Its umbrellas beat like scooping bat wings, and the greased hessian held it. It flew random as a butterfly, staring at the moon with cats’ and dogs’ eyes, its numerous limbs splayed. It hunted with urban bramble, thorned stalks that whipped and pinioned prey from the air and the ground. It scoured the scrubland of cats. It spasmed between tower blocks, each wing contraction jerking it through the air. It shouted the words it had learned, without sound.
There were only two nights that it could fly, before it was too large, and it loved them. It was aware of its pleasure. It used it as it grew. The summer became unusually hot. The familiar hid in the sudden masses of buddleia. It found passages through the city. It lived in wrecking yards and sewers, growing, changing, and using.
Though it replaced them regularly, the familiar kept its old eyes, moving them down itself so that its sight deteriorated along its back. It had learned caution. It was educated; two streets might be empty, but not identically so, it knew. It parsed the grammar of brick and neglected industry. It listened at doors, cupping the cones of card, the plastic funnels with which it extended its ears. Its vocabulary increased. It was a Londoner.
Every house it passed it marked like a dog: the familiar pissed out its territory with glands made from plastic bottles. Sniffing with a nose taken from a badger, it sprayed a liquid of rubbish-tip juices and the witch’s blood in a rough circle across the flattened zones of the north city, where the tube trains emerged from underground. The familiar claimed the terraced landscape.
It seemed a ritual. But it had watched the little mammals of the landfills and understood that territory was a tool, and it used it and learned it, or thought it did until the night it was tracing its limits into suburban spaces, and it smelled another’s trail.
The familiar raged. It was maddened. It thrashed in a yard that reeked of alien spoor, chewing tires and spitting out their rags. Eventually, it hunkered down to the intruder’s track. It licked it. It bristled throughout its body of witch-flesh and patchwork trash. The new scent was sharper than its own, admixed with different blood. The familiar hunted.
The trail ran across back gardens, separated by fences that the familiar vaulted easily, trickled across toys and drying grass, over flowerbeds and rockeries. The prey was old and tough: it told in the piss. The familiar used the smell to track, and learned it, and understood that it was the newcomer here.
In the sprawl of the outer city the stench became narcotic. The familiar stalked silently on rocks like hooves. The night was warm and overcast. Behind empty civic halls, tags and the detritus of vandalism. It ended there. The smell was so strong, it was a fight drug. It blistered the familiar’s innards. Cavities opened in it, rudimentary lungs like bellows: it made itself breathe, so that it could pant to murder.
Corrugated iron and barbed wire surrounds. The witch’s familiar was the intruder. There were no stars, no lamplight. The familiar stood without motion. It breathed out a challenge. The breath drifted across the little arena. Something enormous stood. Debris moved. Debris rose and turned and opened its mouth and caught the exhalation. It sucked it in out of all the air, filled its belly. It learned it.
Dark expanded. The familiar blinked its eyelids of rain-wet leather offcuts. It watched its enemy unfold.
This was an old thing, an old familiar, the bull, the alpha. It had escaped or been banished or lost its witch long ago. It was broken bodies, wood and plastic, stone and ribbed metal, a constellation of clutter exploding from a mass of skinless muscle the size of a horse. Beside its wet bloody eyes were embedded cameras, extending their lenses, powered by organic current. The mammoth shape clapped some of its hand-things.
The young familiar had not known until then that it had thought itself alone. Without words, it wondered what else was in the city—how many other outcasts, familiars too foul to use. But it could not think for long as the monstrous old potentate came at it.
The thing ran on table legs and gripped with pincers that were human jaws. They clenched on the little challenger and tore at its accrued limbs.
Early in its life the familiar had learned pain, and this attack gave it agony. It felt itself lessen, as the attacker ingested gulps of its flesh. The familiar understood in shock that it might cease.
Its cousin taught it that with its new mass it could bruise. The familiar could not retreat. Even bleeding and with arms, legs gone, with eyes crushed and leaking and something three times its size opening mouths and shears and raising flukes that were shovels, the intoxicant reek of a competitor’s musk forced it to fight.
