by Nick Mamatas
He drove the spear through her dry chest.
There was a sound like twigs breaking.
Horley woke covered in leaves, in the dirt, his body curled up next to the old woman. He jumped to his feet, picking up his spear. The old woman, dressed in a black dress and dirty shawl, was dreaming and mumbling in her sleep. Dead hornets had become entangled in her stringy hair. She clutched a dead toad in her left hand. A smell came from her, of rot, of shit.
There was no sign of the door. The forest was silent and dark.
Horley almost drove the spear into her chest again, but she was tiny, like a bird, and defenseless, and staring down at her he could not do it.
He looked around at the trees, at the fading light. It was time to accept that there was no reason to it, no why. It was time to get out, one way or another.
“A pattern of heads,” he muttered to himself all the way home. “A pattern of heads.”
Horley did not remember much about the meeting with the villagers upon his return. They wanted to hear about a powerful witch who could help or curse them, some force greater than themselves. Some glint of hope through the trees, a light in the dark. He could not give it to them. He told them the truth as much as he dared, but also hinted that the witch had told him how to defeat the Third Bear. Did it do much good? He didn’t know. He could still see winter before them. He could still see blood. And they’d brought it on themselves. That was the part he didn’t tell them. That a poor old woman with the ground for a bed and dead leaves for a blanket thought she had, through her anger, brought the Third Bear down upon them. Theeber. Seether.
“You must leave,” he told Rebecca later. “Take a wagon. Take a mule. Load it with supplies. Don’t let yourself be seen. Take our two sons. Bring that young man who helps chop firewood for us. If you can trust him.”
Rebecca stiffened beside him. She was quiet for a very long time.
“Where will you be?” she asked.
Horley was forty-seven years old. He had lived in Grommin his entire life.
“I have one thing left to do, and then I will join you.”
“I know you will, my love.” Rebecca said, holding onto him tightly, running her hands across his body as if as blind as the old witch woman, remembering, remembering.
They both knew there was only one way Horley could be sure Rebecca and his sons made it out of the forest safely.
Horley started from the south, just up-wind from where Rebecca had set out along an old cart trail, and curled in toward the Third Bear’s home. After a long trek, Horley came to a hill that might have been a cairn made by his ancestors. A stream flowed down it and puddled at his feet. The stream was red and carried with it gristle and bits of marrow. It smelled like black pudding frying. The blood mixed with the deep green of the moss and turned it purple. Horley watched the blood ripple at the edges of his boots for a moment, and then he slowly walked up the hill.
He’d been carelessly loud for a long time as he walked through the leaves. About this time, Rebecca would be more than half-way through the woods, he knew.
In the cave, surrounded by all that Clem had seen and more, Horley disturbed Theeber at his work. Horley’s spear had long since slipped through numb fingers. He’d pulled off his helmet because it itched and because he was sweating so much. He’d had to rip his tunic and hold the cloth against his mouth.
Horley had not meant to have a conversation; he’d meant to try to kill the beast. But now that he was there, now that he saw, all he had left were words.
Horley’s boot crunched against half-soggy bone. Theeber didn’t flinch. Theeber already knew. Theeber kept licking the fluid out of the skull in his hairy hand.
Theeber did look a little like a bear. Horley could see that. But no bear was that tall or that wide or looked as much like a man as a beast.
The ring of heads lined every flat space in the cave, painted blue and green and yellow and red and white and black. Even in the extremity of his situation, Horley could not deny that there was something beautiful about the pattern.
“This painting,” Horley began in a thin, stretched voice. “These heads. How many do you need?”
Theeber turned its bloodshot, carious gaze on Horley, body swiveling as if made of air, not muscle and bone.
“How do you know not to be afraid?” Horley asked. Shaking. Piss running down his leg. “Is it true you come from a long way away? Are you homesick?”
Somehow, not knowing the answers to so many questions made Horley’s heart sore for the many other things he would never know, never understand.
Theeber approached. It stank of mud and offal and rain. It made a continual sound like the rumble of thunder mixed with a cat’s purr. It had paws but it had thumbs.
Horley stared up into its eyes. The two of them stood there, silent, for a long moment. Horley trying with everything he had to read some comprehension, some understanding into that face. Those eyes, oddly gentle. The muzzle wet with carrion.
“We need you to leave. We need you to go somewhere else. Please.”
Horley could see Hasghat’s door in the forest in front of him. It was opening in a swirl of dead leaves. A light was coming from inside of it. A light from very, very far away.
Theeber held Horley against his chest. Horley could hear the beating of its mighty heart, as loud as the world. Rebecca and his sons would be almost past the forest by now.
Seether tore Horley’s head from his body. Let the rest crumple to the dirt floor.
Horley’s body lay there for a good long while.
