Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

The creature gurgled up at them. Its pendulous orbs were nothing like eyes, might have been blind. Maybe it was scent that had led it here. Or mere memory. But it reached up feebly, unerringly to Jane’s face and stroked her cheek.

  John took hold of its other hand and sat on the edge of his bed. In this bed, they had made this creature. Their son. John watched as his wife bent over John Sadness.

  Her tears fell upon its tiny face and great eyes as she kissed it, one last time, on the brow.

  Then, with a small contented shudder, the creature died.

  * * *

  A dozen townspeople had perished in the battle. None of these victims had been children, however, for which the townspeople were grateful.

  All of the monstrosities that had disembarked from the ship were finally slaughtered. It took several days to track down the last of them in the woods. Whether there were more aboard the ship, or back on the island, no one could tell…but the strange vessel was gone by the time anyone returned to the beach.

  Sometimes Jane would stand at the spot where it had arrived, holding her husband’s hand. There they would both look out across the black lake, staring at where the island must lie, as if hoping the mist would part, sunlight would beam down upon it. But it remained cloaked in its winding sheet of fog. And while most of the villagers no doubt gazed out at those waters in dread, Jane and John Thistle did so with tears in their eyes, and sad smiles on their lips.

  Thunderheads

  The tentacle came through the ceiling and slithered down toward Warren’s face as he lay back on his bed fully dressed. Unshaven, unemployed and partly unconscious, he had been watching the TV at the foot of the bed in a half-doze of thoughtless ingestion. Game shows, glamour. His country’s hypnotic empty promises.

  But the sight of the tentacle undulating toward him roused him to alertness. He spun sideways to the floor and scrambled to his feet, then bolted from the room…and the tentacle followed him. He slammed a door to block it, but it passed through the door as if it were an illusion, immaterial. Yet it was the tentacle that was immaterial, he realized. Though it looked solid, like a clear rubber hose filled with dark smoke, it was the searching limb of some apparition.

  In the kitchen of his apartment, Warren slid open a drawer and clawed madly amongst his oddly matched cutlery until he lifted out a formidable bread knife. By now, the blind groping extremity had found him, and was swimming through the air in his direction. With a cry, Warren swung his blade and simultaneously ducked.

  The tentacle withdrew sharply, shivering violently in the air. He could see that somehow he had hurt it, as ethereal as it might be. Maybe the sheer energy of his emotion, rather than the steel itself, had wounded it. Whatever the case, thus encouraged, Warren leapt toward it and slashed it again and again. A foot or so of the tentacle was severed and dropped to the linoleum, curling in on itself with a spasm. The rest of the limb, whipping angrily, withdrew. When Warren glanced down again for the severed portion, it had vanished.

  Outside, a peal of bass heavy thunder rumbled, rattling his window in its frame.

  * * *

  Warren had always considered himself a “sensitive”, having seen ghosts on several occasions in his life: that soldier in the Civil War uniform staring in his bedroom window on the second floor, the cowled monk at the foot of his bed. But today was the first time he had ever seen the creatures that assail the minds of humans.

  Afraid that the owner of the tentacle would seek him out again, Warren had gone down into the bustling city streets to immerse himself in the comfort of anonymity. But now the source of the tentacle that had sought him out became horribly apparent. Within moments, he saw that dozens of the people moving about on the sidewalks and even driving along in cars had already been successfully attacked by the creature. From the tops of their heads, tentacles like the one that had come for him ran up into a dark sky with a ceiling of thunderheads.

  They must have been tremendously long to keep up with moving cars, and flexible beyond man-made elastic. And when victims crossed paths the tentacles neatly passed through each other instead of tangling up.

  Warren staggered along the street, gaping, observing, trembling. He flinched back when a victim passed too close, afraid that the limb jammed into his crown would quit that person to attack him instead.

  The type of victims the owner of these myriad limbs favored soon became apparent. An old man slumped in an alley, his head between his knees and a tentacle stuck into his pink and white pate. A thin young woman with huge hollow eyes. A hulking black boy with a face of tremendous fury. A middle-aged man, shambling crazily and talking to himself, shouting out abruptly—something religious—so that Warren really flinched. Disturbed people. Wounded people. Vulnerable, sick or deranged people.

