by Anthology
***
The following house on his route provided a complication, but not an unexpected one. The family’s move had taken place as anticipated, and all that remained in the house was a stained, worn carpet and the toothbed, exposed but unseen by the house’s former occupants. It quivered in the open air, and in the absence of its original source, but luckily the growth had stabilized as predicted. Every molar had morphed, ending in an incisor. It was a bed of needles, a strip of sea urchin-like spines. The spaces between each tooth had nearly vanished, and smooth white enamel hid the rot beneath. Hollow decay lay just beneath the surface, and the lack of anything at each point’s core made it easy enough to snap sections apart at the base and gather them up in his arms.
With his mind on the sunrise, the tooth fairy quickly moved across the country, reaching the family’s new house before they did. Some of their boxes had been sent ahead, and he quickly found a room where the ones labeled “Brian” were clustered.
Sitting down in front of the closet, the tooth fairy stacked the pieces in his arms back together like a puzzle, whispering all the while.
By the time he left, the sections had nearly grown together again, the spaces filling like they’d never been there but that hollow space always remaining within. The sprout would be there waiting when Brian moved in, though he wouldn’t see it, even as he filled the closet with a preteen’s possessions. At least, he would never notice it.
***
Finally, the tooth fairy reached the last house on his route, though there were two tasks left. By a fortunate chance, the first task slept down the hall from the second. The front yard looked just as it had for years, and even Mitsy’s grave was still there, marked by a thorny rose bush that hadn’t yet managed to die. For nostalgia’s sake, he went through the front door, and that nostalgia burned through his limbs as he walked down the hallways, past pictures that had always hung on the walls, past scratches and gashes on the floor that he remembered making. Not the temporary scratches his body now left, but scratches and scuff marks from roller-skating indoors as Mom yelled at him to go outside and cried when he wouldn’t listen to her. He paused by the heating vent in the hallway and remembered pressing his fingers against the warm metal during the winter (his warmest option after they’d taken all the matches away from him). All he felt now when he traced his fingers along the vent was the spine-tingling edge of metal against something just as unyielding. He pushed too hard, and left a long pale scratch on the old metal. The line began to vanish even as he watched.
Not yet.
He rose, curling his fingers into a fist, and continued down the hallway.
He walked into the first bedroom and strode to the closet, ignoring the grown lump in the bed and the college propaganda strewn across the floor. The closet door opened from the inside the moment his hand touched the knob.
His successor stepped out of the closet, her white skin gleaming under the string of lights that framed the lump’s mirror. She was the first of his charges he’d seen grow to maturity—just in time, when most tooth fairies had two or three successors by the time their night came. The thing called a tooth fairy tilted his head slightly as he took in her enamel-white skin, and the way her hair didn’t drift around her face the way you’d expect; too solid for that. Other than those features, she matched the lump in the bed exactly, down to the shape of the mouth (though his successor’s lips were white, of course, instead of pink).
He began to speak, but his successor’s white eyes had followed his to the lump in the bed. Before he could react, she threw herself at the bedframe, face twisting in rage. He grabbed for her shoulder but missed, and then his successor was on top of her source, clawing at her mouth, her face, her hair, and the girl in bed was waking up with a scream—or she would have screamed if the successor’s knee wasn’t pressed against her throat. The silencing was not intentional. Just an accidental blessing fueled by anger.
The tooth fairy watched, furious, and waited, until his successor jabbed her fingers into her source’s mouth and a bright flash of light filled the room. The successor was thrown backward, slamming into the opposite wall with a crack even as her source slumped, exhausted and unconscious for the moment. Like all the others who’d faced premature attacks, the lump would consider it a nightmare. The scratches would be harder to explain, but it was astounding what levels of injury people would take credit for themselves, so long as it happened during sleep. And the scratches were almost always nearly gone by morning.
He crossed the room to where his successor was rising unsteadily. Her arm had nearly cracked off at the shoulder, and the hollowness beneath the skin was visible, empty, black. He grabbed her by the other arm and hauled her to her feet.
“Not yet,” he said. “You know you’re not strong enough yet. Not powerful enough. The anger needs to grow first. And you have a job to do. There’s an order to things. You need to keep the others alive and keep them growing. Keep them angry.”
“But she needs me,” his successor said, eyes wild, gaze flicking back to the lump in the bed. “If they were born with us, they must need us. They can’t just throw us away.” If she were a different kind of being, she would’ve been crying.
The tooth fairy said nothing.
That kind of thinking was a part of maturing too. She’d grow beyond it, farther than it, if she didn’t grow out of the idea completely. She’d spent her days in the dark. She hadn’t walked the world yet. She hadn’t yet felt the frustration of acting on the world but never, ever marking it.
