He stopped, doubting that he dared, after all, all, all . . . to do this. It spoke again instantly, in answer to his hesitation:
Sssssssst
Down he walked, dazed but footsure, stepping down through eons of mist and shadow . . .
Here was the big oak tree that marked an arc of level ground where Larken’s long-defunct compost patch lay. Up in its branches was where his caller awaited him. It seemed that from the tree’s overarching mass a fine, impalpable panic rained down. As if the tree itself, that crooked old leafy mortal, radiated its terror at what this man was bent on doing. Larken stood in this faint rain of fear, like a warning breathed down by the tree.
Though his fear was dire, his hesitation had left him. His legs had carried him too many miles and years on this path to retreat from its terminus.
Its terminus, this compost patch – a sunken crust now which the oak’s canopy overhung. A dried, sunken vegetal crust which to Larken was terror itself, a patch of Absolute Zero. He came to the brink of the worst place on earth.
There was a small, energetic commotion in the oak’s lower branches. Feet, shod in something like track shoes but gaudier, dangled into view from a lower branch. These shoes were blazoned with stripes and chevrons in sweeping curves of some glossy material coloured copper and silver, and dully luminous, burnished, giving off an inner light. Short legs followed, too-short legs sheathed in baggy cholo-pants whose excess material stacked in bulges on the shoes’ tops.
This was the dreadful ripening of what Larken had lived to summon, and only the combined weight of his whole past life – though such a frail, slight weight it seemed now! – sufficed to hold him steady on his legs, sufficed to plant him to confront this strange fruit’s falling, at long last.
The visitant dropped to the ground and stood entire upon the crusty mat. He was a natty little monster three feet high. The whiskered, ’gator-toothed snout of a possum was likest to the face he thrust forth with a loll-tongued leer of greeting. He was jauntily hatted with a snap-brimmed bookie’s fedora of straw – or woven brass? For it glowed like dirty dull gold. The hat was cocked arrogantly over one beady black eye. His baggy black sports coat was hung up at the back on the upthrust sickle of his tail, a huge rat’s tail, a stiff, dried tail, a comma of carrion whose roadkill scent Larken caught on the cold air of this eternity.
The visitant hissed, Feeeed me – its tongue, a limber spike of black meat, stirring in its narrow nest of canines.
Larken discovered at his side something he had not noticed: a shovel standing upright, stabbed into the earth.
Stepping out of an airplane into an alien night sky above Vietnam had been nothing to this, but Larken did it in the same kind of here-I-go instant: he took up the shovel, and stabbed it into the scab of compost.
He dug, knowing without thinking exactly where to dig.
It was his own heart he shovelled out chunks of and spilled to one side.
The shovel was heavy and cold, did not warm to his hands. It was time’s tooth, chewing up lives and spitting them out. It bit out his heart, and dumped it to one side.
He had not understood. He would not have done it if he had known how they were to serve.
Careful, very careful he was near the depth that he knew. He knelt at the last, and scraped the soil away with his hands.
He uncovered a little arm, the slender, bow-and-arrow arc of two bones, the flesh all but mouldered away. He stood up and turned away, his tears streaming down for those precious bones, that little arm.
The visitant’s steps crunched across the compost. Something much more massive than that dapper little monster it sounded like. The monster’s littleness was so dense with greed, as dense as the heart of a neutron star.
Larken stood with his back turned, tears streaming, as the Messenger feasted behind him, as it ripped at the compost and soil in a horrid undressing of the precious bodies sleeping in their garment of earth. The sound of its feeding, the gnashing and guttural guzzling, long it lasted, and he would carry that sound into eternity.
When the meal was done, the visitant spoke again.
The price is two more. They are here . . .
And Larken heard a distant purr and crackle, car tires crunching up his drive. He turned and saw glints of headlights far below, and the beam of a patrol car’s searchlight climbing the twisted ribbon of gravel.