  But why had it come for him, then?

  No. That wasn’t the kind of victim it sought, he intuited. It made people that way! Healthy people. It fed on their minds! It drained their souls! It…

  Another ominous rumble of thunder. Warren stopped on the sidewalk to stare up at the thundercloud directly overhead, eclipsing what little sky showed through the canyon of tall buildings. So many tentacles ran up into that cloud…too many to count…as if the master of these insane marionettes, the evil god who kept these victims on leashes like so many rabid mad dogs, were hiding behind that cloud. Or inside it.

  Warren turned in time to see the tentacle wavering toward him through the air. He screamed, bolted and wove madly through the crowds as if dodging an assassin’s bullets. He nearly sent several people sprawling, and they glared after him, muttering to themselves.

  He had to get up high. He had to see if what he was beginning to believe were true.

  Back in his tenement building, he raced upstairs and fell against his apartment door. Somewhere he had lost the pursuing tentacle. Only slightly relieved, he made quickly for the kitchen and retrieved the bread knife and a steak knife. He slipped these in his long raincoat, then returned to the street.

  Warren rode the elevator of the office building as high as it would take him. The unemployment office was in this building but he left it far below. There was no safety, no comfort to be had there. None of the few passengers who rode with him, thank God, had tentacles secured to them like unholy umbilical cords. When he disembarked at last, he found a flight of stairs which he ducked into when no one was about. A moment later he stumbled out onto the roof, squinting against a cold wind that flapped and snapped at the tails of his raincoat. Warren drew close to the edge of the roof, and gazed out on the gray world. Oh God! It was worse than he’d thought. More awe-inspiring.

  The thunderclouds didn’t hide creatures. They were creatures. And there were a half dozen of them scudding across the sky, like vast zeppelins moored to the minds of thousands. They were animals, perhaps, like the Portuguese Man-o’-War jellyfish, trailing their many poisonous limbs to sting and capture their prey, though they were still like thunderclouds, still growling hungrily in their depths, and showing brief strobe flashes of lightning inside them. But these flashes were green, and the green glow would briefly cast highlights on the billowing, churning, boiling surfaces of the mountainous things.

  Perhaps if those below could see them at all, they innocently perceived them as just an incoming thunderstorm. What if all such storms were actually these airborne leviathans?

  Warren heard a tiny shout float up to him from the street far below, and he leaned over the parapet to gaze down. After a moment, he realized its source. It was the shouting, staggering madman he’d seen earlier, a mere flea at this distance. But Warren recognized his erratic movements…and he saw that two tentacles were hooked into this one man’s skull. Two creatures were draining him, maybe warring over him inside his poor fragile mind.

  One stationary creature, he saw, was hovering above a mental institution across the river. It was gorged fat.

  Someone had to tell people about this! Someone had to fight them…to stop this abomination!

  Warr
en glared out at the great beasts again…and now he saw more. His peculiar sensitive’s vision broadened his perception, brought into focus something which before had been too vast for his mind to grasp.

  Floating above the Man-o’-Wars were similar but far larger monsters. These somewhat fainter, more ghostly creatures were like continents drifting in the ocean of sky, and they were anchored, he realized, to each and every person in the street below. To every person in every car. The tentacles swarmed in windows like so many millions of telephone wires. The clouds were like huge inverted clipper ships with all those lines. And then Warren audibly gasped, and jerked a knife out of his coat to flail crazily above his head.

  He saw the severed limb thrash, cheated. It was sucked up into the sky. God…how long had it been affixed to his mind? His entire life? The greater beasts were linked to millions. They drove millions mad, drove whole countries to violence toward other countries commanded by other creatures. Was this how the creatures fought their wars, or entertained themselves? Were these, indeed…the gods of mankind? If so, Warren disavowed them. He rejected them. He would battle them, and lead others to cast off their bonds as well. He would…

  But his thoughts had reached the great boiling brains. He saw tentacles slithering through the air at him. Over there. And there. He wheeled sharply and a gust of wind nearly cast him over the side. A dozen tentacles were swimming in from behind. And now a hundred. “No!” Warren shouted at them in defiance. From inside his raincoat he slid out the other knife. One in each fist. He raised both high and shook them. “No!” But how could he fend them all off? Hack them all to pieces? Any moment now, he would be buried in a mass of them. A thousand of them would burrow into his mind.

