by Sean Wallace
It was all too much. Giant crabs, pretty scientists, her home destroyed, and her own personal fairy tale come true. She didn’t know what to think anymore, so she didn’t.
Doyer tugged her sleeve. She looked at him blankly.
“Speak to it!”
“No!” Not since high school had she felt this shy. For the life of her she couldn’t remember how to say “How are you?”—the second piece of Salt Fae language she’d learned after “Hello.”
“You have a satellite phone, yes? Good! Call Major Trent Necrat, of the HNS Dogmatic! Code 573-53-acrobat. Top security. Must keep this news secret. Who knows what enchantments she has access to!”
Abruptly, the world reasserted itself, and she shifted from overwhelmed Thirteen back to standard cynical Thirteen.
New enchantments. That’s what this was about. Very naïve of her not to have realized. From this, it would grow into every one of the bigger crabs being hijacked, any other Salt Fae taken prisoner, and from there to military labs and questioning, and then deep sea expeditions to find the rest of them, all for a new flood of enchantments. Science, her arse. It was nothing but a cash cow.
Doyer frowned at her. There was a syringe in his hands, and as she watched he squirted the needle clear. “Get going!”
“Can’t,” she said, “knee is busted.”
He sighed, exasperated. The Salt Fae stirred again.
“Listen, Thirteen! I need your help here. I’m sorry about the gun and all—I really didn’t want to hurt you, but you didn’t give me a choice. This is important. You can be a part of this.” He touched her hand, his own still miraculously clean. “After this, no one will ever laugh at you again.”
He looked like he cared, and he knew he was right. Damn him.
Yes, damn him.
Thirteen wouldn’t have long. It surprised her to realize she’d already made her decision.
She was going to be in so much trouble.
The Salt Fae opened her eyes.
The tidal rig heaved as the crab struggled. Doyer flung himself flat. Hold together, baby, Thirteen thought at her rig, not thinking about the gun, anything except the gun. She pulled a wrench from her tool belt, and as the platform beneath her surged upwards she clonked the scientist behind the ear. A moment later she was knocked flat. The wrench skittered across the catwalk and bounced over the edge. It took a long time before the crab settled down again. The smell of cooking fish drifted up. Something was overheating below, something close to the crab. All this being tossed about was making itself known in her stomach. She concentrated on not throwing up.
When the rig was still, Thirteen checked Doyer’s pulse. She’d never knocked anyone out before, well, not intentionally. There was a lot of blood. Gods, she was going to be in so much trouble. Forget the coast master; if this one really was a military scientist, she was screwed. “Don’t die.”
A hand on her arm made her jump. She looked up, into the Salt Fae’s eyes.
They were dark, strange, flat, like a fish’s. The hand on her arm glowed with a faint luminescence.
The woman surveyed the rig with bemusement. Thirteen had the feeling she hadn’t even realized it was in their path, and now that she had crashed her crab into it, didn’t care much.
She said something incomprehensible. Thirteen looked at her helplessly. The Salt Fae stood and faced the crab. She sang a piercing note that even Thirteen could hear, and wove a complex pattern with her hands. It might have been the glow of her skin, or the toll of the night, but Thirteen thought a faint trail of light followed her movements.
The crab responded to the Fae, no longer twitching, its eyes drooping slightly.
“Can you make it go backwards?” Thirteen asked, doubtful. The Salt Fae gave her a scornful look, and the rigger clamped her mouth shut. Right. Don’t disturb the Salt Fae.
The Fae dropped her eyes from Thirteen to Doyer, and gave the scientist a hard nudge in the ribs. She snorted, a surprisingly inelegant gesture for such a creature, her nostrils flaring wide. Thirteen cringed away when she reached out, but the Fae only patted her head.
“You’re welcome. I think.”
The Salt Fae scrambled up the crab’s leg, using the warty growths as handholds. At its head, she stood, and made a sweeping motion in Thirteen’s direction. They were going around.
