“How?” says the Creature, who can see no clear connection.
“Well, it seems so deep, you know, so . . . dimensional . . . looking down from up here like this. I imagine the way the audience will experience it when they see us swimming out of the screen like that.”
Ah. 3D. If he’s been told once he’s been told a thousand times. Alland’s ambitions for the film hinge upon two factors: the realistic creature effects (which certainly should look realistic, the Creature ruminates) and the use of 3D, only the second Universal film to be released in the innovative format. But then he realizes that Julie has dozed off against his shoulder, and he wonders if he too can have a three-dimensioned life.
Wakulla Springs is everything the Creature had hoped it would be. There are shortcomings, to be sure. He could have wished for a more tropical setting—strangler figs, lianas, and buttress-rooted trees—but there is much to be thankful for as well. The alligators slipping into the murky water recall the caiman of the Black Lagoon; the bulky manatees the nine-foot piracuru and catfish that call his native waters home; the boom of insects the constant roar of the jungle. And the springs themselves are everything he hoped they would be, fathoms deep, and riddled with caverns. Against his better judgment—Julie will think him hardly human at all, he fears—the Creature dispenses with the pretense of his trailer and abandons the on-set catering altogether. Halfway abandons the film, in fact. More often than not, when Jack dispatches Bill to summon the Creature to the set, he’s off touring the depths. He explores the cave system in search of a rocky grotto like the one he had in the Amazon. He dozes in deep, cold currents where no human being can follow. He gluts himself on the abundance of prey, devouring fish raw in clouds of ichthyic blood. Life is good, or better anyway, but he is not happy (or if he is, he does not recognize it). Thoughts of Julie torture him like an inflamed scale under a ridge of his armored breast.
Finally, Jack calls him in for a meeting. Like Karloff, Jack is a kind man. Anger is not his natural métier, yet the Creature is forced to stand dripping on the carpet in the director’s trailer, listening to his gentle rebuke. Somehow that makes it worse, Jack’s generosity of spirit. “I have no choice, you see,” the director admonishes him. “We’re on a tight schedule. We’re not making Gone With the Wind, you know.”
“It’s going to be a good picture,” the Creature says.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be a good picture. I said that we have to make our release date or both our careers are on the line.”
“Your career,” the Creature rasps. “What kind of career am I likely to have, Jack?”
“You’re unique. After people see this picture, offers are going to come rolling in.”
“Don’t patronize me, Jack. We both know there’s only one role I can play.”
Jack sighs. “I guess you’re right. But still, this is going to be a good film. You’ll get to play this role again.”
The Creature laughs humorlessly, snared in a dilemma even his human colleagues must share, forever trapped in the prisonhouse of self. That’s the appeal of acting, he supposes: the chance to be someone else, if only for a little while. And isn’t that what he’s doing here, playing at being something he’s not? He’s not a monster. He never has been. If his range of roles is limited—if he is doomed to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon—well, that’s Hollywood. He thinks of Karloff and Lugosi. Who does he want to become? Does he wish to accept his fate with grace or does he wish to rail perpetually against it, strung out on drugs and bitterness? Is being the Creature any different than being a carnival freak? Yet still he longs for his lost home. How he hates the poachers who have done this to him. He’d like to poke their eyeballs out, too. And eat them.
So maybe he’s a monster, after all.
“I need you on the set on time,” Jack is saying while these thoughts run through the Creature’s head. “It’s expensive to shoot underwater, especially with the 3D rig. Every time you don’t show up when you’re supposed to, you cost us money.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” the Creature says.
“Look, I know this is hard for you. Nobody ever said acting was easy. Look at Brando. Channel your anger into the role. I need you to be the Creature I know you can be.”
The Creature doesn’t know quite what Jack means by this. He doesn’t even know who—or what—he is anymore. Yet he vows to himself that he will try for something more complex than a B-movie monster—to draw not only upon his fury and resentment, but upon his passion for Julie. He vows to do better.
He does, too.
The Creature shows up promptly as requested. He lingers between shots. He tries to make small talk with the crew. But what is there to say, really? He’s an eight-foot amphibian, finned and armored in plates of bone. He could eviscerate any one of them with the twitch of a talon. Monster or not, he is a monster to them.
Not Julie, though, or so he tells himself. Perhaps Karloff is right: set against his natural environment, she seems to recognize his natural grace. Indeed she seems to share it. Unburdened by the clunky scuba tanks the men’s roles demand, she glides through the water. And between shots she dispenses with the bathrobe she’d taken to draping herself in on the Universal lot, as if swimming together has drawn them closer. Of all the actors on the set, she alone seems entirely at ease with him. They spend more and more time talking. As he lolls in the shallows, she tells him about her recent divorce or about growing up in Arkansas; she tells him about her first days in Hollywood, working as a secretary and taking voice lessons on the side. Yet she is still capable of blind cruelty.
“You’re lucky,” she says. “You never had to fight for your dreams.”
