The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  I shook my head, thought about biting him, but then I remembered the extra bullets in his belt. He raised a hand and threatened to slap me in my wound, eliciting a preparatory wince. The memory of the pain of being burned was, of course, still fresh in my mind, so I obeyed without delay.

  It was very fibrous, like chewing a styrofoam ball full of hair. Once I started, the bitterness came out, mixed with the saliva, trickled down my throat. I choked a bit, coughed through my nose. My sinuses burned.

  He waited until I’d given it a good work-over, then told me to swallow it.

  “Hmm-mmph,” I said, shaking my head.

  He answered that by putting his hand against my throat and pushing my neck against the chair, his thumb and index finger pressed deeply into the flesh under my jawbone. He was cutting off my carotid and jugular. I could feel my heart beating under his grip, and my face began to feel swollen, my eyes bulging.

  “Swallow it or choke. Your choice.”

  I forced it down, gagging at the coppery, acrid feel of the mush on the back of my tongue. He tilted my chin down so that my mouth opened and he could see inside. “Say ahhhhhhh!”

  “Ahhhhhhhgo fuck yourself.”

  “You tink you’re funny, do ya?” asked the fiddler, getting off of me. He picked up the revolver and tilted the cylinder open, then started loading more rounds into it. “You’ll tink you’re hilarious once that Acolouthis kicks in. I wonder what it really does.”

  “Like I told you, I have no idea. I’m as ignorant as you are. Well—not quite as ignorant as you, that’d be a feat.”

  He patted me on the wound with the back of his hand, a friendly gesture that would have been genial in more positive circumstance. A shock of pain rippled from my deltoid.

  “I guess we’ll just see what happens,” he said, smiling. “I hear tat some of the people tat take t’Sacrament, tey come back from the desert with the smarts to outwit time itself. Too remarkable, innit?”

  The concept evaded me, but I didn’t say anything, just sat and watched Brains play jaw music.

  “But den some of the people tat take it, tey go out into the wilds and never come back. I hear tey go out tere and der brains just can’t take it, tey can’t handle the visions and epiphanies. Dey go mad and die, der skulls just crack open from the pressure of the madness. Tey find em out in t’dunes, bled out from t’eyes and nose, chewed up by d’animals. Annatsa looky ones.”

  “Epiphany?” I asked. “That’s a nice big word from your vo-cab-u-lary, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, I told you! I got lots of words up here,” he said, tapping his head with the end of the pistol’s barrel. The rounds inside it clicked appreciatively. “It’s too bad here in about a half an hour you’ll forget all of yours.”

  He laughed uproariously at that. He slapped the cylinder back into the gun, and sat in a nearby chair. He tossed one foot up on his knee, leaned back, and tucked a hand into his armpit. The other dangled across his legs, tapping the revolver against his thigh.

  Several minutes passed. My headache got worse. I sniffed and winced at the lamplight, squinting. It felt like my heart was pumping molasses.

  “Do you know how long this is supposed to take?” I asked.

  The fiddler didn’t say anything.

  I looked up at the oil lamp on the counter and noticed something odd. Instead of softly flickering as it had been, now it seemed to be licking up from the wick in slow, tidal movements, curling up like solar prominence loops and evaporating in the glass bell. The steady hiss had become the low, muffled exhalation of a distant jet engine. It felt like staring into hell.

  I cut back to Brains, and he was staring right at me.

  He opened his mouth, gradually, and his eyelids slid downwards, covering his baby blues. Then a sound came out of his mouth that reminded me of the Tyrannosaurs from Jurassic Park, a deep, warbling-trumpeting vocalization from some Cthulean place deep in his throat that sent thrills of amazed horror through me.

  “WWWWAAAAAAAA—”

  His eyes slid open again. His eyeballs had been rolled back in his head while they were shut, and now they were falling back into place, great glassy orbs rivered with red veins.

  The effect was an ordeal of terrific proportions.

  I couldn’t handle his face. He was a living nightmare, and his weird roaring was intolerable.

  My heart contracted like a fist and sent a slow wave of pressure across my body. I realized it seemed to be beating every ten seconds, a languid, tidal metronome that made my circulatory system vacillate between turgid cold and feverish emptiness.

