It’s like every family has their own way of saying things, Jutras told you. And they all understand each other, but they know you won’t. That’s why we have the interpreter.
They don’t trust folks from Away, Judy chimed in. That’s how they put it: there’s them, and then there’s Away. Everywhere else.
Yeah, it’s a serious Innsmouthian situation round these parts, Ken agreed. Some inbred motherfuckers we’re dealin’ with, that’s a certified fact.
Ken, Jutras warned him, but Ken simply snorted.
What, man? It’s just true. These people been marrying their cousins for a thousand years, by definition; cousins if they’re lucky, and some years? I’m willing to take a bet the gene-pool maybe didn’t stretch all that far. Like those Amish villages where the guys all have the same first name, and every dog’s named “Hund”.
Not a lot of cultural contamination on Carcosa, in other words, which is good in some ways, not so much in others. To cite another history of similar colonial isolation, in 1856 – fifty-two years after being officially rediscovered by the British – Pitcairn Island, inhabited by the descendants of the H.M.S. Bounty’s mutineers, lost 100% of its population, gaining only sixteen of them back three years after. Since then, its numbers have fluctuated up and down – as high as two hundred and fifty in 1936, as low as forty-three in 1996. Yet numbers in Carcosa apparently remain steady, as though maintaining a strict death per birth replace-the-race policy . . . barring the occasional mass murder, that is.
Because that’s what’s brought you here, of course – like it always does, no matter where, no matter with who. Because this is your “business”, the reckoning of mortality: to sex bones and extract DNA, to separate violent death covered up from more wholesome detritus, plague-pits or accidents or Acts of God alike, the dreadful human wreckage left behind whenever earth gapes wide, whenever the jungle sneezes up something that makes people cough themselves to death or sweat blood from every pore, whenever the sea rises up and bears away all in its path.
The whole island takes up approximately eighteen square miles, “lake” included. Nine of those take you from the airstrip to Hali-jo’juk, where the causeway to the dig awaits: Funeral Rock, yet one more island inside an island, a tiny chip barely a mile across split off from the main rim back into Hali itself, a shelf of bare black crag-slopes cradling a black sand beach which separates completely from the peninsula at high tide.
This is where it all happened; where no one will say how many of the island’s otherwise rigidly documented population were herded over no one will say how long a period of time, never to return. From what Judy and Ken have uncovered thus far, they think it must’ve begun long before the island was charted, let alone visited, and continued intermittently long after, with only the sheer numbers of the last mass-murder finally revealing the true nature of this particular “memorial” tradition at last . . . along with the fact that those taken to Funeral Rock for “burial” were not, strictly speaking, usually dead before the rocks and sand were thrown in on top of them.
All they know is, there’s no telling how deep it goes down, Jutras told you, before you even started packing. Which is why I need my best girl, Alice – to turn this around, ASAP.
What’s the hurry? you asked. Top layer’s the only one they can press charges with, right? I mean, the rest certainly proves a pattern of behaviour, local prejudices, superstitions, maybe even religion-based motive . . . but in prosecutorial terms, just how useful is that?
Jutras sighed. Hard to say. It’s a . . . weird situation, to say the least; slippery. Nobody knows who’s responsible, or claims not to, so the authorities have just scooped up every able-bodied man within a certain radius; they don’t have a jail, so they’re holding them in the hospital’s contagious ward.
Because women never kill anybody, right? But since you both knew the answer to that one, you asked instead: who are the authorities in this case, exactly, anyways?
Um . . . Wikipedia says the Hyades Islands, “a sub-archipelago thirty miles off the coast of East Timor,” so – Indonesia, I guess? It’s all pretty up in the air. A pause. Point is, they don’t even have cops here, let alone a court, so whoever does get charged with anything is going to have to be taken off-island for trial, and nobody’s happy with that idea; the local garrison commander needs hard facts to keep Carcosa from blowing up around him, literally. Thus, us.
You’ve worked with Jutras seven times before, all over. United Nations International Criminal Tribunal digs to start with, co-ordinated through The Hague – Darfur, then Cote d’Ivoire. Then on to smaller matters in far more obscure places, balancing corporate internal policing with volunteer work for far-flung, resource-poor communities. Carcosa definitely falls under the latter rubric, and also promises something the other sites most often don’t: Mystery. Even back when you were finishing your internship in the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service, the final verdict on any case was almost never in doubt from the moment you first viewed the body on, be it murder, misadventure or J-FROG (Just Plain Fuckin’ Ran Out of Gas).
I’ve never heard of the Hyades, actually, you admitted, feeling stupid. Carcosa either.
Yeah, I’m with you there; had to look ’em up on the plane. But ours is not to reason, right?
