Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling

by H. P. Lovecraft

  To my left I see the shard of china that tripped Perry. The flashlight reveals delicate blue designs beneath a shiny glaze: leaves and flowers, a meadow, something that might be a child’s arm—the rest of the figure is gone. I expect that the vessel, when whole, depicted a pastoral scene wreathed in vines, and I can guess at the story it told: a white man’s paradise.

  Of course the trees are in straight lines here. They must have been planted by hand. The provincial park committee has done its best to return the site to nature, but there is only so much that can fairly be asked of mankind. Right?

  But my anger is a rising tide. I have not lingered a hundred hundred years to be disrespected on my own land. On this holy ground I have turned the voyageurs’ canoes asunder. I have called down fire from the Thunder Beings to burn an inn to ash. I long ago lost patience with the entitlement of foreign men. I feel my fury howl through centuries of stone and Meesha Kakwabit is such a tiny vessel.

  No. I’m a twenty-first century university student. Still, I have the distinct impression that neither Perry nor I will be returning to school in the fall. Perry struggles to stand. I struggle to breathe. High on the ridge above the lake I feel as though I’m drowning. The presence of Mazinaabik looms over me, pressing me down and under the tides of blood and time and the bottomless waters of the lake.

  I move my mouth and what emerges is a kind of choking grunt, because my mouth doesn’t seem to be quite the right shape for the sound that fights its way out between my teeth. Perry is blubbering a self-serving apology that I can barely hear. I would give more time to my own regrets if I could dare to split my attention, but my entire being is now consumed with the effort to stay conscious. If I go under, I will be submerged, swallowed up, subsumed.

  I fight with the last strength I can muster, but Mazinaabik Rock is far too heavy for me to shoulder. Blood and heritage roar in my ears like raging rapids. The momentum of eons is a riptide, and the lake here is very, very deep.

  Perry’s presumption has doomed us both. My last mortal thought is a pale hand on a painting in red ochre, a man with the ears of prey, and columns, trees like columns, all around.

  DOLLMAKER

  Alan Loewen

  You walk into my store looking for some quick money because you have heard on the streets that I hire without asking questions, and a runaway cannot afford to work for somebody who asks questions.

  Like so many others before you, before I even register on your consciousness as a harmless, wizened old man, you will first see the dolls that line my walls.

  I will watch and weigh and carefully judge.

  And if your eyes grow wide with wonder, if I see your hands reach out as with a will of their own to stroke hair or brush fingertips against a tiny, lace petticoat, or if I see your puzzled look at the sad expressions of my creations, I must let you go, for the Rules were set years ago.

  I will show you the broom and the cleaning supplies and in a few hours you will wander back into the streets with enough money to feed you for a day or two, but you will never return because it will not be permitted.

  Yet, if you enter with a cold heart and see my dolls only as an old man’s eccentricity, then I will smile and welcome you with open arms.

  Come into my parlor.

  I will pour you tea that you most likely will leave untouched, for your world-weary palate desires stronger libations. I will question you—I, gray-haired with bleary eyes—and you will see me as only a harmless old man.

  You will most likely answer my questions with monosyllabic contempt, but I am a master in my own right. You will eventually open up to me.

  And if you left hearth and home and heart because of true cruelty and not just some self-centered perception of it, if you fled because those that should have loved you are as twisted and evil as me, and if you sought the shelter of the streets because home gave no shelter at all, then again, I must let you go.

  The Abandoned have another Father and I am forbidden to touch them.

  I am father to the Arrogant.

  So, if you tell me of passions denied by those who measured restraint out of love, if you left their protection only to bitterly complain that the world will not bend itself to your whims, if you blame all and sundry for not acquiescing to your demands, if all you are is a complaining lump of clay, than I will nod wisely in agreement.

  The pastry I set before you I have baked with my own hands and includes special flavorings not found in this world.

  And after you have eaten, I will take you by the hand, and lead you into my workshop.

  I will remove the studs and rings from tongue, cheeks, ears, and nostrils and smooth the flesh, making it as unblemished as the day you were born.

  I will wave away the tattoos, making them fade into oblivion, and with just as much ease I will remove from your mind all that you are, for you are mine now and your father has the right to give you a new name.

  You will be dressed in crinolines and laces, your nails trimmed and shaped, rouge and eye liner applied with all the love of a master and your hair will be carefully brushed and exquisitely arranged.

  And though I cannot remove the sad expression from your face—for even my magic has its limits—I will transform you into that which is useful.

  Then you will sit with your brothers and sisters on the shelf until your new owner appears.

  And eventually she or he will come. They will enter the door, making the little bell above it jingle, and will look around wondering how and why they ever entered such a place.

  I can see their wounds.

  I see the slit throats of their souls bleeding to a death they will never reach. Some come with faces marred beyond recognition because of the deep cuts and lashes and scratches that life has given. Some of them have been reduced to shambling horrors with their incorporeal forms flayed alive and it takes all I am not to scream.

  They will stare at the walls and blink in surprise until their eyes fall on the one doll they have unknowingly come for.

  It may be you.