More pain and the loss of more self. The little insurgent was diminishing. It was awash in rival stink. A notion came to it. It pissed up in its adversary’s eyes, spraying all the bloody muck left in it and rolling away from the liquid’s arc. The hulking thing clamored silently. Briefly blinded, it put its mouth to the ground and followed its tongue.
Behind it, the familiar was motionless. It made tools of shadows and silence, keeping dark and quiet stitched to it as the giant tracked its false trail. The little familiar sent fibers into the ground, to pipework inches below. It connected to the plastic with tentacles quickly as thick as viscera, made the pipe a limb and organ, shoving and snapping it a foot below its crouching opponent. It drove the ragged end up out of the earth, its plastic jags spurs. It ground it into the controlling mass of the old familiar, into the dead center of meat, and as the wounded thing tried to pull itself free, the guileful young familiar sucked through the broken tube.
It ballooned cavities in itself, gaping vacuums at the ends of its new pipe intestine. The suction pinioned its enemy, and tore chunks of bloody matter from it. The familiar drew them through the buried duct, up into its own body. Like a glutton it swigged them.
The trapped old one tried to raise itself but its wood and metal limbs had no purchase. It could not pull itself free, and the pipe was too braced in earth to tear away. It tried to thread its own veins into the tubing and vie for it, to make its own esophagus and drink down its attacker, but the vessels of the young familiar riddled the plastic, and the dying thing could not push them aside, and with all the tissue it had lost to the usurper, they were now equal in mass, and now the newcomer was bigger, and now bigger still.
Tissue passed in fat pellets into the swelling young familiar sitting anchored by impromptu guts. Venting grave little breaths, the ancient one shriveled and broke apart, sucked into a plughole. The cobweb of its veins dried up from all its borrowed limbs and members, and they disaggregated, nothing but hubcaps again, and butcher’s remnants, a dead television, tools, mechanical debris, all brittled and sucked clean of life. The limbs were arranged around clean ground, from which jagged a shard of piping.
All the next day, the familiar lay still. When it moved, after dark, it limped though it replaced its broken limbs: it was damaged internally, it ached with every step it took, or if it oozed or crawled. All but a few of its eyes were gone, and for nights it was too weak to catch and use any animals to fix that. It took none of its opponent’s tools, except one of the human jaws that had been pincers. It was not a trophy, but something to consider.
It metabolized much of the flesh-matter it had ingested, burned it away (and the older familiar’s memories, of self-constitution on Victorian slag heaps, troubled it like indigestion). But it was still severely bloated. It pierced its distended body with broken glass to let out pressure, but all that oozed out of it was its new self.
The familiar still grew. It had been enlarging ever since it emerged from the canal. With its painful victory came a sudden increase in its size, but it knew it would have reached that mass anyway.
Its enemy’s trails were drying up. The familiar felt interest at that, rather than triumph. It lay for days in a car-wrecking yard, using new tools, building itself a new shape, listening to the men and the clatter of machines, feeling its energy and attention grow, but slowly. That was where it was when the witch found it.
An old lady came before it. In
the noon heat the familiar sat loose as a doll. Over the warehouse and office roofs, it could hear church bells. The old lady stepped into its view and it looked up at her.
She was glowing, with more, it seemed, than the light behind her. Her skin was burning. She looked incomplete. She was at the edge of something. The familiar did not recognize her but it remembered her. She caught its eye and nodded forcefully, moved out of sight. The familiar was tired.
“There you are.”
Wearily, the familiar raised its head again. The witch stood before it.
“Wondered where you got to. Buggering off like that.”
In the long silence the familiar looked the man up and down. It remembered him too.
“Need you to get back to things. Job to finish.”
The familiar’s interest wandered. It picked at a stone, looked down at it, sent out veins and made it a nail. It forgot the man was there, until his voice surprised it.
“Could feel you all the time, you know.” The witch laughed without pleasure. “How we found you, isn’t it?” Glanced back at the woman out of the familiar’s sight. “Like following me nose. Me gut.”
Sun baked them all.