Winter came—as brutal as it had ever been—and the Third Bear continued in its work. With Horley gone, the villagers became ever more listless. Some few disappeared into the forest and were never heard from again. Others feared the forest so much that they ate berries and branches at the outskirts of their homes and never hunted wild game. Their supplies gave out. Their skin became ever more pale and they stopped washing themselves. They believed the words of madmen and adopted strange customs. They stopped wearing clothes. They would have relations in the street. At some point, they lost sight of reason entirely and sacrificed virgins to the Third Bear, who took them as willingly as anyone else. They took to mutilating their bodies, thinking that this is what the third bear wanted them to do. Some few in whom reason persisted had to be held down and mutilated by others. A few cannibalized those who froze to death, and others who had not died almost wished they had. No relief came. The baron never brought his men.
Spring came, finally, and the streams thawed. The birds came back, the trees regained their leaves, and the frogs began to sing their mating songs. In the deep forest, an old wooden door lay half-buried in moss and dirt, leading nowhere, all light fading from it. And on an overgrown hill, there lay an empty cave with nothing but a few dead leaves and a few bones littering the dirt floor.
The Third Bear had finished its pattern and moved on, but for the remaining villagers he would always be there.
Widely regarded as one of the world’s best fantasists, bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer’s book-length fiction has been translated into fourteen languages, while his short fiction has appeared in several year’s best anthologies and short-listed for Best American Short Stories. His most recent books have made the year’s best lists of Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Weekly. He is also the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. A two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, VanderMeer has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In addition to his writing, VanderMeer has edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the critically-acclaimed Leviathan fiction anthology series and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. He will also co-edit the inaugural edition of Best American Fantasy. VanderMeer grew
up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction. He now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann, and three cats.
THE FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT
Michael De Kler
Rule Number One: No Crying.
It always happens when he apologizes. When his anger snowballs into a rage of screams and punches I don’t shed a tear. I’m a statue then, incapable of feeling the pain erupting in my body. Later when he says he loves me, that he’ll never raise his hand again or lock me away or tie me up, when he promises to treat me like a human being, that’s when the tears flow. It’s funny how I always believe it for a moment. I feel a pain in my chest that I think is love, before remembering it’s just a cigarette burn, a new scar forming over an old scar forming over an older scar, the raw skin brushing against the inside of my shirt.
Even now, hearing him ask for forgiveness almost makes me believe he cares again, that it’s another start of a new life for us. I think about kneeling to say a prayer of thanks, but the little slices he cut into my knees make kneeling down impossible.
Rule Number Two: No Praying.
It made him nervous. He looked at me as if he really believed it worked. If I prayed long enough and wished hard enough, maybe it would come true. Maybe I’d be taken out of this house and away from him. He said it made me look like a child wishing on a star for some pathetic dream, that I was wasting my time. I said, you’re probably right.
I try to encourage him often. To agree and submit. That’s what keeps me alive. And of course, not breaking the rules. He says the rules are there to protect me. It’s when rules aren’t followed that people get hurt. Without them, you wouldn’t know why you’re being punished. You’d think the slaps and punches were just for his amusement.
Breaking the rules lands me in here. I’m sitting on the floor in the corner of this small room staring at the spot on the wall that used to be a window. The wooden boards defend against any ray of sunlight attempting to enter.
I usually pace around the room to keep myself busy. I’m supposed to think about why I force him to do this, why I draw the anger out of him. But the pain in my foot is getting worse and I can’t stand for too long. Spots of red already seeped up to the surface of the thick cloth. The bandage is actually a ragged strip torn from my favorite wool sweater. Not much of it is left now, just the right sleeve and part of the collar. The soft fabric feels so soothing against the cuts and scratches.
I need a distraction from the throbbing ache so I slide over a few inches, exposing the loose floor board near the wall. I pry up the board by the small knot hole and pull out the box hidden underneath, bringing it close to my chest. Already I feel safer, calmer, with the old jewelry box cradled in my arms. My mother gave it to me just before I left, her idea of a wedding present. I’m not sure why she thought I needed it. But now it holds something more valuable than any jewelry I was never given.
Inside the box is my toe.
Rule Number Three: Never Talk Back.
The way you end up with a toe hidden in a box is this: defend yourself. Tell him you can’t take it anymore, that you’re leaving and never coming back. Pick up the phone as if you might call the police this time. Scream until your lungs ache. Unload the entire nightmare of a marriage in one long string of obscenities and threats. Stand up to him for just that one moment, ignoring the inevitable flood of pain you know will wash over you when you’re done, when the storm quiets down and he takes back control. It will be worth it. It always is.
This prison was once a nursery. At least that was the idea. I have a blurry memory of the two of us planning it. A pink wallpaper border still lines part of the wall just below the ceiling. I trace the edge with my eyes like it’s a timeline of our lives together. The beginning is flawless. The little cartoon animals look so happy and carefree. Near the other end of the wall, the paper is torn and shredded where the glue wasn’t strong enough to withstand his anger. He used to say it was just in his blood, that he couldn’t help it, back when he still felt the need to explain himself to me. His father made him that way, he’d say. It was just something I’d have to get used to.
