by S. T. Joshi
He saw he was alone once the meagre light recognised him. A lectern stood beside an imposing telescope that was pointed at the window. Astronomical charts—some crumpled, others chewed or torn to shreds—lay on the floor. “I never saw the appeal of the stars,” Crowcross said, more distantly now. “I’ve no wish to be reminded of the dead. They say that’s how old their light is. I preferred to watch the parade of the world. The glass brought it close enough for my taste.”
He could have used the telescope to spy on the grounds and the road. Beyond the blurred fields Randolph saw an endless chain of watery lights being drawn at speed along the horizon. It was the motorway, where he promised himself he’d be soon, but he could finish exploring while he waited for the rain to stop, particularly since the family wasn’t with him. He left the turret room with barely a glance at the portrait in which Crowcross appeared to be stroking the barrel of the telescope as if it were a pet animal.
The next room was a library. Shelves of bound sets of fat volumes covered every wall up to the roof. Each volume was embossed with a C like a brand at the base of its spine. More than one high shelf had tipped over with the weight of books or the carelessness with which they’d been placed, so that dozens of books were sprawled about the floor in a jumble of dislocated pages. A ladder with rusty wheels towered over several stocky leather armchairs mottled with decay. “This might be tidier,” said Crowcross. “Perhaps that could be your job.”
What kind of joke was this meant to be? Randolph wondered if the last lord of Lorn Hall could have pulled the books down in a fury at having nowhere to hang his portrait. He couldn’t have done much if any reading in here unless there had been more light than the one remaining bulb provided. It was enough to show that Randolph was still alone, and he dodged across the corridor.
An unshaded bulb on a cobwebbed flex took its time over revealing a bedroom. All four bedposts leaned so far inwards that they could have been trying to grasp the light or fend it off. The canopy lay in a heap on the bed. Although Randolph thought he’d glimpsed clothes hanging in the tall black wardrobe as the light came on, once he blinked at the glare he could see nothing except gloom beyond the scrawny gap—no pale garment for somebody bigger than he was, no wads of tissue paper stuffed into the cuffs and collar. “This could be made fit for guests again,” Crowcross said. “Would you consider it to be your place?”
He sounded as furtively amused as he looked in his portrait, which showed him standing in the doorway of the room, gazing at whoever was within. It made Randolph glance behind him, even though he knew the corridor was empty. “I wouldn’t be a guest of yours,” he blurted, only to realise that in a sense he was. Almost too irritated to think, he tramped out of the room.
Next door was a bedroom very reminiscent of its neighbour. The fallen canopy of the four-poster was so rotten it appeared to have begun merging with the quilt. The portrait beyond the bed was virtually identical with the last one, and the light could have been competing at reluctance with its peers. Nothing was visible in the half-open wardrobe except padded hangers like bones fattened by dust. Randolph was about to move on when Crowcross said “This could be made fit for guests again. Would you consider it to be your place?”
The repetition sounded senile, and it seemed to cling to Randolph’s brain. As he lurched towards the corridor Crowcross added “Will you make yourself at home?”
It had none of the tone of an invitation, and Randolph wasn’t about to linger. Whoever else was upstairs had to be in the last room. “Have you seen all you choose?” Crowcross said while Randolph crossed the corridor. “See the rest, then.”
The last room stayed dark until Randolph shoved the door wider, and then the lights began to respond—more of them than he thought he’d seen during the rest of the tour. The room was larger than both its neighbours combined, and graced with several chandeliers that he suspected had been replaced by solitary bulbs elsewhere in the house. They were wired low on the walls and lay on the floor, casting more shadow than illumination as he peered about the room.
It was cluttered with retired items. Rolled-up tapestries drooped against the walls, and so did numerous carpets and rugs, suggesting that someone had chosen to rob Lorn Hall of warmth. Several battered grandfather clocks stood like sentries over wooden crates and trunks that must have taken two servants apiece to carry them, even when they were empty of luggage. Smaller clocks perched on rickety pieces of furniture or lurked on the floorboards, and Randolph couldn’t help fancying that somebody had tried to leave time up here to die. Crouching shadows outnumbered the objects he could see, but he appeared to be alone. As he narrowed his eyes Crowcross said “Here is where I liked to hide. Perhaps I still do.”