  I looked around the room for something I could focus on to help me ignore the bizarre trip I was experiencing. I’d never had hallucinogens before in my life. I wondered if I was going to be like this until the day I died, which was undoubtedly going to be soon.

  I hated it, couldn’t understand for the life of me why anyone would willingly go through this. Something was definitely wrong with me.

  I looked down. Instead of a naked chest covered in curls of coarse black hair, there was a hinged hatch, and it was open. Inside I could see circuitboards, loops of red and yellow wires, hard-drives with clickety-clackety arms twitching back and forth like the mandibles of ants, so many ants, they were migrating up my legs and into the hatch to pull the wires loose.

  Some of them had wings, and they were hornets, they were the giant hornets I’d seen in the train station attic, as big as my thumbs.

  “—AAAAAAA—”, the fiddler was warbling, and when I looked up at him he was grimacing with those grimy butter-colored teeth, one of them crooked like a mismatched gravestone. He looked like he was about to get out of his chair.

  “Geeet theeese fuuuckiiing thiiings ooooff meee!” I yodeled, struggling against my bonds, feeling my vocal cords undulate like the strings of a stand-up bass. The hornets tumbled from my lap like derailed train cars, rolling down my legs in slow-motion.

  My feet tingled, my hands were sparkling pins and needles, I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. My legs were made of iron. It was all I could do to move them. I had become a bobblehead figurine, my giant noggin unwieldy on my insubstantial neck. I could feel the numb skin of my face following my skull like an ill-fitting mask.

  I couldn’t breathe. I sucked at the air with greedy lungs, I opened my innermost self to make room for it but it refused to come into me fast enough. When I finally got enough of it, I was helplessly inflated with it, a solid mass of oxygen and nitrogen occupying my torso, bloating me like a pool toy.

  I forced it out into the fiddler’s face; it looked like Superman’s ice breath as it came out, a blast of white tousling his hair, breaking across the bridge of his nose as he crooned his frightening foghorn song.

  “—TTAAAAAAAAAFFFFFFF—”

  The sheets tied around my ankles were loose enough that I could piston my tree-trunk legs up and down under them. I got one foot free and kicked the twisted sheet off.

  I remembered something that I’d seen when I was a teenager, where a man had come to my school to show us tricks based in physics. At the moment, I couldn’t remember any of the others, but the one that came to mind was where he stood on a turntable that rotated freely to and fro. He had a bicycle wheel in his hands—when he spun it, he could somehow use the spinning wheel to rotate himself on the turntable by canting it to the left or the right.

  “—FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU—”

  I got it into my head that I could do something similar by kicking my legs up, leaning to the left, and bicycling my burdensome feet. And somehow, it seemed to be working. The barber chair began to turn on its pneumatic shaft, and Brains eased out of sight off the right side of my vision. He was now behind me.

  My heart was a slamming bank-vault door in my rib cage, thundering over and over. A hand came into sight and gripped the armrest at my left.

  I hunkered down in the chair and stretched out my foot, down, down, and found the pedal underneath the seat. I stood on it and the column loosed a
sinister blast of air, causing the seat to sink, which released the tension on the sheet binding my arms.

  “—UUUUUUUUUUUUCK” said Brains, pulling the chair. I swiveled around to face him, slithering one arm out of the sheets.

  I took careful aim, slung my arm back like a ten-pound sledgehammer, and planted a blow on the left corner of his jawbone with my fist.

  His cheeks rippled at the force of it and white spittle constellated from his flapping lips. I actually saw his eyeballs wobble, billiard balls in a Jello mold. While he coasted away from the impact, spraying a swath of saliva, I freed my other arm and pushed myself out of the chair feet-first.

  I cruised forward like a leaden missile and hovered there for what felt like half a minute at the top of an arc. I was backwinging to a landing on the floorboards when Brains held his arm out to the side, the straight-razor in his hand.

  The razor swung open with a sibilant ssssssssssssslick, and he turned toward me, trailing the arm, the blade gleaming in the warped lava-lamp light of the oil lantern. I leaned backward and his arm whipped from his shoulder like a steel chain.

