by Larry Niven
And the worst part of it all is, “Wendy” is actually just a mob of different beings. The being that destroyed the Roanoke colony isn’t the same as the being that ate the crew of the Mary Celeste, at least we don’t think so. But just like soldiers over the years personified their faceless enemies as a single Johnny Reb or Fritz or Charlie, so too have we referred to them as a single “Wendy.” And like Satan being a more interesting character than God in Paradise Lost, so too are we good-guy mortals left as mere fodder to strengthen the legend of a flesh-devouring creature.
Some native tribes called it the wendigo.
We’re Chuck Wepner fighting Muhammad Ali. No matter how many rounds we win, we’ll be forgotten, and your interest will remain with our opponent—don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking it! It ain’t frigging fair.
* * *
I’ve never been at any surprise parties for people. I just saw them on TV. People jump out when someone opens the door and turns on the lights. It always feels like a surprise party for Wendy.
We heard them in the hallway. Sven was laughing—a bit too loud, too forced—and a woman’s voice laughed along with him. I saw the door handle move. A soft buzz told me he’d inserted the key card into the room.
Sven screamed.
She’d smelled it, somehow. So she attacked poor goddamn Sven in the hallway.
The others jumped from their hiding places. “Open the door! Open the door!” more than one yelled. Everyone had their talismans out, their heavy-duty garbage bags, their ropes, their holy water; all the potpourri of weapons that usually, one or another, killed Wendy.
I opened the door, and was shielded from whatever happened in the hallway, blocked into the little closet space.
From the blur of movement I saw, it seemed some of my friends ran into the hallway, grabbed the Wendy, and dragged her in. A rush of air and light enveloped me as the door swung away, slammed shut. Dana Hernandez flipped the little hotel-room U-bolt closed and glanced at me. “Duck tape!” she yelled. Then she jumped into the melee in the center of the room.
The duck tape (often miscalled “duct tape,” but Google it if you do, you’re wrong) was in a paper bag along with some good Swedish-made scissors to cut it with. The gap between the door and the carpet was just enough that it needed the tape; I’d been assigned it. I knew its importance. But just now, with Sven’s desperately pumping legs sticking out of Wendy’s mouth, I had to look.
They have to give up part of their human appearance when they eat us, of course. The Wendy’s face and neck were distended like that of a boa constrictor eating a goat. Sven’s legs went slack; I’d just seen his moment of death. But my friends grabbed at his legs; being human, they had to try. It unhid its claws and swiped at Jamal; his face was opened up to visible teeth and gum. My friends stabbed her, they pressed crucifixes against her, they looped rope around her, looking for any one of the tricks that, without any predictability, would work.
But I had to do the goddamn duck tape.
I turned away just as the tips of Sven’s Nike Air Jordans disappeared down the Wendy’s throat.
One strip, covering the space between the door and the carpet. A strip above it, a strip below it, sealing and securing.
* * *
Poor Sven. He’d had to play out that other story that the outside world didn’t realize was based on Roanoke Society activities.
The Stranger in the Bar story.
You know the one: it’s become such a stale old wheezer that it can’t be published in magazines anymore, only broadcast. It goes like this:
Niles Cadbury hoisted his Tom Collins as he scanned the crowd. Some beautiful women were here tonight. Niles loved beauty. He took beauty. Even if it didn’t want to be taken.
At the end of the bar was a good-looking blonde who was getting very unsteady and was laughing way too loud. If he could just separate her from her friends and get her into a cab, he could do what he wanted. And Niles Cadbury liked to play rough.
“Hey stranger, buy me a drink?”
Niles looked over in surprise. How had this sexy redhead come to sit down beside him without him seeing her? Her swept-up hair was even redder than her lipstick.
Almost the color of blood.
(They get back to some hotel room, where inevitably, the misogynist gets his comeuppance.)
He sat back on the bed, watching as she shrugged off her dress. It hit the floor, and she kicked it aside.
“Tell me what you want,” she breathed, as she stepped out of her high heels.
Niles Cadbury didn’t like to put on the romantic crap any longer than he had to. He would tell her, in the crudest terms, what he wanted. If she didn’t do it, he would grab her and beat her until she did.
He was an expert at it.
“I want you to suck me dry,” he growled.
Her smile widened into a strangely oversized grin. With a shock, he saw that two of her teeth ended in long, sharp points.
And her eyes … Her eyes were red, glowing coals!
“Gladly!” she snarled. She jumped on him before he could scream.
The Wendys were the basis for the mythical vampires, of course.
* * *
Our screams would lead to no assistance. This was the Fleabag du Fleabag. No one cared. Loud rap blared from a room down the hall; there were shouts of argument from the floor above, unrelated to us.
The Wendy’s mouth was as wide as an HDTV now. It was barely keeping its human form. It chewed Jamal and Dana at once. Half a dozen knives and hatchets stuck out of her, but she still kept going. If we’d been able to surprise her and bag her head before she opened her mouth, none of this would have happened. It’s almost like they’ve got to get a running jump to leave their human form.
Three of my friends had disappeared inside its mouth, and it was still hungry. But the blows they’d struck were beginning to have their effect. From the knife sticking out of its back, a white mist began to waft. From the hatchet handle poking out from under an armpit, another little tendril of mist.
