In the Deadlands

by David Gerrold

Idly, he wondered what they were, these skinflowers. Abnormal growths of some kind? Or a new development of his body, one that could have been expected? If they were natural, what should he do about them? Were they like hair —to be groomed and admired? Or were they blemishes, like unsightly warts?

  And if they were unnatural, what then? Maybe they were parasites—tiny plants or animals that had imbedded themselves in his skin and were actively reproducing like real flowers in fertile soil. No. He doubted that. These flowers were too much like flesh; they were too much a part of him.

  Maybe they were some kind of disease—like a tumor. But he doubted that too. They weren’t painful, and he’d never heard of any disease where the skin broke out in flowers.

  No, they must be some kind of natural development. As he examined them curiously, he noticed that the flowers seemed to be replacing the hair on his hands and arms. The skin beneath the stems was pink and fresh, completely hairless. Parasites wouldn’t do that, would they? Neither would a disease. These skinflowers were probably a different kind of hair, perhaps their stems were just a different kind of hair follicle.

  Except that he had heard somewhere that hair wasn’t alive; it was protein produced by the follicle and the actual shaft was dead material. These skinflowers were obviously alive. The ones he had cut on Saturday were quickly replacing themselves.

  Well, perhaps his hair follicles had changed somehow. It wasn’t inconceivable. He stroked his arms fretfully, and the sensation comforted him. The feel of the tiny cups of flesh as they pulled and rolled across his skin was...interesting.

  On Monday, he decided to wear a short-sleeved shirt around the house. He didn’t want to cover up his flowers. He enjoyed looking at them. He enjoyed touching them and stroking his cheek with the back of his hand and arm. He was fascinated by their scent. They were almost up to his elbows by now.

  On the older flowers, the stems had turned pink and the cups were beginning to take on a more definite color. The shading was delicate, from rose at the center of each blossom, fading almost to white at the edge. The rim of each cup retained its hint of bloodlessness, outlining each flower with a pale halo.

  He spent long hours just studying them, touching them and caressing them, rubbing them against his cheek, rubbing them against his nose and mouth. He found himself sucking meditatively on the blossoms, almost—but not quite—nipping them off with his teeth. He would bury his nostrils in them and luxuriate in their fleshy smell.

  When he discovered the rough patches on his shoulders, as well as at the base of his spine, he was delighted. That meant the flowers were not to be limited to just his hands and arms. He longed for their spread—they produced a weightless, almost floating sensation in his arms and he ached to immerse his whole body in the sensation.

  In the next few days, the patches on his shoulders and back grew into spines and then into clumps of pink dichondra. The cups were larger here, more developed. And they seemed more rugged than the blossoms that covered his arms, which were almost all the way up to his shoulders now. The flowers spread quickly across his shoulder blades, like a mantle, and down his back. The first patches of roughness appeared on his legs.

  The smell was stronger by now, much stronger. He seemed to move in a cloud of it, but he wasn’t always conscious of the odor. His nose had grown used to it, and it was only when he moved suddenly that he was aware of his smell.

  The scent had the sweetness of decay, but without the cloying pungency of rot. It was a flowery-sour smell—like roses, too many and too ripe. He liked it though. It was a part of him.

  Sleeping was developing into a problem though. He didn’t like seeing the flowers crushed each morning. They weren’t hurt by the pressure of his body weight on them for a night, but it usually took an hour or so for them to resume their resiliency. In addition, the stems were beginning to develop a sensitivity of their own. If pressed the wrong way for too long, they began to ache like hair that has been brushed against its natural direction and held that way.

  He took to sleeping on his stomach with only a single sheet instead of a blanket. He wasn’t masturbating any more either. He was too intrigued with the taste and texture of his flowers. And the overall sensation of lightness. He moved in a trancelike daze. He floated. Usually, he would fall asleep with his nose and mouth pressed against the back of his right forearm where the flowers were thickest.