I can’t resist another look so I lift the lid of the box to see if the bandage needs changing. Another strip from the wool sweater is wrapped around my toe to keep it safe. I once read that when the wool is sheared off it’s full of lanolin that acts as an antibiotic. They squeeze this fat and grease from the wool and use it in creams and ointments. The lanolin is long washed away before the wool ever becomes a sweater. At least that’s what they say. But they never felt the soothing touch of the fabric on an open sore. How it cools the pain down to a dull, distant throb, like a mother’s kiss on a scraped knee. Or how it fills the space between the other toes, making you forget the bloody stub left behind.
Pain for me is not the way most people think of it. It’s a part of my life, intertwined within my everyday routine, the way going to work or reading the newspaper is a part of any normal day for other people. To truly feel something, you need to compare it to an opposite feeling. The frozen air of a late winter morning bites at your skin after you walk out of your warm, cozy home. It’s the change, the deviation from normal that arouses your senses. My pain is always there. It never leaves or changes. I’ve learned to deal with it.
That day was the exception.
He tied me to the bed and left the room, letting the mystery boil inside me. I knew he needed to top himself this time. I took away his dignity, his control over my actions during those few moments when I said everything I wanted to say to him for years.
I knew he wouldn’t kill me though, and that’s what scared me in those moments while I wiggled my hands around waiting for him to come back, the abrasive rope shaving tiny patches of skin from my wrists. For the first time in so long I felt real fear, wondering how he would not kill me. How he would try to bring me to that fine line between life and death, only to pull me back into an existence worse than any hell that awaited me.
I immediately recognized the object he held in his hands when he returned to the bedroom. In a former life I rather enjoyed gardening, sitting in the sun on a spring day, planting a new bed of flowers and waiting for those first buds to push up through the soil. I accumulated a collection of tools over many years and was quite proficient in using them. So my stomach lurched when I saw the blade of the pruning shears glinting in the light from the dresser lamp as he walked by. Before he ever got near the bed I knew that I was about to experience a whole new kind of pain.
The important thing to remember about pruning shears is to keep them razor sharp. Even the small variety, small enough to fit in your pocket, can cut through a tree branch the diameter of a nickel. You may need to put a little muscle into it, but it’ll cut. And never leave them out in the rain. The rust dulls the blades all to hell.
He knelt at the foot of the bed and from this distance I could tell the shears saw many rainy days.
He took a long time deciding which one would go. I felt his rough fingers sifting through my toes like he was deciding which piece of chocolate to eat first out of the box, giving each one a squeeze.
When the cold blades finally wrapped around one of my middle toes I squirmed my hands around, hoping to build up enough pain in my wrists to divert my senses away from the new pain. He began to squeeze the handles, the rusty blades trying mightily, and finally succeeding, at penetrating the skin. I think I actually shocked him with how loud I screamed. He looked up at my face, surprised at first, but then satisfied that he achieved such a reaction from me. I considered begging him to stop, but before I pushed the thought to my mouth he squeezed again. I pulled my arms so hard from the headboard I thought the rope might pull the skin off my hands like a glove.
All those techniques and tricks for dealing with pain that I developed over the years all went out the window as the edge of those blades pressed against the sm
all bone in my toe. The grating sound vibrated through my entire body like getting a tooth drilled. He twisted the shears around as he squeezed harder, apparently having trouble cutting through.
I passed out just after I heard the metal clap of the two blades closing shut.
The television woke me up sometime later that day. He lets me watch it after the really bad punishments. My hands were untied and my foot was wrapped in gauze. Spikes of pain sliced up through my body and pounded against the inside of my skull. I felt too weak to move or peek at the gore beneath those bandages. I tried to focus on the television. Some people debated whatever topic made headlines that day. In between the throbs of pain I heard snippets of a conversation.
“ . . . an abomination of the creation of life . . . ”
“ . . . of course there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not evil. It’s progress . . . ”
“ . . . science gone mad . . . ”
Eventually I realized the subject of the discussion. Somewhere far away in a lab in some other country, far from my world that exists only in this house, away from the pain and misery and forgotten dreams, a team of scientists cloned a sheep.
From the video clip of the animal running around a barn, I could tell she was happy.
I’m back in my room sitting in the corner clutching the box in my arms. A smile forms on my face, something I used to think could never happen again. I peek inside the box, unable to resist another look. The tiny appendage, now independent of my body, looks so feeble yet holds so much hope. It’s the new beginning I’ve been waiting for. My second chance.
New Rule: What’s Good for the Sheep is Good for Me.
Maybe one day those scientists will decide it’s time to try a human. I’ll get it out somehow. I’ll figure out a way. A box will arrive on someone’s desk, someone that might see the value of what’s inside.