Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn’t climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers’ house and pull the Myers’ baby from the second story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers’ house’s foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.
“This is just like—” Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice.
“I know,” Suzie said, hushing him.
When they looked back at the Myers’ house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy that looked like Billy Carson.
The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.
The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.
The ropy thing continued its work.
They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry’s Dad’s binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.
“I’m telling you it’s—” Jerry said again.
Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: “—just like my father’s trick.”
They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.
They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing’s passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic’s ceiling and walls.
“Do you think it’s happening everywhere?” Jerry asked.
“What do you think?” Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad’s battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.
He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.
“Everywhere . . . ” Jerry whispered.
“Looks that way,” Suzie answered.
“It can’t be . . . ” Jerry said.
Suzie ate another cracker.
Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. “But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn’t real!”
“It seemed real at the time, didn’t it?” Suzie asked.
Jerry continued to sob. “He was always playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry it had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!” He looked earnest and confused. “He was always doing things like that!”
“You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn’t you?” Suzie asked.
“Yes! But—”
“Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real.”
Jerry was frantic. “But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground, and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and absorb them into its pulsating jelly body—”
He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. “It wasn’t real!”
“You believed.”
“It was just a trick!”
“But you believed it was real,” Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. “Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real.” She looked up at him. “Maybe that’s why it hasn’t gotten us—because you did it.”
She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.
“Maybe you did it because you love me,” she said.
Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. “I do love you,” he said.
They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers’ house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens next door to the Myers’. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood’s dogs and cats.
Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antennae. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn’t even know their host’s names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.
Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.
“Everywhere,” she said.
As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place, of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.
There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing up into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.
They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.
Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled any more. His eyes became hollow, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.
Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, “Make me stop believing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get the ropy thing out of my head.”
Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry’s ears.
“Nothing in there but wax,” she said.
“I don’t want to believe anymore,” Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.
“It’s too late,” Suzie said.
Jerry la
y down on the floor and curled up into a ball.
“Then I want to die,” he whispered.
Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.
It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.
Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.
Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.
Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.
A few pale snowflakes fell.
“I want it to end,” Jerry whispered hoarsely.
He had not had even a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.
“I . . . want it to stop,” he croaked.
He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child’s body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.
When he spoke, it was a soft question: “It wasn’t me, it was you who did it.”
“Yes,” Suzie said. “I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you.”
There was silence for a moment. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the corn field, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.
Quietly, Jerry said, “I don’t love you anymore.”
For a moment, Suzie’s eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.
“Then there’s nothing left,” she said.
Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.
The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.
And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.
The Third Bear
Jeff VanderMeer
It made its home in the deep forest near the village of Grommin, and all anyone ever saw of it, before the end, would be hard eyes and the dark barrel of its muzzle. The smell of piss and blood and shit and bubbles of saliva and half-eaten food. The villagers called it the Third Bear because they had killed two bears already that year. But, near the end, no one really thought of it as a bear, even though the name had stuck, changed by repetition and fear and slurring through blood-filled mouths to Theeber. Sometimes it even sounded like “seether” or “seabird.”
The Third Bear came to the forest in mid-summer, and soon most anyone who used the forest trail, day or night, disappeared, carried off to the creature’s lair. By the time even large convoys had traveled through, they would discover two or three of their number missing. A straggling horseman, his mount cantering along, just bloodstains and bits of skin sticking to the saddle. A cobbler gone but for a shredded hat. A few of the richest villagers hired mercenaries as guards, but when even the strongest men died, silent and alone, the convoys dried up.
The village elder, a man named Horley, held a meeting to decide what to do. It was the end of summer by then and the leaves had begun to disappear from the trees. The meeting house had a chill to it, a stench of thick earth with a trace of blood and sweat curling through it. All five hundred villagers came to the meeting, from the few remaining merchants to the poorest beggar. Grommin had always been hard scrabble and tough winters, but it was also two hundred years old. It had survived the wars of barons and of kings, been razed twice, only to return.
“I can’t bring my goods to market,” one farmer said, rising in shadow from beneath the thatch. “I can’t be sure I want to send my daughter to the pen to milk the goats.”
Horley laughed, said, “It’s worse than that. We can’t bring in food from the other side. Not for sure. Not without losing men.” He had a sudden vision from months ahead, of winter, of ice gravelly with frozen blood. It made him shudder.
“What about those of us who live outside the village?” another farmer asked. “We need the pasture for grazing, but we have no protection.”
Horley understood the problem; he had been one of those farmers, once. The village had a wall of thick logs surrounding it, to a height of ten feet. No real defense against an army, but more than enough to keep the wolves out. Beyond that perimeter lived the farmers and the hunters and the outcasts who could not work among others.