  The flowers spread to his feet, covering all but the soles and the toenails. They clustered across the top of the arch and two or three even grew out of each toe. He stopped wearing shoes and socks. And when the flowers covered his legs he stopped wearing pants. He felt like he was immersed in sweet oil.

  They appeared on his neck and soon after even on the back of his head where they looked like tiny ears. They began to replace his hair. A rough patch appeared on his belly and grew downward. These blossoms were slightly darker, slightly redder than the rest, especially where his pubic hair had been. His penis was surrounded by a forest of curlicue stems and crimson cups. By then, most of his chest was covered too.

  Oddly, the flowers did not appear on his face. They curled down his ears, like scarlet sideburns, and they crept around his neck like a flaming beard. They capped his brow like a thicket of red ringlets and they even replaced his eyebrows with miniscule blossoms, but they did not appear on his cheeks and forehead.

  By the time his body was completely covered by the flowers, he was no longer wearing any clothes at all. He was swimming in cold euphoria. It was rosy and blurred. He no longer had any trouble sleeping now; the flowers had grown stronger and more resilient to his weight. The sensitivity had been only a temporary phase.

  He found that direct sunlight was too strong for him now, and he spent more and more time indoors. He only liked being outside during the night. He began sleeping later each day and staying awake longer into the dark, until after a while he had reversed his normal habits.

  The colors of the flowers deepened now, grew richer. Across his back, they shaded from deep brown to pale yellow, with here and there a hint of red or purple. On his chest and stomach, the colors were lighter, but there were patterns of shades, darker where there had been hair, lighter where there had been none. His arms and legs repeated this coloring, the insides of the limbs being paler, the outsides being darker.

  And the smell of the flowers was rank now, almost overpowering. He didn’t notice—and even if he had, he wouldn’t have minded. He liked them. He liked their feel and their fragrance. He liked to lose himself in their curls.

  He stood out in the yard each night and bared himself to the sky. He opened his flowers and his pores and let them suck in the blackness; let them ripple the coolness all through his body.

  There was no moon, and even the stars were diminished. There was only darkness, cold enveloping darkness. He stretched his arms out to it.

  His state was trancelike, disembodied. He floated in the night and waited for the harvesters to come.

  —and when they did, they plucked the flowers from him with a scream. They stripped the skin from his body and left him twitching and raw, jerking like something that had been flayed.

  In the morning, she found bristly patches on the backs of her hands....

  AFTERWORD:

  I don’t write horror stories very often.

  Possibly because there isn’t much that can horrify me anymore.

  Battle Hum and the Boje

  There was a jazz club, dark and smoky. It was one of those places where music lived, where musicians came to listen to other musicians. The sounds were alien and haunting. They hinted at deeper understandings. I grew up with rock and classical—this music was a break in that reality.

  I hungered to drink deeply of this other world, to get inside and be a part of it.

  The first thing I learned—what they say about jazz is true. If you have to have it explained to you, you don’t understand it.

  The greater thing I learned is that jazz is a subversive idiom. It’s
a rebellion against structure. It’s interactive—it requires the listener to participate, because it’s a conversation without words, an exploration of the moment. It’s about the instrument, the sound, the feeling. You’re not listening to the music, you’re listening to the soul underneath it.

  And that’s where this story came from.

  The sound was bad right from the beginning. The notes just drooled out of the horn and lay there. No life to them.

  So I did a fanfare shtick and passed the melody over to Loamy, the man with the bass. He played with it for a bit while Earlie, the drummer, embroidered the edges with a ra-tata-ra-tata on the snare. But their hearts weren’t in it either, and the audience knew it.

  It was a bad night all around. Usually an audience will sit and listen, but when they know the stuff is bad, they just sit. And that’s what they were doing tonight. Just sitting.

  A couple of months or years ago I would have dismissed it without a thought. “It’s just the war. They’re down because it isn’t going well.”

  But the war had been going on too long for it to have any meaning any more. It could no longer affect our lives. It was part of living. Like breathing. One didn’t think about it; you just accepted it. So it wasn’t the war.