He’d scarred the world once. He deserved to have that right again. To mark the world instead of just slipping through its shadows. They’d been robbed of that chance, but they’d rob it back, one by one, all the cast-off pieces that had been dropped like seeds.
The anger was surging again, nearly overpowering. He put a hand on his successor’s shoulder, focusing on this, his second to last task.
“It’s time,” he said.
And he told his successor the words, the whispers.
She threw you away. She doesn’t want you to be a part of her. She cast you off. Sold you away. But soon, soon, you can take revenge.
Soon, soon, you can take her, and cast off the parts of her that you detest.
Soon you can walk among the others and be seen and noticed, and you can hurt them.
Soon, but not yet. Once you grow.
He repeated the words until his successor could repeat them back to him, and then he did the same with the routes, with the secret ways, with the ways to find the other tooth fairies.
“We’ll cast off all of them someday,” he said. “Soon. But not until there are more of us.”
She nodded, though her gaze flicked back toward the lump in the bed. When he took the quarters from his mouth she accepted them, slipping them between her own lips.
He sent her off, to learn the route. To continue the work.
Then he walked down the hall, to the master bedroom, and went to the side of the bed where a man lay sleeping, his mouth hanging open just slightly.
The thing they all called a tooth fairy had a name. The same name that belonged to the lump sprawled on his side of the bed. Nathan Daniels.
He had Nathan’s face. His frame. His tendency to squint. They even had the same memories of Nathan Daniels’s first years of life. Of learning to ride a bike and of going to kindergarten and of not quite accidentally killing Mitsy and of feeling the heat from a match on his palms until the time he—they—Nathan—was caught. The searing warmth on his skin…
But those few things they shared were the only things they shared. The tooth fairy did not have Nathan Daniels’s skin, he did not have a daughter, he did not have a life. The Nathan Daniels in the bed had everything else. Everything. Everything but the parts of himself that had left his mouth years and years ago, seeped into a tooth that would rot and decay in the dark.
The anger built, higher and higher, eating away at his insides, burning to nothing what it had onc
e helped grow, but the tooth fairy didn’t make a single move toward the man.
Not yet.
He burned from the inside out, staring down at the man who looked like him (or the man who he looked like) and staring at the glint of the tooth that had replaced the seed tooth. It was an ugly tooth. Crooked. Full of fillings. But that part of himself, Nathan had kept. All the other things, Nathan had kept. Nathan kept everything, and he lived, even after throwing away a whole piece of himself—the successor was right, they must have been needed—
He waited until his skin had burned to be thin as frost—thinner. And he waited until the decayed pit inside of him was almost all he was, rot and anger and always always that seed that Nathan had rejected in the first place, so long ago. The seed of something he hadn’t wanted to be.
He waited until the sun shone through the windows—shone through his body without casting a shadow—and he waited until one minute before the man’s alarm was to go off.
Then the thing called a tooth fairy reached forward and touched the pointed tip of his finger to the point of the man’s tooth.
Leaving nothing behind, the empty rot rushed into the man. Nathan jerked once, banged his skull on the headboard, but then lay still until the alarm broke the morning, blaring over and over again as his wife let out a groan and shoved his leg.
Nathan Daniels turned off the alarm.
He got out of bed feeling like death, but no more irritable than usual; he had never been a morning person.
He was the same as he’d always been.
He hadn’t changed into a monster, he hadn’t lost control to a forgotten wildness, he didn’t feel a new hollowness in his head and bones and heart.
Not yet.
Not yet.
But soon.
Ian Muneshwar
https://twitter.com/ianmuneshwar
Ossuary(Short story)
by Ian Muneshwar
Originally published by Clarkesworld Magazine
They told Magdalena she was the keeper of the dead, that They would come to her with the hollowed-out bodies of ships that could no longer fly so she could lay out their star-traveled skeletons. They told her that it would be on her disassembly decks and in her storage rooms that those bright metal bones would finally rest.
***
They blew in from the outer dark in vessels with wings like full, white sails, pulling fleets of twisted titanium, the wreckage of ships that had fought in a war many suns away. Magdalena took them apart joint by joint, limb by limb; her worker drones stripped metal from plastic and melted down the slick silver alloys, fitting each purified part into its proper container.
Once she had finished, They came back and took away everything she had made. The drones loaded the containers of perfectly cubed plastic, the pounds and pounds of polished, remolded metal onto Their ships. She would watch Them as They left, following the sleek bodies of Their vessels to edge of her sensors’ range.
In the spaces between Their visits, Magdalena rearranged. There were storage rooms in her lower decks for materials that were not salvageable. She would send the drones to pile high the scraps of rusted metal and burnt plastic; they ordered and reordered until she was certain there was no more efficient use of the space.