“Oh. Good. I mean—” Thirteen nodded vehemently, and then, without quite knowing why, bowed. When she straightened the Salt Fae was gone.
Ponderously slow, the crab began to move again, shuffling backwards and turning as it did. Three point turn. Perhaps it was the Salt Fae’s enchantments that let it get so close to shore in the first place. Perhaps now she had placed some spell that lightened the crab’s load.
It seemed a lot of effort for not much in return. In fact, she couldn’t see anything the Salt Fae could hope to accomplish from this exercise at all.
Thirteen propped herself against the station. The rig shuddered as the crab backed away, but failed to collapse. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
The Salt Fae appeared again, waving for Thirteen’s attention. Thirteen waved back. The Salt Fae smiled, and raised a finger to her lips. She might have winked.
Slowly, Thirteen nodded again. “Not a soul,” she murmured.
Especially not after assaulting a military scientist.
Later, when the combat moths arrived, more of her hearing returned. There was a constant muffled buzzing from the com which she had turned to full volume, and when she leaned close to those birds that had returned, within pecking range, she thought she could make out their indignant caws. They hadn’t appreciated their sensational eviction.
She sat with Doyer’s head pillowed on her lap, partly out of guilt, but mostly so she could tell him what happened as soon as he woke. She was certain there were some details he’d need correcting on.
The moths alighted on the side of the rig, pilots peering around for somewhere to dismount. She peeked over the edge of the platform. Giant moths, she decided, were just as ugly as giant crabs. Leaning back, she finished her fourth smoke, and started her fifth.
The pilots brought more scientists with them. She was happy to play up her lack of hearing, and watched them with amusement when they attempted to mime their questions to her. She told them that Doyer had been struck by one of his boxes in one of the crab’s convulsions, and that was all. They left shortly after, taking Doyer with them. Good riddance. He wasn’t that cute anyway.
Later still, with the sun high in the sky and her hearing fully returned, the phone rang. She eyed it sceptically. The coast master never had anything nice to say, and would probably be exceedingly incensed that she’d gone and got her rig banged up.
“Thirteen here.”
“Ah, so you are alive!”
She hunkered down behind the bench. “You’re not supposed to use this line, Fourt. The coast master will yell distortion at you.”
“Eh,” he said, clearly not caring, “you’ve been silent for ages. What happened?”
“Saw one of those crabs up close. Not cool. Blew my hearing, too.”
“Mmm,” Fourteen hesitated, then said, “you had your com on, remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“While you and your scientist were yelling at each other, I thought I heard another voice. Some of the others did, too.”
“I told you my hearing was shot. I couldn’t hear shit.”
“Mmm,” he said again, “I think Nine is going to be nicer to you now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh huh. You take care of yourself.”
“Talk to you later.”
Thirteen smiled, and hung up. With her feet on the table, she poured herself a double, no, a triple of scotch. It seemed a paltry consolation, given everything she’d gone through to get it.
She took a sip.
It was worth it.
Show Night
Steve Rasnic Tem
Every night from
the time he was six or seven, Henry’s single mother would wake him up, invite him into the walk-in closet at the back of the upstairs hall, and together they would watch the tiny people stream out of the auditoriums and theatres of the entertainment district a few blocks away, their eyes glassy as dolls’. “Look at all the rich people in their fancy clothes,” she would say. “Wouldn’t it be grand to dress up and go to shows?” She’d fall silent then, and he’d wait, and then she’d say, “But frightening, too, don’t you think? All those people rubbing up against you, and you’d never know what any of them are intendin’. The city is such a lovely place, but such a dangerous place as well. Remember that, won’t you, Henry boy? But what am I thinking of? You’re just a little boy needing his sleep for a big day of learnin’ tomorrow!” And she’d seem so flustered and surprised with herself, even though she said more or less those same words every night. So she’d hustle him off to his bedroom next door, retiring to her own large room with a window that bulged out over the porch like a traumatized eye—to do whatever it was she needed to do.