  I will teach them how to care for the priceless clothing, how to tend to the delicate hair, and how to ensure the fine china skin remains unblemished.

  And after they pay me my price, they will leave with you carefully packaged in a box, never to return, for these lost and lonely flayed souls will never again find my store.

  They will have no need to.

  The little bell above the door has rung and as I look up from where I sit behind the counter, I see a young girl with her upper lip curled in a contemptuous sneer as she stares at the dolls that line my walls.

  She will look just fetching in indigo.

  SECRETS IN THE SOIL

  E.S. Wynn

  Aureus was supposed to be a clean world. Earth-like, ripe for colonization. The kind of place where plants could take root and grow as well as they do back home.

  No life, no prior inhabitants. Clean. No mess, no fuss, no life displaced, no life to study. No extra paperwork to file or red tape to deal with.

  No secrets lurking just beneath the soil, waiting for the first plow to unearth them.

  A clean world. Yeah, that’s the way it was listed. That was the way the survey team who’d claimed to have spent a month on the surface billed it. That was what we paid for. A clean world.

  We weren’t on the surface three days before one of the kids came running to the colony portables with a stone about an inch across covered in ridges and striations. “A coin,” he called it, but we didn’t need a geologist to tell any of us that it was something more. Something that shouldn’t have been there. A fossil. Evidence of life, however ancient.

  Not the kind of thing you expect to find on a clean world.

  Drummond, our colony supervisor, dismissed it as an anomaly, and got our chief geologist, Doctor Harris, to write up some report on the iron content of the “coin” that basically dismissed it as a naturally occurring nodule that just happened to look like the remains of some ancient creature. Not a f
ossil, Harris maintained throughout the report. None of us believed him.

  Other “coins” started showing up after we broke ground on the fields where we were going to sew the seeds of our first crop of hybrid corn. To his credit, Drummond made every effort he could to keep the truth from getting out, even going so far as to erase autoplow logs and bribe people to collect the fossils before the rest of the colonists even knew about them. But, in the end, even he caved and admitted what all of us already knew. Aureus wasn’t a clean world. The sheer number of fossils just beneath the first six inches of topsoil could attest to that.

  You can probably imagine what followed. Lawsuits, hold orders, waivers, med-scans. Col-Ad, Colonial Administration– they dropped a team of geologists, exobiologists, exopalientologists and a whole bunch of other exo-specialists on Aureus. Standard procedure for finding evidence of life on a world that should have been clean. Bac-scans, deep-soil cores– within a week, they had a full biological profile of that particular stretch of the world, and the summary we got as colonists was better than a lot of us were expecting.

  Fossils. Lots of fossils, but nothing else. The survey team who’d discovered it, listing it as clean, had done a bac-check. Subsequent scans only showed earth-strains in the soil and atmosphere. Stuff we’d brought with us, but no native bacteria. Other scans over other hemispheres showed more of the same.

  A dead world, clean but for an explosion of life that had happened several hundred million years ago. No one could say why that explosion had ended, why the world wasn’t still crawling with life. A mass extinction, complete and planetwide, was all they would say. Close enough to a clean world to warrant continued colonization, as long Drummond agreed to host a small research team and everyone involved was willing to sign another battery of waivers.

  We’re farmers and craftsmen, not lawyers. We signed the waivers and went back to work.

  Worst mistake of my life, looking back. Worst mistake any of us could have made.

  The first sign that something less than kosher was going on came with the reports of the “coins” disappearing. The research team had quite a collection of them by that point, so when half the samples went missing from a locked case one night, Drummond authorized a door-to-door witch hunt in an attempt to find out who might have stolen them.

  To say he was thorough would be an understatement. We didn’t have much, a lot of printed spinplastic furniture and spinwoven work clothes, but Drummond’s goons made a mess of it all, turned whole units inside-out trying to find the missing coins. In the end, all he managed to dig up was a lot of ire, a lot of anger that culminated in a town meeting the next night.

  Town meeting. Hah. That meeting had more in common with a war-crimes trial than any kind of reasonable, civil discussion. Issues of trust, of boundaries, responsibility and the like were brought up, and by the time Drummond started accusing his most fervent detractors of being low lives and thieves, we were pissed enough at him that we took a vote to request a new colonial supervisor.

  You can probably imagine how that went over with Drummond. One order, one dramatically delivered ultimatum, and his staff of four security officers were at his side, stunsticks out, crackling with life.

  And that was when the lights went out. That was when the nightmare began.

  Biologists have such a narrow definition of life. They take into account the material aspects, the physical characteristics. Does it breed? Does it die? They look at fossils and they think “this is a copy of something that was alive once.” To them, it’s stone, minerals that replaced biological materials, an ancient facsimile of organic matter.

  But these fossils, these coins– they were something else. They were intelligent, aware.

  And they were hungry.

  It was dusk when it happened. The planet’s twin suns were resting at the edge of the horizon, bathing the colony in just enough crimson light for us to see the columns as they rose from the dirt.

  Columns. Great pillars of swirling stones, of those fossil coins gathering into knots and eddies, spreading into the sky. I remember standing at the door to the portable we’d made into our town hall, dumbstruck, staring, one of the technicians at my side. Light danced off smooth, fossilized lines like flickers of fire across the cracks of a fractured mirror. They were beautiful, the columns. Beautiful. Deadly.