“You may have to pretend it is a time of war and live in the village and go out with a guard,” Horley said. “We have plenty of able-bodied men, still.”
“Is it the witch woman doing this?” Clem the blacksmith asked.
“No,” Horley said. “I don’t think it’s the witch woman.”
What Clem and some of the others thought of as a “witch woman,” Horley thought of as a crazy person who knew some herbal remedies and lived in the woods because the villagers had driven her there, blaming her for an outbreak of sickness the year before.
“Why did it come?” a woman asked. “Why us?”
No one could answer, least of all Horley. As Horley stared at all of those hopeful, scared, troubled faces, he realized that not all of them yet knew they were stuck in a nightmare.
Clem was the village’s strongest man, and after the meeting he volunteered to fight the beast. He had arms like most people’s thighs. His skin was tough from years of being exposed to flame. With his full black beard he almost looked like a bear himself.
“I’ll go, and I’ll go willingly,” he told Horley. “I’ve not met the beast I couldn’t best. I’ll squeeze the ‘a’ out of him.” And he laughed, for he had a passable sense of humor, although most chose to ignore it.
Horley looked into Clem’s eyes and could not see even a speck of fear there. This worried Horley.
“Be careful, Clem,” Horley said. And, in a whisper, as he hugged the man: “Instruct your son in anything he might need to know, before you leave. Make sure your wife has what she needs, too.”
Fitted in chain mail, leathers, and a metal helmet, carrying an old sword some knight had once left in Grommin by mistake, Clem set forth in search of the Third Bear. The entire village came out to see him go. Clem was laughing and raising his sword and this lifted the spirits of those who saw him. Soon, everyone was celebrating as if the Third Bear had already been killed or defeated.
“Fools,” Horley’s wife Rebecca said as they watched the celebration with their two young sons.
Rebecca was younger than Horley by ten years and had come from a village far beyond the forest. Horley’s first wife had died from a sickness that left red marks all over her body.
“Perhaps, but it’s the happiest anyone’s been for a month,” Horley said.
“All I can think of is that he’s taking one of our best horses out into danger,” Rebecca said.
“Would you rather he took a nag?” Horley said, but absentmindedly. His thoughts were elsewhere.
The vision of winter would not leave him. Each time, it came back to Horley with greater strength, until he had trouble seeing the summer all around him.
Clem left the path almost immediately, wandered through the underbrush to the heart of the forest, where the trees grew so black and thick that the only glimmer of light came from the reflection of water on leaves. The smell in that place carried a hint of offal.
Clem had spent so much time beating things into shape that he had not developed a sense of fear, for he had never been beaten. But the smell in his nostrils did make him uneasy.
He wandered for some time in the deep growth, where the soft loam of moss muffled the sound of his
passage. It became difficult to judge direction and distance. The unease became a knot in his chest as he clutched his sword ever tighter. He had killed many bears in his time, this was true, but he had never had to hunt a man-eater.
Eventually, in his circling, meandering trek, Clem came upon a hill with a cave inside. From within the cave, a green flame flickered. It beckoned like a lithe but crooked finger.
A lesser man might have turned back, but not Clem. He didn’t have the sense to turn back.
Inside the cave, he found the Third Bear. Behind the Third Bear, arranged around the walls of the cave, it had displayed the heads of its victims. The heads had been painstakingly painted and mounted on stands. They were all in various stages of rot.
Many bodies lay stacked neatly in the back of the cave. All of them had been defiled in some way. Some of them had been mutilated. The wavery green light came from a candle the Third Bear had placed behind the bodies, to display its handiwork. The smell of blood was so thick that Clem had to put a hand over his mouth.
As Clem took it all in, the methodical nature of it, the fact that the Third Bear had not eaten any of its victims, he found something inside of him tearing and then breaking.
“I . . . ” he said, and looked into the terrible eyes of the Third Bear. “I . . . ”
Almost sadly, with a kind of ritual grace, the Third Bear pried Clem’s sword from his fist, placed the weapon on a ledge, and then came back to stare at Clem once more.
Clem stood there, frozen, as the Third Bear disemboweled him.
The next day, Clem was found at the edge of the village, blood soaked and shit-spattered, legs gnawed away, but alive enough for awhile to, in shuddering lurches, tell those who found him what he had seen, just not coherent enough to tell them where.
Later, Horley would wish that he hadn’t told them anything.
There was nothing left but fear in Clem’s eyes by the time Horley questioned him. Horley didn’t remember any of Clem’s answers, had to be retold them later. He was trying to reconcile himself to looking down to stare into Clem’s eyes.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Page 22