, and that was where it happened, before my eyes as the rising women, turning slightly but rebalancing back, drug him into the witch-lit road. There he fell, and he raved and slavered and tried to walk where he lay, tried to hold his head together, pitiful, as the donkey and I came up, with the cart, which might have held nothing of kegs nor any more lawful load it seemed of such little consequence to the beast that pulled it. That cart were witch-worked too, I shouldn't be surprised, to be so light.

  You think you would have fled? You think stayed hidden? Well, I will tell you the worst spell: it was not their dragging music, nor the tidal folds of their cloth; it were the connection that could not be broke without you breaking yourself like Bertoldo done; it were the thing I first told you of, the light; it were the bond tight as wire, strong as chain, between the flying women with their burden, and mine eye.

  This I seen, this I realised, my head dragged back by their heightening magic. White they were above me, and the singing hung in the road there, quite removed from their bodies and independent, a shell of noise at the limits of the light, a horrible reverberation. There hung their grey feet, there swirled their cloths weightless around them, and their thighs went up to shadows, and their elbows busied all around like an animate crown.

  They were eating him! No, they were kissing. They were some of them like leeches upon his skin and one was sucking and mouthing above the point of his chin. His face was in shadow, but his mouth was darker, wide; his hair—that I'd almost been jealous of it, were so raven-black, unfrosted yet by age and responsibilities—creeping around his head in the air like a pail of snakes caught for Saint-day.

  The circle of them span, the pointed feet below, the pointed hats above crisscrossing, nodding. The queen, I saw, was in between his legs, and she had got a fine point up on him and were working all about on him, swooning and swaying and rubbing her self and arms up all his thighs and stomach, pointing her breasts to heaven and then burying them either side of his rod, there in the flesh you never think about you are usually fixed upon the man itself, the two valleys there left and right of it, unsunned and tender, unprotected by hair.

  A long moan was stuck in my throat, sucking out all my breath. Higher they went very slowly and I strained after them
; I would lift, myself, and point my own feet and be dragged up after them, any instant now. Dass were up there among them all, flesh upon flesh, slowly swimming, slowly scrambling. The queen had her hand in the darkness under his buttocks; in the midst of the turning, bright lit, was the great veined spike of the man, almost rumbling under the hum and rub and the irritation of the music, trembling on the point of discharging.

  I reached back over my head for the neck of my shirt, and even as my face drank in every drop of jealousy, and light, and terror—I have never done anything more difficult in my life—I pulled the cloth forward, to cover my eyes, to swathe my head. 'Twere my choice, weren't it?, to break my own mind or to have it broke for me by the sight of those monsters.

  And I ran, as far as the light showed the road at my feet and then I freed my head and without looking back I plunged out of the music into the darkness and I did not stop, scrambling from leaf-wink to star-snippet, beating my feet against the dull ground in the songless quiet so safe, so glorious, until I fell into Leightman's, more or less into old man Cooper's lap.

  "Hie, boy, are we lost?" He was up and ready to flee any implications.

  I sat in Leightman's hay. Cooper gummed and tutted and wanted clarity above me while I got back my breath, great homely whooshes of it into me, out of me, smelling of hay, smelling of the pomander that Mistress Cooper must put among all their clothes; I have smelt it on the younger man in the alehouse, orange-y, clove-y.

  "Where is they? What's up wi' ye?"

  I put up my hand to stop his hissing, to settle him. "They're coming," I said. "All is good. They are just up the road." And I stood and straightened myself, everything most ordinary around me. "I will have them to you in a little."

  "What d'you mean thundering in like you've Mastiff on your tail? Men have fallen over dead from lesser shocks."

  I left him twitching and cursing and went, myself all peaceful and relieved, out again into the spacious night. A breeze had come up, and a freshening stroll it was, a leisurely amble with nothing but the strokings of grasses around me, the snuffling of forest, the limp and pat of the wind.

  Dassel were motionless in the road, dropped there insensible. I cast about for his clothes, but could not find them.

  "Bertoldo? Bertoldo?" I called softly here and there, and finally I found him far back along the roadside trying to disguise himself as a log, but the log whimpered, and shivers went through it like horseflesh shaking off flies.

  I had a right time, as I told Fion, getting the two of those into the cart. 'Twas not that they were so much heavier than I, more that the witchment had taken from them the ability to move helpfully. I forgot, almost, about the kegs, I was so occupied with getting these injured men to home and safety.

  The women, the witches, the bitches were gone that had done this to them, that had turned Bertoldo soft and made Dass the odd unmarriageable character he is. I cannot tell you with what joy I uttered those words to myself, They are gone; they are gone, all the way out to the road there, and all the way back to Leightman's. I cannot tell you even today the relief it is, the gone-ness of them, the surprise it was to look back and see the will in myself, pulling forward my shirt-cloth, breaking the spell that was on my eyes. The clink of Cooper's gold had nothing on it, nor the dispersal of that gold on boots for us all, and on Fion-finery and on a pony, a little bay gelding, bless him, that did not take a piece out of anyone came near, like that donkey done ever after.

  So who were they, husband? Fion says. You said you seen their faces. She cannot believe me, she who can recognise a certain look passing between two women across the far side of the May Fair, beyond the hankerchee-dancing and everything.

  I tell you, I say. Constituted though they were like people, yet there was nothing recognisable about them.