Three members in good standing of the Roanoke Society, local chapter 8601, were dead and consumed. The Wendy grabbed Manny, our old hand who’d been doing this since the 1970s. With a roar, it lifted him up and scooped its lower jaw (which was stretched like a pelican’s lower beak by now) and tossed him in. John “Lumberjack” Tolliver, who stood 6'6", swung a machete low to the ground, biting into its knee. But that barely fazed it.
I unrolled the duck tape and extended it in front of me.
The machete had done less than one of the daggers had, don’t ask me why. We can never tell.
* * *
Some wendigos seem to fear the crucifix, and will stop resisting entirely; we don’t know if it’s because some of them have adopted cultural taboos, or if we’re dealing with different subspecies.
Some of the creatures are easily bound up in rope, while others simply break it into shreds.
Chains were tried in the early 20th century, and always ended up being used against the Roanokans; somehow, the Wendys could heat the links and burn the hands of the people trying to wrap them up.
Guns never did any good, because the fast projectiles did little but perforate them, and in closed spaces we could shoot each other by accident.
Any sharp object did some good, because it started them bleeding out their mist. Some mythical vampires (depending on the author) are able to turn themselves into mist; that was surely based on wendigos bleeding out that white vapor; but it’s not some shape-shifting thing—it’s their death throes. If they’re able to drift out of the room, they can sometimes re-coalesce and survive to prey another day; hence, we have to seal the room fairly tight, always. We have to lock the room. Their body evaporates into mist, the mist becomes just water stains on the walls, and the bitch is dead.
It’s slow though, damn it.
I jumped at the Wendy just as it had pushed Manny’s Doc Martens down its hellish gullet. The gray tape stuck in a diagonal slas
h across its face (it looked like a Silly Putty-stretched comic strip had come to life—not a trace of its human guise as a beautiful woman remained) but I dropped the roll and it simply hung on the other side of “her.”
Thank God for Jane. She’s a jogger and a health nut, and at most of our chapter meetings she can be depended upon to rant about overweight America and diabetes and government-subsidized corn syrup—you almost want her to choke on her carob and soy-substitute milkshakes. But she’s in great shape. In a blur of motion, she wrapped it around the creature’s head three times.
Fitting that a weight-loss scold would bind up a wendigo’s mouth. No more meals for you, Wendy.
We bagged its head, wrestled it down to the floor, and sat on it; soon its life would bleed out. It took a while. We’d made a ruckus, but no one called the cops in this neighborhood. As the three of us survivors sat quietly, waiting for the wendigo to evaporate into dead mist, a shouting match (in Spanish) broke out between a male and female voice.
We would sneak out of here soon, and go back to our normal lives. The management would find a trashed hotel room, but no bodies.
Finally, the Wendy was gone. A few scraps of clothes, bunched up duck tape, and an empty burlap sack were all that remained of it—and our departed friends.
We cleaned up and left.
If it had happened differently, there would have been a locked-room mystery.
It could have gone like this: If everyone was eaten except me, and I succeeded in killing the Wendy, and died of wounds after killing it, they would have found my single dead body, evidence of a struggle, but a room sealed from the inside, with no possibility of escape.
Every locked-room mystery that ever really happened, happened like that.
The stories had to make up some convoluted tale of icicle daggers and false compartments or hidden rooms and odorless poisons. They also had to provide characterization. Sorry I wasn’t able to give you a sense of mine. But goddamn it, if I twist my ankle stepping off a curb, I’ll have to limp into the office the next morning, because I’ve run out of sick days taking care of these creatures. For you. And if you don’t have enough of a sense of me as a heroic, sympathetic character, then fuck y’all. Will you volunteer to kill Wendy?
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 5
Copyright © 2013 by Eric Cline. All rights reserved.
Neep
by K. C. Norton
Ever since Mads carved me, he has spoken of the day when he will make me his. Today is no exception.
“Your skin will part like apple-flesh,” he tells me, “and the meat beneath is white. Did you know that, Pluto? That inside, you are as white as I?” His fingers trace the slope of my cheek up to my scalp and into the stalks of my hair. He tugs—I am sure he thinks he is being gentle, but Mads is never gentle—and it takes everything I have not to react.
Like most humans, Mads does not believe we can feel pain, and I have never set him straight. If he does not know that he can hurt me, he will not bother to try. So I keep my face blank as I polish his second-best pair of shoes and say only, “So you have told me, Gartner Poulson.” When he caresses me, I dare not use his given name.
“You’re a good neep,” he tells me.
But that is the problem—I am no longer a neep. I am nearly full-grown, and when I begin to flower I will be diced and shaved and julienned in the name of Mads Poulson’s hunger.
His hand, where it rests against my skin, is smooth and soft. Beneath a stranger’s touch, I would seem to be the rough one. But skin deceives.
* * *
It pleases Mads to think of me as a woman—though of course I am no such thing—because his hunger for me has the same shape as all other human hungers.