  And it wasn’t that we weren’t trying either—I knew we were. We’d started out as high as ever, ready to make music the best we could. But by the time we were into the third number we knew something was wrong. If an audience doesn’t warm up by then, they’re not going to warm up at all. We might as well have been playing to a graveyard.

  The whole thing was a contact down. We couldn’t warm them up and we couldn’t keep ourselves going without the feedback from them. So we started downhill, and the worse we got, the worse they got. And all the way down, we could see it happening. We knew what was happening and why it was happening, but we couldn’t do a thing about it.

  And that’s a frightening thing to any horn man, the contact down. You know it’s possible for a good piece of horn to lift an audience right out of their seats and keep them rising—but when it works the other way around it can make you stop and think, am I losing it?

  Bojo was standing by the edge of the stage; he looked like he wanted something, so I signaled the others to keep it going or wrap it up without me. It wasn’t a bad set, but it wasn’t good either. (Like the ever-present war, it had lost all its meaning—but it just kept on going....) Loamy flashed me a grin, a we’ll go-down-fightin’ look, as I stepped past him and down off the stand next to the Boje. “What’s up?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. But I’m gonna wrap it up early tonight.”

  “Huh—”

  “It’s not your fault,” he cut me off. “You and the boys have been on top of it all the way in. I just feel like wrapping it early. Do one more set for me and that’ll be it.”

  “Sure. Why not?” I shrugged. Sometimes Bojo doesn’t make sense, but I’d give my horn for him if he asked—and that should give you some idea how much I think of the Boje. “You name it. What do you want to hear?”

  There was a funny look on his face. “The Battle Hum.”

  “Huh? Hey, are you feeling all right?”

  “Yeah, sure. Just play it, huh?”

  I shrugged again. “Whatever you want.” I almost added, “Sarge,” but decided that the Boje was in no mood to be kidded about his army career. Okay, if it was the Battle Hum he wanted, the Battle Hum he’d get.

  The Battle Hum is an experiment that failed—but it failed so successfully that we’ve never been able to live it down. A while back, we’d given some thought to breaking out of the jazz idiom and had tried to do some of the folk-rock stuff that was so popular (and commercial). Not the head music and the so-called protest stuff; instead, we had thought we could trace our musical origins, that sort of thing.

  But the jazz was so firmly rooted in our blood that most of what came out sounded too much like a blend of both and not enough of either to be distinctive.

  We’d just about come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work when one night Bojo suggested we try doing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. (He’d been in a funny mood that night too. It might have been the night Kennedy died. The second one.) I gave him a funny look. “Your good conduct medal acting up again?”

  He smiled. I expected him to reply, “I wish I’d had you in my unit, Duff. You wouldn’t be so flip.” But instead he murmured, “Try it. See what it sounds like.”

  The boys and I exchanged a glance. Why not? What have we got to lose? We did it as a lark, playing with it, noodling the various themes back and forth, exploring the nuances of its melody.

  Of course, when we were through with it, it sounded nothing like the original; long moody passages of blues alternated with blaring horn solos. I confess no great fondness for the traditional military version, and when trapped in a piece of music like that, I begin inventing. I used both clarinet and horn. I did one passage with a bugle, and once found myself wondering what a trombone would do.

  Anyway, it turned out to be our most successful experiment, but it could just as well have been a failure. There was no place to go with it, and it was a constant reminder of a whole set of experiments that hadn’t worked.

  And try as we could to bury it, it refused to lie down and stay dead. Requests for it popped up regular—everything from Lincoln’s Birthday to the Kennedy Assassinations. Boje would ask for it every July 4th. That was the only time his taste descended to that of the marks. He loved it as much as they did, even though he knew we hated to do it. He didn’t ask us to do it very often, though.

  Loamy faded out with the bass and Earlie put a stinger on the end with the drums. Almost immediately the Boje was up on the stage, which wasn’t like him. He doesn’t step on a man’s applause, but he had a look on his face like I hope never to see again. Like death it was.