  The razor sang through the air where my throat had been.

  I took advantage of his follow-through and hoisted one foot into the air, got behind it, and jammed my heel into his shoulder-blade. It was like hitting a walrus with a car. The satisfying weight of his mass carried his feet off the floor and he sailed backwards.

  I turned and tried to run, but my body was too slow, too heavy to respond to my demands. It was like a dream, I couldn’t move fast enough. I leaned forward, threw out one foot to catch the boards, and basically clawed across the floor alternating with my toes like two frogs pulling a helium balloon.

  My hand closed on the doorknob and I twisted it, shoved myself against the door. At first, it was like plowing into a wall, but then it gave way and I went tumbling into the night.

  One of the recruits was standing in front of the platoon when he came back to the company area, talking animatedly. Normand stood in the shadows under the risers and let him talk. “What does this man know of wilders and metal giants? He’s nothing but a poke, from the nowheres,” the young man was saying. “And a reformed outlaw, at that. A common criminal!”

  Another recruit was trying to get his attention.

  “What?” snapped the first.

  “E’s back there, larkin in them shadoos. Best watch—”

  “What’s your name, man?” asked Normand, strolling out of his hiding-place with his hands in the pockets of his dungarees. He spoke with geniality, opting not to come at him with the same barbed hostility as the officers. The recruit spun to face him, and stumbled over his words at first. “Rollins, serah, Clay Rollins. Clayton. That is, Trooper Clayton Rollins.”

  “Well, Trooper Rollins, how would you like to be my porter and confidant for a while? You talk like quite the diplomat. You get to have a front-row seat for these things I know nothing of.”

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 3 “The Rope and the Riddle”

  The Man Comes Around

  THE FIDDLER SLID DOWN THE wall and landed on his ass, as the gibbering maniac shoved the door open and flung himself through it. Julian scrambled to his feet and gave chase, jumping out into the street. By the time he got in line for a good shot, the old boy had already high-stepped it to the end of the block and was rounding the corner, running in that goofy way, mincing into the sunset like a crazed nancy-boy.

  Julian fired off a shot, but it was just a formality at this point. The bullet went wide.

  He snarled and threw the gun into the dirt, but then remembered that the wanna-be was going to die out there anyway. This thought consoled him, the mental image of him lying on his back out in the sands, blood drying in his teeth as a carrion-bird plucked out his eyes.

  He bent to pick up the gun, breathing hard, and sat on the edge of the barber’s porch. It had been a long week, and now it was going to get longer.

  He’d come out here to the middle of nowhere and scoped out the abandoned town after he’d heard about the rail shipment of K-Set imports, then gone back to Salt Point to recruit a couple of helpers. It was supposed to be a simple job, but the kid had ruined all of it.

  He considered taking a walk in the morning to make sure he was dead, to look for the body and put a couple of bullets into it for good measure.

  Whatever Julian Clines expected the Acolouthis to do, it wasn’t the result he got. He’d sat there in the chair for the better part of an hour, watching the kid get sweatier and sweatier, until finally the wannabe had whispered something unintelligible, then started freaking out.

  Julian had sworn and gotten out of his chair, but by the time he was on his feet, the kid had fought his way out of the sheets and started pinwheeling his feet. Afraid of having his teeth kicked out, Julian grabbed him and spun him around, and got a haymaker in the face instead.

  The fiddler looked down at the withered fungus-finger in his hand.

  He’d come out on top this way, at least. A sample of the Acolouthis would rake in a pretty penny out at Finback Fathoms.

  He trembled at a chill wind and pulled his jacket tighter at the neck, hugging his elbows to his sides. The desert had grown cool fast.

  He was sitting on the porch thinking about what he could buy with the money he was going to get for it when a man came up and stood over him, his boots crunching in the dirt and gravel. Julian looked up at him and stowed the mushroom in a jacket pocket.

  “Can I help you, sera?” he asked, searching the shadows for the man’s eyes.