When the light finally begins to fade from the sky, I am permitted to sit behind the old house, on the weathered steps half worn-through with rot, and speak with Sissel Peals, so long as it does not disrupt her work. Sissel considers herself a her, most likely because she has seeded several neeps of her own.
“You’re not well,” says Sissel, laundering Mads’ shirts. Her hands are leathery and polyped from so much time spent in the water.
“Well enough,” I say. From the folds of my tunic, I withdraw my secret stash of cigarettes. I must be very careful where and when I smoke, in case Mads should smell it and catch me out, but he never intrudes on the laundry washing. It disgusts him to think that he needs washing-after. When Sissel sees the carton, her lips become pruney, but she does not scold.
“There is news in town today,” she says instead. “We have a visitor.”
“A visitor.” I light a match, one of only four I have left, just as dangerous and just as secret as the cigarettes themselves. “That does not pass for news.”
“Ah, but she is special.” Sissel wrings a shirt dry and hangs it on the line. “Her performances are spectacular. And she is very pretty; they all say so.”
Who cares about pretty women? I hope she starves to death. I hope they all starve to death, and then sink rot-deep within the soil, that we may feed on them.
I take a deep drag on the cigarette and hold the smoke within my fibers for as long as I can, so that the tar and nicotine have every opportunity to render me carcinogenic. So that when he cuts me open, Mads’ stomach will roil at what his knife reveals: my flesh, not opaline, but yellow-black.
“Tell Gartner Poulson,” Sissel insists. “Maybe he’ll bring you to town, to meet her, before she leaves.” She hangs the last shirt and shakes her hands dry.
“What fun that would be,” I tell her, in just the tone of voice that should make clear my feelings on the subject.
“Tuber of Many Roots,” Sissel mutters, “such a sour neep I never met. Gartner Poulson will make himself sick on you.”
Very good. Let him.
* * *
When the sky has lost its blueness and is freckled with silver stars, I rub out the last ashes of my secret cigarette and head back into the house.
As much as it would please me to snub Mads, I do not dare. I find him in in his study, writing a lengthy letter to the head office in Copenhagen, telling them that the salt mine is nearly used up. They will tell him the same thing that they always tell him—keep trying, send what you find, write again next month—and things will go on as they always have. The mine has always been falling apart, and the head office has always sent him dry form letters with no useful advice or meaningful dispatches.
“Good night, Mads,” I say, letting my fingertips trail across his shoulders. He likes being called Mads when he is working, because it makes him feel at home. I know all his likes and dislikes; after all, he carved me.
He nods, but does not look up at me, does not even pause in the writing of his letter. So I am left in peace to head to the root cellar.
Only twelve steps separate the cellar from the rest of the house, but they lead to another world. Even out in the open air, I am never really myself. My people, from neep to turnip, are a people made for dwelling underground.
I step past cook’s plot to mine. The field workers do not sleep inside, and cook both retires and rises earlier than I. My plot is against the wall, where I can hear the occasional blast of dynamite more clearly than the Gartner’s movements about the house. I take off my tunic and hang it on its nail, to keep it out of the soil. The Gartner, like all his people, believes that dirt is shameful. I hide my cigarettes and my matches behind a loose board; if they are tainted with insulation or asbestos, so much the better. At last, naked, I slip into my plot.
It is so peaceful underground. I stretch out all my fingers and toes into the soil—even though it is flavored with punctured veins of salt—and relax. I let the damp earth feed me. I try to remember what it was like, before Mads Poulson dragged me up into the air and carved me a face.
He didn’t create me, no matter what he likes to think. He only changed me, and that’s poor magic.
I am drifting, my thoughts freed from my body, when it strikes me: if people p
ay their money to see this actress, the woman Sissel spoke of, then she must indeed be beautiful. And if they think she is beautiful, maybe Mads will think she is beautiful. And if Mads thinks she is beautiful, maybe he will hunger for her and not for me.
And he will forget about me.
And I will escape.
And so, I must cause him to meet this woman. It must happen soon, before I begin to flower.
* * *
For the hot meal, cook serves Mads liver paste and smoked cod alongside two thick slices of rye bread and a pile of roast baby potatoes.
I sit at table with him, but only to watch. I do not eat the same way he does. Still, he prefers my company. He likes my eyes on him; he likes to see my expression when his white teeth cut into those golden baby tubers, their brown skin crackling. Their butter smell seeps into my leaves. I don’t mind the suffering of the cow, or even of the fish—but each time he spears a potato, I feel as though my own flesh is speared, as if my own fibers are being ground to pulp between his molars.
He swallows, and I see his Adam’s apple bob as the potato slides down his throat and is lost. “You are quiet today, Pluto.”
“Sissel says there is a woman in town.” The words bubble out of me like a spring flood. “Everybody is talking about her.”
Mads raises his eyebrows and takes a bite of liver paste on rye bread.
“She is an actress,” I tell him.
“In plays? Or pictures?”
“I do not know, Gartner,” I admit. “But they say she is very beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” he says. “Well.”
“I would very much like to see her,” I say.
The bread stops before it reaches his mouth, which hangs open, forgotten.
This is a bold thing to say; I have never said I would like anything before—we are not supposed to want things besides what they tell us to want, or what they shape us to want.