  Except their bosoms. I've told her of my unmanment time and again, but—Sounds like you were too enwitched by five sets o' bare nipples to look properly anywhere above.

  It were not like that, I tell her feebly. It were not.

  The one man who kept his wits on him. She turns to me all fierce and fiery. Who might have named them to Mastiff and got them weeded out fr'amongst us.

  They were no one I knew, I point out again, gentle as I can. There is nothing so disheartening as uttering truth, and your goodwife standing there, fists on hips, outraged and unbelieving.

  So I don't tell about this to Fion anymore. She were the only one I did tell, and well after the glamour of the spoils had worn off. She'd been at me and at me since the night of it. What happened there? You are not the same, and as for those other two. Until I spilled it all out, more fool me, and this is my reward, only rage and accusation. She does not understand at all.

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF TARG

  Paul Brandon and Jack Dann

  It was a typically bitter New York morning.

  The wind was like a splintery hand across the face, each slap feeling like it left tiny shards of ice embedded in the skin. It chased crumpled balls of old newspaper up the gutters, spinning them around the ankles of the hurrying people. Up between the buildings, rivers of flawless blue could be seen mirroring the avenues of grey, cloudless, cold.

  Commuters bustled up the streets, heads bowed, turtled into scarves or high collars. Cars and taxis seethed.

  Just off Fifth Avenue, down a bleak alleyway made almost impassable by large, overflowing dumpsters and trafficked by rats and scraggy cats, a door opened.

  From inside the ally it was no different from any of the other doors; paint-peeled and somewhat bowed, it was utterly unremarkable except for the odd-looking thumb-latch. It appeared to be nothing more than an old back access door to the Starbucks that fronted Fifth.

  As it swung silently open, light bloomed out suddenly, then died away. From across the alleyway, two dark figures could be seen standing within; but it wasn't the store room of a coffee shop that they were inside, not by any means.

  They stood within a small circular chamber. Black brick walls wept water that bled down across a cobbled floor to gurgle down a grated drain. Bodies hung, a few still alive, in various states of interrupted agony from the walls. Small crackles of blue lightning still arced between the two that were still shrieking, the last remnants of the magic that opened the door.

  The two figures that stood just inside were fearsome indeed. Closest to the door was a huge barrel of a man, or at least he would have looked like a man if he'd had a normal head. Great curling horns, polished to an ebony gleam, lifted away from features that more resembled a horse than anything human. His skin was mottled, green and brown like lichen, and he was dressed in formidable-looking armour of interlocking leather plates. In his right hand was an enormous war axe, even more polished than his horns.

  But it was the second figure that commanded the eye.

  Simply dressed, he wore a long black cape and creaseless black pants tucked into his polished black boots. A jerkin, made of blackest leather, was stitched across his chest, overlaying a shirt of midnight silk. He wasn't particularly tall, especially standing next to the other; but what he lacked in stature he more than made up for in presence.

  His skin was white, the pale, chalky white of bones rather than of purity, and his face could simply be described as cruel. From the top of his left brow (where a shock of white hair flared against the black) a wicked scar traversed his face, gouging a line down across the empty socket of his eye to tug the top of his lip into a permanent sneer.

  But it was the other eye that captivated; flat, glassy, like a shark, it seemed to make up for the loss of its twin with an intensity that was little short of terrifying.

  The two figures waited patiently while the blue sparks flickered between the last of the hanging men then, with a last shrieking cry that reverberated quite nicely around the small chamber, the hanging men died.

  Smiling, the man in black gestured politely to the other, "After you, my dear Sarpent," who frowned back at him then stepped through the doorway.

&nbs
p; The air rippled, as if the space between the frame was water and a stone had been tossed in, and as he passed out into the alley, Sarpent changed. Gone was the armour, replaced by a pin-striped, Italian-cut suit. Instead of the wicked axe, his right hand held a black leather laptop case. All that remained of the equine features was a slightly jutting lower jaw on an otherwise handsome face. His skin was the color of an expensive full-cream latte, the horns replaced by beautiful blond curling locks.

  The second man stepped through, and the change was equally startling. His suit was unadorned soft black wool. His hair was still the same; but a mirrored, silver-rimmed monocle covered the vacant eye, a spider thread of gleaming chain tickling down along the ridge of the somehow noble-looking scar. Black Gucci loafers supplanted the leather boots, though nothing could replace his aura of absolute power . . .deep, dark, sickening power. The only splash of color came from a blood-red handkerchief that poked out of his breast pocket.

  "You have the address?" he asked in a voice that brought that same reaction as a broken fingernail down a blackboard.

  Sarpent nodded, tapped his breast pocket and set off towards the bright bustle of Fifth Avenue. When he realized the other man wasn't following, he turned, frowning. "My Liege . . . ?"

  The Dark Lord was bent down, stroking the ear of a tatty black cat that wove between his legs. Even from a half-dozen yards away Sarpent could hear it purring like a little motor. The lord was making little chirping and cooing noises.

  Sarpent took a long, deep, steadying breath and muttered, "And you wonder why we're here?"

  "What was that?"

  "Nothing, oh fearsome and mighty lord."

  The waiting room was paneled with mahogany and smelled faintly of expensive cigars.

  A stunning glass installation the size of a coffee table hung from the wall directly opposite the entrance, its surface laser-etched with a welcome for the visitor to Dr. Hiram Hirsch's Exclusive Evil Consultancy.