  The stranger was unusually tall and whip-thin, his arms dangling at his thighs...his overcoat, the lifeless yellow of dead hair and old bones, twitched in the breeze like a shroud, as if it were made of cobwebs. He reached into his vest and took out a gold pocket watch with long white fingers.

  They were long, so long, too many fingers and too many joints, like a hand molded by a sculptor who’d never seen one and didn’t understand their use. They reminded Julian of bird feet and the great big wolf-spiders that lived in his Aunt Marda’s cottage out in Callahan.

  He thought about the time he’d seen one of those monsters in the cellar, a great bulbous black thing with fingers scuttling gingerly across the floor like a silk glove with a hand inside it. He was twelve, he had just come in from picking okra in the garden. When he saw the spider, he lost his shit and tried to crush it with the basket he was holding, but as the wicker fell across the creature, hundreds and thousands of seed-tiny spiders came streaming out from underneath it.

  He jumped on them and tried to stomp as many as he could, but they were nimble, and bit him on the feet.

  Julian still thought about those pinprick bites some days. He made a subconscious effort to kill every insect he saw, and shook out his boots every single time he put them on.

  “Iqsomilikyytmuhuelcyygurkwyhesihdeururtufutoec,” the man said, his voice a throaty whisper. The gibberish whipped out of him all at once, a string of nonsense syllables snatched from the reel of a fishing rod.

  The gold pocket watch was huge, the size of a teacup saucer. The ticking of the clockwork inside was incongruously delicate, the soft, crystallic tapping of snowfall. Julian felt like he’d taken some of the Acolouthis himself.

  “What?”

  He looked up at the man’s face, framed in a keyhole of light coming from the dentist’s office. He gasped at what he saw there and started to scramble backwards in purest terror.

  “What are you?” he asked, or at least would have, had he found his voice and had the nerve to use it.

  “When you came home last night at two, I was waiting there for you—” the stranger said. He reached down with that eerie cellar-spider hand and covered Julian’s nose and mouth. It was surprisingly strong, and his skin was cool and damp.

  The arachnid white hand gripped Julian’s head and lifted him off the ground as easily as if he were an empty jacket, drawing him close until his hat brushed Julian’s forehead. Before the fiddle
r lost his name, his eyes watered, widening in deepest fear and awe.

  He’s got no face, he thought. It was just a broad, blank wither, like a water-logged thumb. Under the hat’s brim there existed only a wizened plane of pale skin.

  “—but when you looked behind the curtain, I wasn’t there, for certain.”

  The man once known as Julian Clines collapsed into the dust and lay still.

  “Come away, come away,” mumbled the unremembered man as he walked away into the darkening east, “And see what’s behind the door....”

  The House of Water

  I HURTLED THROUGH A MAZE of haunted houses, an unending city of dark-eyed monoliths that clustered close and made the road into a deep valley of paper shadows. A gigantic clap of thunder coughed behind me and something slowly cut the air in my way: a torpedo the size of a snow pea, dragging a wobbling, glassy icicle of vacuum behind it. As I passed it, the torpedo hit a wall and starburst into a flowering nebula of tumbling splinters.

  The Big Bang, I thought. I kept running.

  I wasn’t sure what I was running from: my own deteriorated mental condition, or the man with the gun.

  I was deep into the desert by the time I realized I couldn’t outrun my own mind. I jounced to a stop like a fat man, stumbling in the dirt as my legs rippled from my attempts to stop myself. I fell to my knees in the sagebrush and dry-heaved, but this time, nothing came up.

  I wanted to scrape the “Sacrament” out of me, I wanted to stop the madness. I scratched at my tongue with my grimy fingernails and stuck my fingers down my throat, but I couldn’t get it out.

  After a long while I spat. It did not hang in the air in front of my face, but hit the ground with a soft thump. Seemed the Acolouthis was beginning to wear off. Perhaps I had survived it after all. I stood up, pushing myself straight with my hands on my knees, and looked around, shivering sweaty in the breeze.

  I was alone, in a flat cool wasteland that bristled with sparse sagebrush. The night sky was a rippling black dome ten feet over my head, like a plastic tent shotgunned with a trillion holes through which I could see an unspeakable light. I couldn’t say that it was beautiful.