“Looking well.”
The familiar watched him. It was inquisitive. It felt things. The witch moved back. There was a purr of summer insects. The woman was at the edge of the clearing of cars.
“Looking well,” the witch said again.
The familiar had made itself the shape of a man. Its flesh center was several stone of spread-out muscle. Its feet were boulders again, its hands bones on bricks. It would stand eight feet tall. There was too much stuff in it and on it to itemize. On its head were books, grafted in spine first, their pages constantly riffling as if in wind. Blood vessels saturated their pages, and engorged to let out heat. The books sweated. The familiar’s dog eyes focused on the witch, then the gently cooking wrecks.
“Oh Jesus.”
The witch was staring at the bottom of the familiar’s face, half-pointing.
“Oh Jesus, what you do?”
The familiar opened and closed the man-jaw it had taken from its opponent and made its own mouth. It grinned with thirdhand teeth.
“What you fucking do? Jesus Christ. Oh shit, man. Oh no.” The familiar cooled itself with its page-hair.
“You got to come back. We need you again.” Pointing vaguely at the woman, who was motionless and still shining. “Ain’t done. She ain’t finished. You got to come back.
“I can’t do it on my own. Ain’t got it. She ain’t paying me no more. She’s fucking ruining me.” That last he screamed in anger directed backward but the woman did not flinch. She reached out her hand to the familiar, waved a clutch of moldering dead snakes. “Come back,” said the witch.
The familiar noticed the man again and remembered him. It smiled.
The man waited. “Come back” he said. “Got to come back, fucking back.” He was crying. The familiar was fascinated. “Come back.” The witch tore off his shirt. “You been growing. You been fucking growing, you won’t stop, and I can’t do nothing without you now and you’re killing me.”
The woman with the snakes glowed. The familiar could see her through the witch’s chest. The man’s body was faded away in random holes. There was no blood. Two handspans of sternum, inches of belly, slivers of arm-meat all faded to nothing, as if the flesh had given up existing. Entropic wounds. The familiar looked in interest at the gaps. He saw into the witch’s stomach, where hoops of gut ended where they met the hole, where the spine became hard to notice and did not exist for a space of several vertebrae. The man took off his trousers. His thighs were punctuated by the voids, his scrotum gone.
“You got to come back,” he whispered. “I can’t do nothing without you, and you’re killing me. Bring me back.”
The familiar touched itself. It pointed at the man with a chicken-bone finger, and smiled again.
“Come back,” the witch said. “She wants you, I need you. You fucking have to come back. Have to help me.” He stood cruciform. The sun shone through the cavities in him, breaking up his shadow with light.
The familiar looked down at black ants laboring by a cigarette end, up at the man’s creased face, at the impassive old woman holding her dead snakes like a bouquet. It smiled without cruelty.
“Then finish,” the witch screamed at it. “If you ain’t going to come back then fucking finish.” He stamped and spat at the familiar, too afraid to touch but raging. “You fucker. I can’t stand this. Finish it for me, you fucker.” The witch beat his fists against his naked holed sides. He reached into a space below his heart. He wailed with pain and his face spasmed, but he fingered the inside of his body. His wound did not bleed, but when he drew out his shaking hand it was wet and red where it had touched his innards. He cried out again and shook blood into the familiar’s face. “That what you want? That do you? You fucker. Come back or make it stop. Do something to finish.”
From the familiar’s neck darted a web of threads, which fanned out and into the corona of insects that surrounded it. Each fiber snaked into a tiny body and retracted. Flies and wasps and fat bees, a crawling handful of chitin was reeled in to the base of the familiar’s throat, below its human jaw. The hair-thin tendrils scored through the tumor of living insects and took them over, used them, made them a tool. They hummed their wings loudly in time, clamped to the familiar’s skin.
The vibrations resonated through its buccal cavity. It moved its mouth as it had seen others do. The insectile voice box echoed through it and made sound, which it shaped with lips.