More than a few nights Henry had waited until she thought him safely asleep, then crept down the hall in his footed pajamas whose worn soles made a pleasing whisper-whisper on the old carpet, and cracked open her door just enough to see her gazing out that window, at the hill that rose like a great amphitheater across their street, tier upon tier stacked with houses and traced by narrow lanes meandering to the top. This was where many of those rich theater-going people lived, and she would not go to bed until the last of their grand cars delivered them safely back into their even grander homes.
“The richest live nearest the top, I hear, and don’t they have a long way to travel up those narrow roads? Their kids must be nigh exhausted, don’t you think, after such a trip?”
Henry had never understood her sympathetic tone. They were rich, weren’t they? They had the grand cars and the grander homes, and they went to shows whenever they wanted. All he and his mother had were these windows, and a largely unobstructed view.
Some days she would keep him home from school and they would each pick an outfit from the dusty clothes hanging in that back closet. Even then these clothes had been ancient, smelling of dead people. He imagined he was being swallowed up in their dead skin, wrapped inside their unnaturally preserved carcasses.
But he said nothing. He did it for her, because she was his mother and because she was the saddest person he ever knew.
“Another cookie, my dear?” She passed the pewter plate his way, homemade cookies arranged into a flower shape on the yellowing bit of doily. He forced his hand out of the enveloping sleeve of the scratchy hounds-tooth coat and took a cookie with a polite “thank you.” It would taste like cardboard, but he bit into it anyway and smiled at her until she turned back to their program for this evening: an old Dick Powell movie on their battered black-and-white console television. As soon as her head turned he crumbled up the rest of the cookie and let it fall down inside the sleeve. Later he would shake it out into the sink before he gave the coat back to her.
His reserved seat for the evening was the broad Queen Anne chair that used to belong to Grandmother Emily. It was a faded grayish brown color, the front edge worn almost to transparency by thousands of pant legs and dresses. If he looked closely he could begin to see the chair’s collapsing guts inside the thin material. It had a slightly sour, cheesy smell from a succession of buttocks and sleeping cats. “Buttocks” was one of those words he’d never been allowed to use in his mother’s presence, so he thought the word as much as possible.
By his side the scarred mahogany end table was layered with other people’s thrown away ladies’ magazines, strategically placed to cover the missing veneer. He wasn’t allowed to move them, but he was allowed to use them as a drink coaster on Show Nights. A tall glass of cloudy lemonade sat there, whose bitterness he nursed for the duration of the performance. The cheesiness of the atmosphere, combined with the dryness of the cookie and bitter lemonade, made him queasy. Too-bright, blurry figures gyrated across the screen. Henry had always prided himself on never throwing up before the Show was over.
“This may have been one of your father’s movies,” she said, not unexpectedly. “Let’s see if I can spot him. I think that may have been him at the front of that crowd scene. Oh, there he is, by the light pole. No. Well, maybe. What do you think, Henry?”
“Maybe. That could be him, I guess,” Henry said for her benefit. Of course he couldn’t make out the details. He couldn’t make out the tiny, smeared faces of any of the extras. He could barely recognize the principal actors. In any case, he’d never believed that his father had been an actor, or a doctor, a traveling airline mechanic, a wealthy inventor, or any of the other things his mother had said about him.
Thirty years after his mother’s death Henry lived in the same house, with much the same furniture. And that back upstairs closet contained exactly the same antique garments. Her bedroom was now his, with the same carpet, green and yellow wallpaper, and the same smell: something strawberry-like which he’d never been able to track down. Now it was his face pressed against the glass after the clubs and theaters let out, watching the constant up-and-down movements on the hill.
When they’d hauled her off to the hospital he’d been unable to make himself go. He would never forgive himself for that, but at the time, he’d been terrified. Once he was in that hospital what might they do to him? They would find something terribly wrong with him, and they would not have let him go. His mother, he was sure, would have understood. She’d always said, “I want you safe, Henry, out of the reach of strangers.”