  He held up his hands and cut the audience off short —not that they would have applauded much more anyway, but Bojo wasn’t waiting to see. “Ladies, Gentlemen,” he began. He paused, and for a second I thought he was going to say something else, but he seemed to change his mind and said, “There will be only one more set tonight and then we will be closing early.”

  A disinterested murmur from the audience—they really didn’t care. Only the hope of some excitement in an otherwise meaningless evening caused them to wonder aloud.

  I passed Bojo as he stepped down, but he didn’t say anything. The boys looked at me curiously. I shrugged in reply: “The Battle Hum.”

  Loamy started to protest, but I cut him off. “For the Boje. And tighten up on that bass; you’re getting sloppy.”

  “S’posed to be sloppy,” he muttered, and I shot him a look that said, “Not in this group, it’s not.”

  We started off easy, sort of snuck up on it slow-like. Began with a slow steady drumbeat, low and slow, one hundred to the minute, and after a bit Loamy was under it all just hinting at something else with a bass that was almost sullen.

  Jack on the piano kept waiting for me to cue him in, but I held back. There was something in the sound of the bass that I hadn’t heard before. At first I wondered how Loamy was doing it, but then I realized he wasn’t. A glance at him told me he was playing as sloppy as ever.

  But there was something there. Something I couldn’t quite place, something that didn’t belong in the sound. Offhandedly, I’d have guessed we were picking up some kind of harmonic off Boje’s fancy glasswork, but this was deeper than any echo had a right to be.

  I let it be and cued Jack in on the piano, but softly. He began with a slow steady alternation of notes, only hinting at the theme to come, but not giving it away. The whole thing was very dark, very sombre; the audience still did not know what we were doing, and for the first time that night they were paying attention.

  If I’d thought the piano was going to cover up that echo, I was wrong. It only seemed to heighten its effect. It was more distinct than ever—but I still couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t u
npleasant though; in fact, it might almost have been a perfect counterpoint.

  I picked up the horn, even started to place it to my lips, then changed my mind Clarinet. Only clarinet would do for this. It’s the only real instrument for me. It’s the soul stick. It can have a sweet caressable sound, like fresh milk being poured into a saucer—or it can blare out with all the harsh frenzy of a two-dollar whore. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to the sound.

  I eased in slowly, softly, with the gentle stroking of air that only the clarinet can do. The word clarinet even hints at it. I could hear the words in my head as I began, like from a distant choir—an all-male chorus, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the...”

  I found myself thinking about the war again, wondering what it must be like to be on the other side, wondering how it would be to be one of the enemy—

  Abruptly, I felt sorry for them, for they were doomed and didn’t know it. We always won. Always. Because we were right. And then I felt sorry for us too—what if we were wrong and didn’t know it?

  I shoved the thought out of my head; put my mind back on the music. Like the blues, slow and muted, the melody was sobbing through the room, its very slowness a sign that it could not last. For when the Duff plays the Battle Hum, it’s anything but soft and subtle. We only start out that way. It’s a battle hum and it’s gotta be played that way, loud and brassy.

  It’s a sound that has to be heard above the din of battle, above the dull thunder of the bombs, the agonized screams of the dying. It has to grab the men, lift them, pick them up, and hurl them back into battle. It’s got to be so vivid that you forget the smell of your blood, the pain of your torn flesh, your fears of death and damnation, and nothing must exist for you but the sound and the glory, and you rise and keep going. And keep on going. For the sound, the beautiful sound.

  Earlie picks up the pace then, and Loamy adds overtones and then does things with the bass. Jack starts slipping in some extra notes, and before we realize it Earlie has eased us into a whole new tempo, twice as fast as before, and then I’m blowing out my guts and my mind at the same time. Nothing exists but the clarinet and the sound—and somewhere on the fringes of my existence, the piano, the bass, and the drums are all combining to make that sound. The sound.