“Sun,” it said. Its droning speech intrigued it. It pointed into the sky, over the nude and fading witch’s shoulder, up way beyond the old woman. It closed its eyes. It moved its mouth again and listened closely to its own quiet words. Rays bounced from car to battered car, and the familiar used them as tools to warm its skin.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Andy Duncan
A RAILROAD BULL WAS in charge, of course, cane-tapping around the planks till he tripped the trap, feeling two-handed up the post to find the rope notch, hissing to himself like a slow leak.
Under the planks, six coppers were planted in a circle like fence posts. One had a bumble drilling into his shin, kicking the sawdust out behind, and another sprouted dandelions from his knobby knees. Everything grows in the Rock Candy country, even a copper’s dried-out joints. I once had a toothpick bloom halfway to my mouth, and that is true, as true as the average.
Penned inside the cop ring, a little leather-faced woman in too-big overalls and a too-small porkpie hat sat in the grass, sharp chin on her knees and skinny arms wrapped around. She cussed a blue streak in a tired, raspy boy-voice, like she had wearied of it. “You withered-up hollowed-out skanktified old shits, old sons.”
Me, I’d been down to the lake for a bowl of stew and was feeling belly-warm and prideful. Some miracles get stale with use and others go bad quicker than a Baptist flounder, but friends, a bowl of Big Rock stew—whether scooped from a lake or poured from a falls or welling up out of a crack in the rocks—will stay a miracle till the world looks level. So I was full of stew and full of myself when I stumbled upon the scaffold in the making. I sat beneath a cigarette tree and picked a good one and fired it up by looking at it, and, puffing, I called from the side of my mouth: “What’s happening here, Muckle?”
The bull quit sniffing along the fat rope long enough to yell, “What’s it look like?”—not that he knew himself, all the railroad police being blind since birth, if birth they could claim. They were all just alike, but only one came around at any given time, and he always answered to Muckle, so whether Muckle was the full-time name of an individual or a sort of migrating title like a Cherokee talking stick I’d given up wondering long before.
The setting sun flashed off Muckle’s dark glasses as he sniffed his way to just the right spot. “Ahhh,” he said, gnawed the rope to mark the place, and started threading it through the
notch.
“What has the lady done?” I asked.
“It ain’t what Dula’s done, Railroad Pete,” Muckle replied. “It’s what Dula wants to do.”
“And that would be?”
“Dula wants to.” He shuddered. “Dula’s trying to.” He spat. “Dula’s hankering to, angling to, ootching and boosting to … work.”
“Work!” snorted the prisoner.
“Work!” groaned the coppers.
“Work!” rumbled the far-off Big Rock Candy, its glittery crystal slopes to the north for a change. The ground shimmied. The air cooled. Mr. Muckle’s dickey flew up out of his Sunday vest with a ping. A dark black cloud ate the sun and rained down on us a flock of roasted ducks, burnt on one side and raw on the other.
“I ain’t neither,” Dula said.
“You see?” Muckle screeched. “You see what the world is coming to? Not a one of them ducks edible!” He shoved his dickey back down and straightened his celluloid collar. The bulls always dressed as if for a railroad owner’s ball—I suppose to show up the rest of us stiffs. “Shrimp bushes blooming with razors, chocolate streams hardening up, ice cream turning sour before it’s even out of the cow—and it’s all the fault of this one, a-using around here, a-using around there, all over Hell’s Half Acre, trying to talk perfectly good people into what? Into hitching the Eastbound!”
At that my cigarette lost its taste, and I put it out with a look. Heard screaming in the distance late at night, the Eastbound left your bones rattling like rails; even hearing its name at sunset was enough to give a grown man the greeny ganders. The old-timers said we’d all ridden the Eastbound to get here, and were blessed to have forgotten the details. I looked at Dula again, the set of her jaw. There was something in her face I couldn’t name, something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
Muckle tied the noose, his face paying no attention to his hands. They were like two crabs fighting. “There ain’t no way to ride no Eastbound nohow,” Muckle went on, addressing the topmost cigarette on the tree, “if you don’t scheme and run and sweat and jump and climb and hide and fight and kill and that’s work and to hell with it.”
New Wave Fabulists Page 24