The Creature hardly knows how to respond. So what if Universal picked him up the minute William Alland laid eyes on him? Unlike Julie, he’ll never play another role in his life; all the elocution lessons in the world won’t change his inhuman growl. He’s not even sure what he aspires to anymore. Stardom? Freedom? A return to the Black Lagoon? In his dreams, he sweeps Julie into his embrace, carries her off to the Amazon, unveils to her the wonders of his vanished life: the splendid isolation of the Lagoon, the sluggish currents of the great river, the mystery of the crepuscular forest.
Maybe this newfound intimacy accounts for the otherworldly beauty of the Wakulla scenes. In the dailies, Julie cuts the surface, her white bathing suit shining down through the gloom like god light. The Creature stalks her from below, half-hidden among drifting fronds of thalassic flora, rapt by her ethereal beauty. His webbed hands cleave the water. Bubbles erupt skyward with his every kick. As she swims, he glides toward her from below, up, up, up, until he is swimming on his back beneath her and closing fast: a dozen feet, half a dozen, less, his immovable face frozen in an expression of impossible longing. He reaches out a tentative hand to brush her ankle as she treads water—and pulls it away at the last moment, as terrified of her rejection on celluloid as he is terrified of her rejection in life. What one does not risk, one cannot lose; worse yet, he thinks, what one does not risk, one cannot gain. A sense of inconsolable despair seizes him. In the images projected on the screen, he sees now how little their worlds can connect. She is a creature of the daylit skin of the planet, he of the shadowy submarine depths.
Jack praises the silent yearning in the Creature’s performance.
Yet the whole thing drives the director crazy nonetheless. Frustrated by the task of stitching the haunting underwater scenes together with the mundane L.A. footage, he asks the studio for reshoots and is denied. For the first time—the only time—the Creature sees Jack angry, his face a mask of fury. “This could be so much more than another goddamn monster flick,” he says in the dim projection trailer, flinging away the 3D glasses perched on his nose. Even this angry gesture drives home the Creature’s inhumanity. Alone in the back row, he must pinch his glasses between two delicate claws. His flattened nose provides no bridge to support them. He has no external ears to hook them over. Everything about him i
s streamlined for his underwater existence.
The Creature grinds his cardboard glasses under one webbed foot. He slams out of the trailer, the door crumpling with a screech of tortured metal as he hurtles into the moonlit night. He is halfway to the water when Julie catches up with him. “Wait,” she says. “Wait—”
Her voice hitches in the place where his name ought to be—for of course he has no name, does he? He is the Creature, the Gill Man, nothing more. There has been no one to name him—even the freaks did not name him—and he has never thought to name himself. He would not know how to begin. Fred? John? Earl? Such human names fall leaden on the tongue, inadequate to describe a . . . a creature, a fiend, an inhuman monster. How will they credit him in the film? The Creature as the Creature?
“Wait,” Julie says again. “Creature, wa—”
The Creature whirls to face her, one massive hand drawn back to strike.
“Don’t,” she whispers, and the Creature checks the blow. For an instant, everything hangs balanced on a breath. Then the Creature lowers his hand, turns away, and shambles toward the water, his great feet flapping. Something feels broken inside him. Jack’s words—
—another goddamn monster flick—
—echo inside his head. That’s all he is, isn’t he? A monster. A monster who in a moment of fury, would have with a single swipe of his claws torn from her shoulders the head of the woman he loved. A monster who would in the grip of his rage, feed upon her blood. The Creature would cry, but even that simple human solace is denied him. The dark waters beckon.
“Wait,” Julie says. “Please.”
Almost against his will, the Creature turns to face her. She stands maybe a dozen feet away. In the moonlight, tears glint upon her cheeks. Beyond her, the men—Jack and Dick and Richard Denning, the third lead—stand silhouetted against the beacon of golden light pouring through the trailer’s shattered door.
“Why?” the Creature says, knowing the doom that will come upon him if he stays.
“Because,” Julie says, “because I love you.”
So Karloff was right. For a heartbeat, happiness—a great and abiding contentment that no mere human being can plumb—settles over the Creature like a benediction. But what is the depth of love, he wonders, its strange currents and dimensions? What is its price, and is he willing to pay it? And a line from another monster movie comes to him, one that Jack showed him in pre-production: It was beauty killed the beast.
This is Hollywood.
It vill fuck you every time.
“I love you, too,” he says in his inhuman rasp, and in the same instant, in his heart, he recants that love, refuses and renounces it. For Julie. For himself. He will not be the monster that loves. He will not be the monster that dies. He will not be their freak, their creature. He will not haunt their dreams. They can finish their fucking film with a man in a rubber suit.
The Creature puts his back to Julie and wades into the water, glimmering with moonlight. It welcomes him home, rising to his shins and thighs before the bottom drops away beneath him, and he dives. He has studied the locations, he has explored the Springs’ network of caverns: from here the Wakulla River to the St. Marks and Apalachee Bay, and thence to the Gulf. The Black Lagoon calls out to him across the endless miles, and so the Creature strikes off for home, knowing now how fleeting are the heart’s desires, knowing that Julie too would ebb into memory, this perfect moment lost, this happiness receding forever into the past.