The first officer said, “Christ. It’s abandoned.” Their headlights, as they pulled up onto the narrow plateau where the driveway ended, flooded against a little house walled in weeds and vines, its roof a thick sloping scalp of dead leaves a foot deep sprouting grass also dead now in the dry fall.
They got out and splashed their flashlight beams across windows opaque with rain-spotted dust. They approached the gaping front door, and poured their beams inside, across furniture blurred by dust and leaves and cobwebs.
“Christ,” echoed the second officer. “We’re not gonna find him here.”
The first shrugged. “Some indications of whereabouts, maybe.”
They moved farther into the house, and the floor felt the same underfoot as the ground had. Their beams woke a startling scuttle and scramble of animal paws. They tried light switches that didn’t work. Kitchen and living room conjoined with no wall between. The second officer began to search these rooms.
The first officer followed a short hallway farther inside. The hallway was festooned with dusty cobwebs, and behind this dust, was walled with books, books, books, their ranked titles like muffled shouts and exclamations choking in the dark.
Insanity. Right here. If the guy’s brain was packed with all these mummified shouts, then the missing woman was dead. The officer, though he tingled with this intuition, dismissed it as ungrounded, at least so far. There was no denying, though, that to leave a house like this, just abandon it with everything in it, indicated some kind of insanity, if it didn’t prove homicide. The door to the bathroom opened off this hall.
Tacked to the bathroom door was a drawing. It was clearly a very old one, done with pencils and colored markers. It was divided in panels on an oversize sheet of art paper. In each panel the father, small daughter and smaller son appeared to be self-drawn. The panels presented a narrative: the trio find their cat nursing five kittens. The family dog licks the kittens while the mother cat stands by with raised hackles and fluffed-out tail. They carry the kittens in a box. They stand in front of a supermarket with the box, the little girl handing a kitten to another little girl. The kittens look like slugs with pointed ears and tails. Dad is clownishly self-drawn with big ears and wild hair, the little girl very precisely drawn with pony tail and bangs and a pretty dress, the boy drawn with barely controlled energy, head and limbs various in size from panel to panel, hair all energetic spikes.
The officer heard a shift of mass, a sigh.
“Ted?”
A big, sinewy shape stood in his flashlight beam. The officer struggled to clear his sidearm.
“I’m sorry,” the shape said sadly, and cut his throat.
Up before sunrise. Marjorie hated getting out of bed in the dark, but loved the payoff once she was dressed and rolling down the country roads in the first light, cruising and owning them almost alone. The countryside here used to be a lot more interesting, though. She remembered it in her girlhood – orchards, small ranches, farmhouses, each one of these houses a distinct personality . . . Money, she thought wryly, scanning the endless miles of grapevines, all identically wired and braced and drip-lined, mile after mile – money was such a powerful organizer.
As the dawn light gained strength, and bathed the endless vines in tarnished silver, it struck her that there was, after all, something scary about money, that it could run loose in the world like a mythic monster, gobbling up houses and trees, serving strictly its own monstrous appetite.
But there was Pat and his crew ahead. A bright red Japanese earthmover – skip-loader in front, back-hoe behind – had already bladed out the wide strip of bramble and w
eed between the vineyard fence and the roadside rank of eucalyptus. The mangled vegetation had already been heaped in a bright orange dump-truck which was now pulling out for the dump, passing Marjorie as she approached. The next load the truck would be returning for had not yet been created, but Marjorie could see what it would be. The earthmover, with its backhoe foremost now, stood confronting the cinderblock shed. The hydraulic hoe’s mighty bucket-hand rested knuckles-down against the earth, like the fist of a wrestling opponent, awaiting the onset. Its motor idled while its short, stolid Mexican operator had dismounted to confer with Pat.
And instantly Marjorie forgave money, loved and trusted it again, seeing all this lustrous sexy powerful machinery marshalled to money’s will. And just look at that cleanness and order it had created. Where there had been tangle and dirtiness and trash before, was now clean bare dirt, reddish in the rising light, beside the columned trees.
Pat stepped smiling out to the road. “Good morning! You look radiant!”