  He wouldn’t let them touch him. He would bring his freedom with him where they couldn’t get at him.

  In triumphant glory, Warren leapt from the roof. He was an angel of vengeance descending, his coat flapping behind him like a robe. He flailed his flashing knives like bright wings, and in plummeting he swooped down on several tendrils, hacking them as he passed…and laughed.

  The clean and purging wind of descent blasted him. Yes, he was free, and he saw that he had set a few people below him free as well. He had sliced their tethers and they had glanced up at him and now were scattering. Maybe the beasts would claim them back, but now at least they had a fighting chance…

  To die free. To spit in the eye of the gods. What more could a man want? He was a falling angel. So be it.

  * * *

  The paramedics who responded did not hustle to squat by the man to check for vital signs, to administer aid. They stood back a bit and stared.

  The suicide victim was face down in the street, a knife in each locked fist embedded in the asphalt, as if he had miraculously crucified himself to the ground. CPR would be useless; even Jesus couldn’t resurrect a man after this.

  One of the responding policemen watched a dark tendril of blood wind out of the man’s riven skull into the gutter. He had seen jumpers before, and the first time he had puked, but this time he had an odd reaction. His scalp constricted, and tingled.

  He removed his cap to rub at his hair nervously, and shuddered.

  Thunder growled above the city, and a gray rain was released to fall in a deluge.

  Pale Fruit

  The woman who opened the door in answer to Griffin’s knocks was beautiful, and it was this more than the fact that she was most certainly not the person he had expected to greet him that made him falter speechless for several beats. Her hair was long and straight, that drab shade of watery brown that was really like no color at all, but it was parted in the center and framed like curtains an oval face of great impact. The strange woman’s mouth was decadently plush, lips that had been stung by the whole hive of bees held compressed into a solemn pout. They glistened a moist and glossy crimson, some swollen exotic fruit. Her eyes had a feline shape and were of a blue that was clear almost to the point of transparency. Too much mascara only heightened the effect.

  “Yes?” the woman—surely only a girl of eighteen or nineteen—asked him at last in a dark, vaguely surly voice.

  “I’m sorry…um…I was looking for my landlord…uh, Guy?”

  “Guy Hamlin,” the young woman droned.

  “Yes. Guy Hamlin.”

  “I’m Guy’s daughter, Idelia.”

  Griffin smiled. “Do you call your father by his first name?”

  Just that lynx-like stare for a moment or two, and then, “Yes.”

  The girl—Idelia Hamlin, then— was small, and obviously very slender, lost like some dour, doleful child in her over-sized sweater. Black tights clung to legs almost alarmingly thin, and her bony feet were bare, the red polish on their nails flaking away like old blood. The dim bulb beside the door glowed on her high forehead, and made her pallid, translucent flesh seem almost softly luminous. Normally, Griffin did not care for the starving model look, that heroin chic, the anorexic waif that was the current ideal, as dictated by the media. His interest lay in substantial women, voluptuous, large-breasted, round-bottom-ed. His ex-girlfriend Natalie had been plump as a Renoir nude. This girl was anything but substantial. And yet, those ice-blue eyes, the too-ripe painted lips that seemed to overcompensate for the rest of her, pinned his heart like a struggling, dying moth inside his chest.

  He might have disbelieved her about being Guy’s daughter, except that Guy also had uncanny blue eyes—if not of quite so light a shade. Yes, he could see Guy in her unsettling gaze. But otherwise there was no similarity, as Guy was singularly unattractive and a good four hundred pounds, Griffin wagered. Oh yes…Guy. He had come upstairs to see Guy. Griffin realized he’d been mutely staring again.

  “I’m Griffin Shores; I live downstairs. Is your father home? I have the rent…and some books to return.” He held them up as proof. “He lent them to me.”