About the Author
Dale Bailey’s short fiction has appeared in Alchemy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, SciFiction, and various original and year’s best anthologies. He has stories forthcoming at Tor.com and in Fantasy & Science Fiction. His work has been collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. The author of three novels—The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.)—he has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, once for the Shirley Jackson Award, and has won the International Horror Guild Award. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
The Ki-anna
Gwyneth Jones
If he’d been at home, he’d have thought, Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Equatorial Ring, little scavengers tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium, Earth-atmosphere-and-pressure nursing or the flesh would not regenerate—which they didn’t get. The gouges and dents would be permanent: skinned over, like the scars on her forearms. Visible through thin clothing, like the depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at a more horrifying childhood poverty.
She seemed very young for her post: hardly more than a girl. She could almost have been a human girl with gene-mods. Could have chosen to adopt that fine pelt of silky bronze, glimmering against the bare skin of her palms, her throat and face. Chosen those eyes, like drops of black dew; the hint of a mischievous animal muzzle. Her name was Ki-anna, she represented the KiAn authorities. Her partner, a Shet called Roaaat Bhvaaan, his heavy uniform making no concession to the warmth of the space-habitat, was from Interplanetary Affairs, and represented Speranza. The Shet looked far more alien: a head like a gray boulder, naked wrinkled hide hooding his eyes.
Patrice didn’t expect them to be on his side, this odd couple, polite and sympathetic as they seemed. He must be careful, he must remember that his mind and body were reeling from the Buonarotti Transit—two instantaneous interstellar transits in two days, the first in his life. He’d never even seen a non-human sentient biped, in person, this time last week: and here he was in a stark police interview room with two of them.
“You learned of your sister’s death a Martian year ago?”
“Her disappearance. Yes.”
Ki-anna watched, Bhvaaan questioned: he wished it were the other way round. Patrice dreaded the Speranza mindset. Anyone who lives on a planet is a lesser form of life, of course we’re going to ignore your appeals, but it’s more fun to ignore them slowly, very, very slowly—
“We can agree she disappeared,” muttered the Shet, what looked like mordant humor tugging the lipless trap of his mouth. “Yet, aah, you didn’t voice your concerns at once?”
“Lione is, was, my twin. We were close, however far . . . When the notification of death came it was very brief, I didn’t take it in. A few days later I collapsed at work, I had to take compassionate leave.”
At first he’d accepted the official story. She’s dead, Lione is dead. She went into danger, it shouldn’t have happened but it did, on a suffering war-torn planet unimaginably far away . . .
The Shet rolled his neckless head, possibly in sympathy.
“You’re, aah, a Social Knowledge Officer. Thap must be a demanding job. No blame if a loss to your family caused you to crash-out.”
“I recovered. I examined the material that had arrived while I was ill: everything about my sister’s last expedition, and the ‘investigation.’ I knew there was something wrong. I couldn’t achieve anything at a distance. I had to get to Speranza, I had to get myself here—”
“Quite right, child. Can’t do anything at long distance, aah.”
“I had to apply for financial support, the system is slow. The Buonarotti Transit network isn’t for people like me—” He wished he’d bitten that back. “I mean, it’s for officials, diplomats, not civilian planet-dwellers.”
“Unless they’re idle super-rich,” rumbled the Shet. “Or refugees getting shipped out of a hellhole, maybe. Well, you persisted. Your sister was Martian too. What was she doing here?”
Patrice looked at the very slim file on the table. No way of telling if that tablet held a ton of documents or a single page.
“Don’t you know?”
“Explain it to us,” said Ki-anna. Her voice was sibilant, a hint of a lisp.
“Lione was a troposphere engineer. She was working on the KiAn Atmosphere Recovery Project. But you must know . . . ” They waite
d, silently. “All right. The KiAn war practically flayed this planet. The atmosphere’s being repaired, it’s a major Speranza project. Out here it’s macro-engineering. They’ve created a—a membrane, like a casting mould, of magnetically charged particles. They’re shepherding small water ice asteroids, other debris with useful constituents, through it. Controlled annihilation releases the gases, bonding and venting propagates the right mix. We pioneered the technique. We’ve enriched the Martian atmosphere the same way . . . nothing like the scale of this. The job also has to be done from the bottom up. The troposphere, the lowest level of the inner atmosphere, is alive. It’s a saturated fluid full of viruses, fragments of DNA and RNA, amino acids, metabolizing mineral traces, pre-biotic chemistry. The configuration is unique to a living planet, and it’s like the mycorrhizal systems in the soil, back on Earth. If it isn’t there, or it’s not right, nothing will thrive.”
He couldn’t tell if they knew it all, or didn’t understand a word.
“Lione knew the tropo reconstruction wasn’t going well. She found out there was an area of the surface, under the An-lalhar Lakes, where the living layer might be undamaged. This—where we are now—is the Orbital Refuge Habitat for that region. She came here, determined to get permission from the Ruling An to collect samples—”
Ki-anna interrupted softly. “Isn’t the surviving troposphere remotely sampled by the Project automats, all over the planet?”
“Yes, but that obviously wasn’t good enough. That was Lione. If it was her responsibility, she had to do everything in her power to get the job done.”
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 85 Page 6