The TV he had now was color, with an impossible-to-understand remote control, although he’d eventually figured out how to power on and off, change channels, and volume. He held on to that remote tightly, ready to switch channels if anything disturbed. The faces were still on the blurry side with warring colors, the eyes strangely fixed, as if the people had been mesmerized, controlled by some hidden intelligence, some undiscovered lineage.
This perception had spoiled any entertainment value the programs might have for him; he could not lose himself in the shows as his mother had, but he still sat there glued every night of the week in the old Queen Anne chair. He sipped at bitter lemonade or at bitter tea, nibbled on stale cookies, watching, flipping the channels, making close comparisons of eyes, postures, of the relative position of arms and legs, of the overall outline of the people’s forms against painted backgrounds. Obviously there was a greater intelligence at work here—these people’s lives were not their own.
He began the Project when he was just a boy, working up one piece at a time. Every afternoon he sat on the front porch with battered binoculars, drawing maps of homes and utility buildings in his Big Chief tablet. One afternoon he started diagramming comings and goings, traffic patterns, the periodic appearances of this or that street beggar or pet. Sometimes he’d sneak up to Mother’s bedroom for a higher viewpoint, shamed by all the old coffee cans full of her terrible cookies, and box after box of tissues to soak up her inevitable tears. He didn’t really understand, except even then he knew that some people lived and breathed sadness as if it were desperately needed air.
As Henry grew into his teens his note-taking became even more obsessive. On a typical day he got up, drank a glass of foul-tasting lemonade, then immediately began work on his lists. He’d write the date at the top, some notes about the weather, perhaps some comments on what he was feeling that day. The weather is sunny, a scattering of clouds. I went down to the store, but I felt crowded, even though there were only a few people inside. I hurried home as fast as I could. Then he listed the comings and goings of the various families who lived on the hill, color-coding the schedules so that he could coordinate the time lines across families, comparing the lives of those at the bottom with those at the top, who he had come to refer to as “the upper crust.”
Mr. Balding-with-Red-Suspenders who lived in a large white house approximat
ely a third of the way up the hill, where the lane took some nasty turns (leading to a higher percentage of traffic accidents than anywhere else on the hill), left his home at 8:00 AM every morning. Since he did not work (disabled or independently wealthy?) his trips were circumscribed, apparently being more of the errand variety. But every other day or so his car would disappear behind a cluster of trees in the top quadrant of the hill at the same time Ms. Lemon-Dress-with-Pink-Shoes (named so because that’s what she wore three days out of five) left her red bungalow less than a hundred feet away. She would walk for a time toward those trees, but Henry always lost sight of her before she reached them. It didn’t matter how carefully he watched, he could never track her past a certain point. Was there an assignation involved? He could not say with any precision.
He began the Project piecemeal, in shoeboxes and crates, in castoff food containers, all of it hidden from his mother. He augmented his formal schooling with trips to the city’s Museum of Natural History. There he studied the dioramas.
“Nice detail, huh?” the guard said behind him.
“Oh, yes, beautiful,” Henry replied, too embarrassed to turn around and look at the man, afraid he’d throw him out for leaning on the glass. “I love the faces.”
“Yes. I hear some of those take hours to do.”
“They make the faces a little blurry on purpose, I think,” Henry said.
“It’s what makes the eyes really stand out. Their faces are a little dead, but the eyes are so alive they embarrass you to look at them.”
The guard laughed awkwardly. “Well, best run on. Almost closing. Feel free to come back tomorrow.”
Years of notes became years of meticulous recreations, pieces of a puzzle he hid in his closet and under the bed, behind a false wall in the attic where he knew his mother would never go, in secret cavities, disguised by layers of other things, under thick hedges, beneath outbuilding foundations, inside hollowed walls.