“I would if I were you,” Randolph said without having a preciseretort in mind. He’d noticed a number of paintings stacked against the wall at the far end of the room. Were they pictures Crowcross had replaced with his own, or examples of his work he didn’t want visitors to see? Randolph picked his way across the floor, almost treading on more than one photograph in the dimness—they’d slipped from unsteady heaps of framed pictures which, as far as he could make out, all showed members of the Crowcross family. Even the glass on the topmost pictures in the heaps was shattered. He’d decided to postpone understanding the damage until he was out of the room when he reached the paintings against the wall.
Though the light from the nearest chandelier was obstructed by the clutter, the image on the foremost canvas was plain enough. It portrayed Crowcross in a field, his arms folded, one foot on a prone man’s neck. He looked not so much triumphant as complacent. The victim’s face was either turned away submissively or buried in the earth, and his only distinguishing feature was the C embossed on his naked back. It wasn’t a painting from life, Randolph told himself; it was just a symbol or a fantasy, either of which was bad enough. He was about to tilt the canvas forward to expose the next when Crowcross spoke. “The last,” he said.
Did he mean a painting or the room, or did the phrase have another significance? Randolph wasn’t going to be daunted until he saw what Crowcross had tried to conceal, but as he took hold of a corner of the frame the portrait was invaded by darkness. A light had been extinguished at his back—no, more than one—and too late he realised something else. Because the headphones weren’t over his ears any more he’d mistaken the direction of the voice. It was behind him.
The room seemed to swivel giddily as he did. The figure that almost filled the doorway was disconcertingly familiar, and not just from the versions in the paintings; he’d glimpsed it skulking in the wardrobe. It wore a baggy nightshirt no less pallid and discoloured than its skin. Its face was as stiff as it appeared in any of the portraits, and the unblinking eyes were blank as lumps of greyish paint. The face had lolled in every direction it could find, much like the contents of the rest of the visible skin—the bare arms, the legs above the clawed feet. When the puffy white lips parted Randolph thought the mouth was in danger of losing more than its shape. As the figure shuffled forward he heard some of the substance of the unshod feet slopping against the floor. Just as its progress extinguished the rest of the lights it spoke with more enthusiasm than he’d heard from it anywhere else in the house. “Game,” it said.
Blind Fish
Caitlin R. Kiernan
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the
primitive terror.
—T. S. ELIOT
May 14, 2031 (Tuesday)
Since Istria, Jeremiah’s life seems portioned, divided into a monotonous triad: the dread presaging sleep, his nightmares, and the hours of disorientation after waking. He is dreamsick. A psychiatrist might prefer to label it PTSD, but to him dreamsick seems a far more appropriate term. The triad is monotonous, despite the terror, the cold sweats, the claustrophobia. He imagines that soldiers must often fall in
to an emotional routine not so very different, long periods of boredom between the sudden violence of battle. Having spoken to women and men who served in Pakistan, Korea, and Somalia, yes, what his life has become since Istria seems very much the same, as though he exists now in a continuous cycle of mental plateaus and spikes. But he picks and chooses from among the cheap buffet of black market pharmaceuticals he buys off the Cambodian and Laotian street vendors crowding O’Farrell and Jones streets. Rice-paper envelopes that once held the pills litter his nightstand, because he only rarely bothers gathering them up and throwing them away. Those who are dreamsick have deplorable housekeeping skills.
Their gods are not our own.
Jeremiah opens his eyes on a rainy morning in June, and Aden is still sleeping, coiled into the sheets beside him. So, she wasn’t only a part of the nightmare, and that brings both relief and the daily realization that he has survived actual events existing beyond the labyrinth of his subconscious. He sits up and wipes at his face, the stubble on his face and head, his aching eyes. The room is all shadows and the gloom of the day leaking in through the apartment window. The room is the same shades as the dream that clings to him as sure as the sheen of sweat. He wants a cigarette, but there’s no smoking when Aden is around. She has enough trouble breathing as it is; he settles for a Tic-Tac and a yellow pill. He leans against the headboard and tries not to remember the dream, the way it was not so very different than what actually happened off Kolone Isle.