“I look that tired, huh?”
“Nothing some Espresso Buono won’t fix when we head out of here. I didn’t expect you’d actually come out.”
They hadn’t been able to make yesterday’s date, Marjorie going instead to make her report to the police, but they’d agreed she might meet him for this morning’s early business. Why exactly had she come? “I figured,” she said sweetly, “that if we grabbed a date this early, we’d actually get to see each other.”
He nodded, but added, “Did you have the thought that Larken might show up?”
“Yeah. You’ve had the thought too?”
“I guess I have. Look, pull off into that drive down there. This won’t take half an hour. Come watch this Nipponese brute do its stuff.”
She pulled off about a hundred feet downroad, in the driveway of the fieldhands’ little house. As she parked she saw Pat in her rear-view, lifting his arm in greeting to someone beyond him. She got out and saw, about a hundred feet uproad of Pat, Carl Larken come coasting on his bike, a pack on his back, one bandaged hand raised in salute.
He dismounted still a little distance off, leaned his bike on a tree, and began walking towards the men and their machine.
Marjorie had to gather herself a moment before approaching. She must tell Carl simply and honestly about the report she’d made. It was not, after all, a criminal matter, but there would have to be discussions with the police. There were accountability issues here. She began to walk towards them, had taken three steps, when she felt a wave of nausea move up into her through her legs.
She froze, utterly disoriented by the sensation. The ground beneath her feet was . . . feeding terror up into her body. She stood, almost comically arrested in mid-stride. What was this panic crawling out of the earth? It had something to do with Carl Larken down there, approaching the men from the opposite direction, something to do with the impact of his feet on the fresh-scraped earth.
Look at his slow liquid gait, all muscle up his legs and arms. He was so here, he pressed with impossible mass against the earth. Suddenly all this regimented greenery, this whole army of rank-and-file vegetation, seemed to belong to him, while Pat and his helper and their bright machine had a slightly startled, caught-in-the-act air.
Marjorie gripped the trunk of a eucalyptus, but even the hugeness of the tree against her felt flimsy in this radioactive sleet of fear that was blazing from the ground beneath them both.
Pat and the operator stood slack-shouldered beside the red steel monster. Larken came to within fifteen feet or so, and stopped. It seemed to Marjorie, even at her little distance, that the mass of him dented the earth, putting the two lighter men in danger of falling towards him. His voice was gentle.
“Good morning, Mr Bonds. Señor.” (a faint smile for the operator) “I’m really sorry to intrude. I have to make use of this . . . land you own. It is a purely ceremonial thing, and executed in mere moments. Would you bear with me, Mr Bonds? Indulge an addled old pedagogue for just a moment?”
“You say you want to perform a ceremony, Mr Larken?” It was odd how much frailer Pat’s voice sounded than Larken’s. The idling earthmover half drowned him out with a surge in its engine’s rumble.
“A simple ceremony, Mr Bonds. An offering, plainly and briefly made.”
“You want to do it . . . in that shed?” Again the earthmover engine surged, and half-erased Pat’s words, his little laugh at the strangeness of his own question.
“This spot of earth, right here, is all I need. The god I’m praying to is here, right underfoot of us.”
The man’s utter madness was out, it loomed before them now. But in that moment it was the others who seemed unreal to Marjorie. Hugging her tree, melted by her terror out of any shape to act, she found Pat and the operator, the Jeep and the ’dozer, all too garish to be real – like bright balloons, all of them, taut, weightless, flimsy.
Pat, helpless before Larken’s perfect nonsense, made a gesture of permission that was oddly priest-like, an opening-out of hands and arms.
Larken unslung his knapsack, and cupped it in both hands before him, tilted his head back slightly, his eyes searching inwardly. Marjorie, stuck like lichen to the tree’s trunk, a limbless shape, a pair of eyes only and a heart with the earthquake-awe in it – Marjorie understood that the strange man was searching for the right words. Understood too now that the rumbling of that ’dozer’s engine was awakening this sensation of earthquake underfoot.