  Idelia gazed at the books in his hand, and seemed hesitant, or indecisive as to what to do next. But finally she said, “Why don’t you come in, then.” She held the door wide for him. Before that, she had been blocking it warily with her thin frame.

  “Okay, um, thanks.” Griffin slipped past her, lightly brushing against her sweater. Very consciously, he inhaled as he did so, and stole a furtive whiff of her musky perfume.

  “What are the books?” Idelia asked as she turned away from the door.

  “Oh, about the supernatural, the occult, mostly,” Griffin replied with some degree of embarrassment, as if caught with a stack of pornography. “Your father and I got to talking one day, and he found out I work in a book store and love to read. He’s pretty enthusiastic about these books…he thought I’d find them interesting, too.”

  Idelia nodded absently, but said, “I think they’re dangerous.”

  “Books?”

  “Those books.”

  “Oh. Well, ah, so…is Guy here?”

  “No. He isn’t. He’s away.”

  So why had she let him in, he wondered, when she could have just accepted the books out on the landing? There was something in her spacy manner that suggested drugs, or even a psychological problem, or both—not that it decreased his lust by much. “Um, so when will he be back?”

  “Not sure. Not soon.” She shrugged vaguely. “If you don’t feel comfortable leaving the rent with me, you can wait until he returns.”

  Griffin didn’t feel comfortable with that, so he changed the subject. “I didn’t know Guy had ever been married.” He didn’t add that his impression had been that Guy was a very lonely—bitterly lonely—man, who had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a wife with the kind of genes to produce a creature like this one. Also, he had taken Guy to be only in his mid thirties; he must have sired Idelia when quite young.

  “They’re divorced,” Idelia explained. “My mother lives out of town. I’m just visiting here.”

  “I see. Then I’ll bet you haven’t been to the store where I work. It’s just down the street—‘Book Plates’? We have a little coffee s
hop in there. If you’re not busy, maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?” His throat clicked as he swallowed a phlegmy glob of nervousness.

  “Outside?” Idelia glanced rather suddenly at one of the windows in this front room, a parlor. Ancient, water-stained paper of a dark color covered the tenement apartment’s walls, and all the curtains were drawn, all the shades pulled. “No—thank you.”

  Griffin felt like he’d totally humiliated himself, as usual. He called the look women gave him when he asked them out “the tarantula”. As if, instead of asking them out, he had extended his open palm with a tarantula on it. He had gotten along with Guy, evasive as Guy was (this was the first time Griffin had actually been inside his apartment), not only because they shared a passion for books, but because they were both unlucky bachelors. Well, he had had Natalie, and Guy had had his wife, so there was always hope for the future…and Griffin felt he was at least more attractive than Guy, though that wasn’t saying much.

  “Well, I’ve got to start my shift in a half hour, anyway, so I guess I should be going. You ought to drop in some time, though—I mean, just to look at the books. It’s a nice little place.”

  Idelia said nothing in reply; just stared at him, as if to hypnotize him. He was hypnotizing himself, he thought, and he’d better break off; he was starting to feel light-headed just being in her aura of subtle perfume and glowing flesh.

  And then, she took two steps to cross the space between them, to float toward him like a somnambulist, and her arms drifted up to him, the sleeves of the bulky sweater sliding back to reveal the thinness of her arms, and her hands alighted on either side of his face, her touch so soft it was like smoke, but cold smoke. A question half rose in Griffin but before he could give it sound, her face too floated toward him, and she pulled his face down and pressed that luxuriant mouth against his.

  He put his hands on her arms, as if to push this stranger away, but her tongue slipped into his mouth, cool and anxious, and he found his arms sliding around her instead, to press her whole body to him. He could almost have wrapped his arms around her twice; he was accustomed to Natalie’s broad back, her warm cushions of flesh. This bird-like body with its sharp points of bone and its insubstantial lightness was alien to him. But that alienness of her body and of her actions increasingly stimulated him. He pushed his own tongue into her mouth in turn, and grew aroused, grew desperate to enter her down there as well…