He reminds himself to breathe.
He reminds himself to take slow, measured breaths. It’s always bad enough without hyperventilating. He alternates between watching the rain streaking the window and watching the clock on the nightstand, a refugee among all the dope and rice-paper envelopes, until Aden wakes up half an hour later. She opens her eyes, which he still finds unnerving, even after seven years and in spite of his feelings for her. They are the black eyes of certain sorts of sharks, which makes them more like the eyes of humans than the eyes of bony fish, possessing retinas, corneas, and pupils that dilate and contract. Her night vision is amazing, adapted to the depths at which the Monsanto germliners designed her to function, but she’s not so great at diurnal. She blinks, and smiles, and the respiratory assist vest hums to life, giving her sleep taxed lungs a rest, pumping salt water across the pairs of gill slits on either side of her sternum, just above her tiny breasts. In truth, Jeremiah only vaguely understands the mechanics of the RAVs provided to marine hybrids.
Their gods . . .
“You don’t look so good,” she says, and the chip implanted in her larynx does its halfway decent job of making her voice sound human.
“What else is new?” he says.
“The hole again?” she asks, and he replies “The hole again.”
She puts an arm around his legs, and hugs his knees. Her smooth, hairless skin is almost the same color as the light in the room, smudgy greys and blues and blacks. “You ought not keep going back there,” she says, as though he has a choice.
“I know.”
The yellow pill is starting to lift the pall in his head just enough that these moments seem somewhat more real than those moments, the ones he has presumably awakened from.
Jeremiah has spent many hours entertaining the notion that he’s still more than five hundred and fifty meters below the surface of the Adriatic, trapped in the submersible lit by the sickly red emergency lights while his days and nights in San Francisco are the dreams. Or a delirium he’s slipping into as his oxygen levels are rapidly depleted and hypoxia sets in.
“I dreamt of swimming,” Aden says sleepily, which is what she almost always dreams of; if he were a deep splice, like her, Jeremiah supposes he would also mostly dream of swimming. If he, like her, had been fashioned to be a creature of the sea, but found it necessary to spend the lion’s share of her life on land.
But it was a conscious choice, he reminds himself. It was a choice she made. I never asked her to do it.
“I should take a shower,” he says and considers a second yellow pill.
“I wish I could show you the way the sea is for me. Then maybe you would not be so afraid, even after what happened in the hole.”
With alien eyes, they did fashion their gods
Eyes far more alien than Aden’s. Inscrutable windows into inscrutable, ancient souls.
“Are you hungry?” he asks, and she nods and tells him she’ll make breakfast while he showers. Jeremiah isn’t ever hungry anymore, but it’s easier to go through the motions than let people think he’s trying to starve himself.
“Ramen and eggs?” she asks, and he nods.
He’s lucky, and this is one of the days there’s hot water. He stands beneath the spray, letting it beat down on the back of his neck and against his shoulders while he stares at water swirling down the drain set into the pink ceramic tiles. The steam smells like soap and shampoo. He could easily stay here until the water turned cold. If he were lucky all over again, that might not be for another half hour. But Aden is making breakfast, and the only thing less appetizing than the thought of breakfast is the thought of breakfast cold.
He shuts off the water, stands dripping a moment, then dries himself with a towel that should have seen the inside of a laundry two weeks ago. He shaves quickly and nicks himself twice.He dabs at the tiny cuts with tissue. All these simple, mundane acts, somehow they only serve to underscore the detached fog of his days, the dreamsickness, the inability to detach himself from the nightmares that are, in the main, only endlessly regurgitated memories.
Breakfast. An egg. Sriracha. Noodles. Two pieces of toast with the last of a jar of marmalade. Strong black coffee. A red pill from its rice-paper envelope, just to balance the effects of the yellow wake-up pill, which is making him jittery.