Larken chose his words. “I have been your faithful seeker, your faithful servant, forsaking all others! All others! I make you now your commanded offering. Open to me now the gates of eternity!”
He opened the knapsack, lifted it high, and sent its contents tumbling down through the silver air – two pale spheroids, two human heads, jouncing so vividly on the ground, their short-bar-bered hair looking surreally neat against the red dirt, their black-scabbed neck-stumps glossy as lacquer.
Their impact with the earth set off the earthquake. There was a shrieking of metal as the ’dozer flung its great arm in the air, a gesture galvanic as some colossal scorpion’s. The whole machine came apart with the fury of this straightening, the steel sinews spraying asunder in red shards, and revealing a darker sinew within, a huge, black hatchling of tarry muscle clotted on long bone. Two crimson eyes blazed above its black snout, as its crooked paw, prehensile, seized Pat and the operator together. The men cried out, their bones breaking in the grip that lifted them up to the mad red moons of eyes, lifted them higher still, and flung them powerfully at the earth. They struck the ground, impossibly flattened by the impact, transformed, in fact, to roadkill, to sprawling husks of human beings, bony silhouettes postured as if they were running full tilt toward the core of the planet.
“Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!” Larken’s gratitude sounded as wild as grief. His wail brought the god’s paw down to him in turn. In turn he was seized up and lofted high, and was held aloft a moment while the god’s eyes bathed him in their scarlet radiation.
And Marjorie, who had not guessed that she had voice left in her, screamed, and screamed again, because the earth beside the monster was no longer earth, but was a ragged-edged chasm of blackness, an infinite cauldron of darkness and stars.
The brute god held Larken high above this abyss. She could make out his face clearly above the crooked claw that gripped him. He was weeping with wonder and awe.
The god flung him down. His arms wind-milling, down Larken plunged. The god gave one furious snort that wafted like roadkill through the morning air, and leapt after his acolyte, dwindling down toward the starfields.
The earth closed over them, and Marjorie hugged the tree, quivering, staring at that resealed earth. It seemed to her the spot was not quite healed. The soil seemed sneakily transparent, thinly buried stars trying to burn through it like diamond drill-bits. The planet felt hollow underfoot, the great tree sustaining her seemed to feel it too. They huddled together, feeling the planet-bone resonate under them, like the
deck of a ship in high seas.
She straightened and started forward, a starship traveller negotiating the gravity of an alien world. The ship had crashed . . . there were the twisted shards of bright red metal . . . right here was where it had happened, the red dirt solid now, supporting her, supporting the black-stumped heads like thrown dice, their dulled snake-eyes aimed askew of one another, looking in different directions for the sane earth they had known, Marjorie had known . . .
The sane world that lay that way . . . didn’t it? Down this narrow country road here she could find her way back to freeway on-ramps and off-ramps that channelled directly to shopping malls that sold Technicolored candy and underwear, and to Humanity Incorporated with its computers and telephones and case files full of lost souls dying on their feet . . .
But how could this road lead there from such a starting-point as this? Here on the asphalt sprawled two human husks. She gazed on the distorted profile of Pat Bonds, crushed bone clad in sun-baked parchment. Older than Egypt he looked, the eye a glazed clot of mucus, a canted half-grin of teeth erupting from a leathery cheek. Crazed Cubist face, yet so expressive. He stared at eternity with outrage, with furious protest.
Go back down this road. Take the first step and the next will follow . . . See? Now the next. You’re doing fine, Marjorie. Soon you’ll reach your Beemer, and your Beemer will reach the city. Just keep moving. It’ll all come back to you . . .
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
This is Now
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH grew up in the United States, South Africa and Australia before moving to north London, where he lives with his wife Paula, his son and two cats.
He spent some time as a comedy writer and performer for BBC Radio before winning the 1991 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer and for his debut story, “The Man Who Drew Cats”. He followed those with two more for his short fiction, some of which is collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning More Tomorrow & Other Stories.
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