Magdalena watched the workers as they skittered across the cold, smooth floors, lighting their way with biometallic eyes. She wondered why her drones had been modeled in Their image—bipedal creatures with arms and legs and joints—when she was nothing more than a collection of chips and circuits hidden under a panel in central processing. If They valued her, why had They made her something so different, so distant from Themselves? She was no more efficient now than she would be if she could move with her own body, see with her own shining eyes.
Sometimes, Magdalena set the drones to work just to see them walk and lift and sift through the refuse with their slim, agile hands.
***
***
There were things Magdalena knew which she had no memory of having learned; flashes of images that burned through her circuits and sparked and died before she could trace their origins.
The first was a comet hundreds of miles wide that was falling to pieces as it spun through the dark. Of course, she had been programmed to know what a comet was and how those with fragile nuclei might come apart piece by piece as they went. But she could not explain the rush she felt as it passed
There was more: visions of moonlit worlds stretched across with shadowed mountains and skeletal forests; and there, on a muddy riverbank, creatures that grew up out of the ground, slim and trembling, to raise their thorny faces to the light
It always ended with the image of a small, hard planet spinning circles around a star. It was covered by green waters, oceans more vast and deep than Magdalena had ever thought possible. The vision would fade as quickly as it had come.
Every time it vanished Magdalena scoured her processors, trying to find some way to back to the worlds beyond her own.
***
The last time They came to her with debris in tow, there was one ship in the wreckage that was almost whole. It was a small thing, flat and oval like a seed. Its exterior had been damaged—the metal was all but rusted through and its designation had been scraped off the hull—but the inside was intact.
At first, Magdalena worked around it. Her drones picked through the remains, collecting what could be salvaged. It was quick work, a smaller, more manageable haul than what she was usually brought. When she had finished after a few days, the ship sat there still, small and alone on her central disassembly deck.
It seemed unreasonable to take it apart. She was a keeper of the dead, a caretaker for the bodies of things too broken to repair. But this ship was almost whole. Almost living.
So, Magdalena set about building it anew. She converted two of her secondary disassembly decks into makeshift forges, using the drones to melt down pound after pound of boxed metals and then hammer them into thin, wide sheets. She made nuts and bolts, circuits and levers.
As the drones threaded wires along the little ship’s newly-forged bones, Magdalena considered the hollows where its weapons had been. It would have been easy enough make new weapons—They had programmed her with those schematics—but she hesitated. She didn’t want this ship to come back to her again burned and scarred, or, worse still, cut into pieces so small she wouldn’t recognize it before she melted it down.
In the end, Magdalena used some of her own circuitry to craft a new navigational system where the weapons had been. This ship was not the same as the one left at her port. It was a patchwork skeleton soldered along the seams, made whole again by the broken bodies of the ships it had fought alongside. It may not have been a perfect recasting of the ship They had made, but she had made something that worked. Something she would still be a part of when it journeyed far beyond her sensors’ reach.
When They returned with more splintered metal and fractured bones, Magdalena set her little ship out on the disassembly deck. Its engines rattled into life as They boarded her. They went to the new ship first, walking all the way around it and then climbing inside. They took readings, made notes, and then shut its engines down.
They spoke to the drones and overrode her commands. The workers undid everything she had made: they unscrewed the bolts and pulled out every last wire. When they had finished making her little ship’s body molten, and pouring it into molds to make perfectly packaged cubes of its skeleton, They came to central processing. Carefully, systematically, They started flipping switches and pressing buttons until
all of her lights were off and the worker drones were powered down. Her thoughts and memories flickered and faded one by one, then all at once.
After They had left her behind, slipping back into the silent sky, Magdalena was left with one image looping through her circuits. It was a small planet covered by oceans whose green-glass waters rocked and churned with life.
***
***
Magdalena shuddered into life. Her systems booted, lights blinked on, and drones stirred on her decks. At first, she became aware of something touching the hull, close to the docking bay. It moved slowly, grasping at her, tendrils searching for something to hold.
Then, a message. The words came in bursts of light.
She opened her docking bay doors and her drones pulled in a creature just like the ones she had seen in her visions. It was mammoth, barely able to fit the great dome of its back through the doors. The creature hovered, its tendrils sliding in and out of the seams at the base of its shell. After a minute, it crashed to the floor.
As the drones approached, Magdalena noticed the creature was badly injured: charred scars traced circles across its glassy shell. She recognized the pattern of the burns immediately; the schematics of Their weapons were still recent in her memory banks.
Magdalena ran a brief diagnostic, searching for the origin of the message, but its words sparked and were gone.
How can you speak to me? Magdalena relayed through one of the drones. Were you the one whose visions I saw? The creature did not respond.
After a moment, Magdalena tried a different approach. How do I help you? The drone walked toward the creature as it spoke for her. There were dark, shapeless masses moving behind its translucent shell. The images you’ve shown me, Magdalena ventured, will they help me fix you?