Aden makes a joke about going back to bed and fucking the day away, and Jeremiah laughs, though his libido has seen better days. Everything about me has seen better days, he thinks, wondering how long it will be before Aden tires of his shit and finds another lover. She says she would never do such a thing, but he’s never been a romantic. All relationships can be reduced to acts of selfishness, and when the self ceases to be satisfied—on whatever level—they dissolve. If you’re fortunate, relationships dissolve amicably.
They dress, he in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt almost as in need of washing as the bath towel, and she in one of the skintight bodysuits that help marine hybrids regulate primary electrolytes, and also avoid dehydration and overheating. She kisses him, her lips and tongue only faintly salty, only faintly tasting of fish. Then she takes the mag-lev to Oakland, and he crosses the bay to Berkeley. He’ll spend the day supervising work on the fossils recovered from the seafloor off Kolone.
Which, of course, is where the nightmares began.
Perhaps a man with more resolve would seek some other position at some other institution, instead of facing daily reminders of the mater and pater of his dreamsickness. But Jeremiah doesn’t. The Kolone fauna is his, and, likely, he will never have the opportunity to work with anything so important ever again in his life. Here is the sort of discovery that not only makes a career, but divides successful academic from scientific celebrity. Here is a life’s work laid out before him. He hasn’t the courage to give that up, regardless of its daily toll on his psyche.
“You could take the Caltech offer,” Aden might say, whenever the subject comes up (and she’s usually the one who broaches it). “Or Harvard. It’s not as if you don’t have good options available to you.”
She never mentions the Atlanta offer. Or Denver. But he understands her phobia of being landlocked, as much as he understands his own fears. Or so he likes to think.
There’s an accident on the bridge, just past Yerba Buena, which makes him late enough that both Galton and Loeuff have gone to lunch by the time he reaches the campus and the lab. He’ll have at least an hour to himself. It means being alone with the fossils, yes. But it al
so means not having to wear the mask he wears for his colleagues and everyone else but Aden.
Their gods, their faces.
Jeremiah picks up part of a fragile jawbone, then sets it down again.
He dislikes handling the bones, no matter how often he’s done just that.
. . . their faces.
The path leading to this moment, this day, to the dreamsickness, to his sharing a bed with a hybrid—all of it—began with an eight-year-old Croat boy stumbling across the battered fragments of a sauropod vertebra while beachcombing not far from Bale. The fragments were eventually brought to the attention of the Hrvatski geološki institut in Zagreb. That was almost fifteen years ago, and for a time the fossils had sat ignored in a cabinet drawer, as those who’d been charged with their keeping happened to have very little interest in anything beyond microfossils and local mineral resources. But then the boy’s find had been noticed by a visitor from the Museo Paelontologico Cittadino di Monfalcone, and she’d been the one to discover that the broken pieces of dinosaur bone had come from beds of late Early Cretaceous—age limestone exposed on the seafloor, half a mile from shore and all those fathoms down. She’d also been the one who contacted Jeremiah, aware of his pioneering work in underwater collecting techniques.
A Croat boy goes beach combing.
An Italian woman pulls open a dusty drawer.
A phone rings at Berkeley.
One hundred and thirty million years ago—give or take—the beds of limestone had been deposited in a lake, at a time when a vast carbonate shelf supported an archipelago that had spanned the proto-Mediterranean, the Tethys Ocean between Gondwana to the south and Laurasia to the north. Fanciful names spun with great solemnity by geographers to label hypothetical landmasses that would seem, to most, as mythic as Atlantis and Lemuria. Names for a vanished geography that Jeremiah has taught Aden in their time together, she so eager to learn and, he thinks, hoping that the more he talks about what took place that day off Kolone and the Istrian Peninsula, the better will be his chances of recovery. Never mind that he talks about it all day. That talking about it is his job. That he spends five or six days a week, every week—never one for vacations—describing, measuring, preserving the fossils the joint Italian-US-Croatian expedition had managed to gather before “the event” that had almost destroyed the Woods Hole submersible Sunfish. That had almost cost Jeremiah his life.