  It only took one collapsing column to cause a panic. Half the colony was watching them twist into the sky when it happened, when one of the pillars tightened suddenly, then shattered with a great, rattling boom. Eyes met eyes, uncertain.

  And then the screams started.

  Like vicious insects, the “coins” homed in on a pair of colonists that had strayed a few paces closer than the rest of us, pelting them with such speed that skin and bone began to break, yielding to the burrowing edges of the rippling alien fossils. For an instant, no one moved– all we could do was stare, watch as bloody eyes bulged, as the “coins” cut to the core and spun through meat with such electric ferocity that the pair of colonists exploded into fountains of meat and gore.

  I didn’t wait. I don’t think anyone did. We scattered like roaches, ran, sprinted into the darkness, but there were so many of them. So many columns, so many pillars of the vicious little coins spinning like stony tornadoes across virgin earth.

  To this day I still don’t know how I survived. I locked myself in the first portable I could find, barricaded myself under a bed with broken chunks of a spinplastic dresser.

  All night long, the winds rattled and howled with clouds of the hungry stones. Sometimes the sound of the fossils scraping across the walls was like the scratching of great talons, the searching movements of massive hands. By the time dawn came, the stones had gone silent, but it wasn’t until I ran out of food and started to starve that I actually dared to leave the portable.

  And that’s when I saw it; the monument. The coiling columns of stone dark with thousands of those fossil “coins.” Even days after the slaughter, the thing was still wet and glistening with blood, seeming to pulse and stir with some terrifying semblance of life. I didn’t stay outside the portable for long, just lingered only long enough to cram a bunch of food in a pack and send a priority-one distress message to Col-Ad. That night, I barricaded myself back under the bed again, but the winds stayed calm.

  For days, they stayed calm. Nothing moved, nothing, and no one else showed up to pick through the colony’s supplies but me.

  Twenty-three days. That’s how long I lived off ration-packs, hidden under that bed, just listening, waiting for even the barest sound of stone scraping plastic.

  The recovery and rescue team Col-Ad sent realized they were out of their depth the instant they saw the monolith. A few minutes after their ship settled on the surface of Aureus, they were hurrying me aboard, eager to get back into orbit. I can’t blame them. Hell, I was ready to leave myself. At my request, they did a quick scan for survivors during our ascent, but found nothing, nothing but the hot blood pulsing on that bizarre, alien monument.

  Aureus. I still don’t know what happened to that world. One of the officers I talked to during the inevitable Col-Ad debriefing told me it had been quarantined and marked as off-limits to visitors, but when I was finally released three weeks later, I couldn’t find any record of it in the Inter-Star network. Nothing.

  Like it didn’t even exist. Like none of the people I’d known had died there. Like none of it was real.

  But it was real. All of it was real. Even now, I sometimes see the monument in my dreams, the coins, the blood, pulsing.

  Almost as if it’s calling me. Almost as if the monument is reaching across time and space, tugging at the edges of my mind with fingers made of stone, made of coins, fossils.

  Fingers stained with blood.

  FIRST TO ONE HUNDRED

  S.L. Dixon

  It was just one of those things, an item on a list, not quite a bucket list although it almost became the final tick on something of that nature. Just something that came
up and took hold like a mental vise grip.

  I’d always loved dinosaurs, spent weeks in both Alberta’s badlands and Montana’s badlands, went to museum exhibits all over the continent, scoured articles and journals, but it was always as if I was missing something. Late for the show, I suppose.

  The life wasn’t in those bones anymore, and I wanted a thriving, shaking, scratching, biting view of the great beasts. It wasn’t a reasonable urge, but matters of the heart rarely are.

  I even tried on the Jurassic Park movie when it came back out in 3D (hell of a lot of fun, but not what I needed).

  “Pard a da reason de’s still ‘round, is de smarts,” said a man with the right arm of his shirt noticeably empty of extremity.

  He spoke of the alligators. You see, I thought the alligators were to be my link, the living snapping, snarling dinosaurs I so eagerly sought. The man leading our little pleasure cruise into the swamp was a man named Big Tuck. He spoke broken swampy slang, smoked roll-your-owns (amazing what he did with his one arm and the shredded tobacco) and had a general reluctance about city dwellers. That included me; it also included the Asian couple snapping shot after shot on their Nikon Ones and a clueless man and his two sons (the boys looked bored enough to toss each other in just to see what would happen).

  Big Tuck was extra stern with the boys. He explained loss. Said he once had two arms. Said once he once had a brother. It was a sad swamp reality. Kids die and the remnants of the Cretaceous Period aren’t exactly against helping with the effort.

  “Big’un dat got ma arm, he’d still out dare. Cetus, he more den fiddeen foot, weigh ‘bout de same as a truck,” Big Tuck swung his stub and his existent arm with the same enthusiasm. His loose cigarette showered embers onto his vest of alligator hide. “Got ma brudda en me when we’s skippin’ rocks off de shore.”