And you might have disagreed with him, on that last part – should have, probably. But you were jet-lagged already, which never helps. One more dig didn’t seem that big a deal.
Now here you are waist-deep in it, learning better.
Decomp clings to everything, in both senses of the word, just like the heat puts paid to modesty, prompting you and Judy to roll your coveralls to the waist over lunch, so you won’t get corpse-rub in your food. Later, you’ll pack today’s “grave bra” into a plastic bag full of Woolite and choose tomorrow’s from the rack it’s been drying on in your hotel room closet. You buy seven new ones for every dig, colour co-ordinated by weekday, and leave them behind afterwards, so stink-saturated they’re only fit for burning.
The famous interpreter Jutras hired, Ringo Astur, sits with you under the canopy, waving flies away. Round-headed, eternally cheerful, chain-smoking imported cigarettes; his skin is the same colour as Carcosa City’s brick-work, a coral-tinged light brown, hair worn in short corn-rows. How many today, Alice? he asks you every noon and every night, eyes charm-crinkling, like it’s some local version of How you doin’?
Three so far, Ringo. Why?
Oh, no reason. That’s a lot, yes?
More and more, you want to tell him. More, and more, and more . . . Just what have these people been doing out here all this time, anyways?
Tell me about the other city, you say, instead. The one from across Hali.
Hm, he replies. Well . . . that city’s also named Carcosa, supposedly. It appears lake-centre, where the volcano used to be – not always, not every night, but sometimes. Where the first Carcosa City stood once, before it dropped inside.
Then there’s a whole other Carcosa City under this lake?
A shrug. So they say. And it appears, sometimes . . . we’d be closer to it here than back over there, if it did. They come down to the quay when it does, the people who live in it, and beckon, try to get us to row across.
People live there?
Well, they look like people, yes, supposedly. They say they wear masks, those who’ve seen them.
You look down at your hands then, still stained from the grave; the sand’s black tinge never seems to wash entirely off. Remembering one skull, its back crushed in with an axe-like implement, so fragile that when you threaded two fingers through its eye-sockets and a thumb through the nose-hole, it came apart in your hand – shed itself by sections even as you fought to keep it intact, yellow-grey bone sliding to sketch an entire fresh new face with palm-pink eyes and an unstrung, mud-filled mouth.
Unsurprising how easy they come apart, considering what you discovered on those top-layer excavations: Carcosans are full of cartilage, like sharks or octopi, with
the proportion of actual collagen-poor bone to extensive net of tissue creepily small; all of them come out flexible yet springy, like osteogenesis imperfecta without the fracturing. You can see the signs from where you sit, in Ringo’s bluish sclerae, his triangular face, that certain blurred malleability of feature which comes from most of your cranial plates simply not fusing, a head full of fontanelles and no joint left un-double. Once, in Carcosa City, you saw a not-exactly-small ten-year-old squeeze through a cat-door and pop out the other side laughing, to bound away into the brush.
Not enough bones in some ways, too many in others. And you’re the only person, thus far, who ever seems to have thought of putting the extra ones together . . .
(But that’s a private project, at least for now. You haven’t even shown Jutras.)
It happens on two-sun days, mostly, around suns’-set, Ringo continues. That’s what they say. You look across Hali and there it is, all lit up, with the masks, and the beckoning. And then when you look up you see black stars high above, watching you.
Who’s this “they” you keep talking about, man? Ken yells at him, from over by the cooler. I mean, you’re related to basically everybody here, right? All those other Asturs? Old John-Paul-George Astur from the post office, Miss Sexy London Astur from the kelp farm? That dude Kilimanjaro Means We Couldn’t Climb It Astur, from the boat repair?
Don’t be an arse, Ken, Judy tells him. Jesus! What’s it to you, anyhow?
Now it’s Ringo’s turn to look down.
They don’t talk to me much anymore, he says, finally. Because I went Away. So I can’t really ask them about any of it.
You never saw it yourself, then? you find yourself asking.
Well . . . I did, yes. Once or twice, I think. I was young, a long time back. It was before, and Away – well, Away makes things like that hard to remember.
Ever try to go over?
No, no. That would be – that’s a bad idea.
You nod, take a swig of water. Then something he said earlier comes back, prompting another question, before you can think better of it:
Closer over here . . . is that why people really came to Funeral Rock, in the first place? So they’d have less of a way to row, if they wanted to make it to the other Carcosa?
Ringo looks at you hard for a long moment, not speaking. ’Til: no, he says, finally. That’s not why. They came to bury, or get buried. Like the King, in the story.
. . . what story?
The King, Ringo tells you, once ruled in Other Carcosa City, before he was expelled and set adrift. He came from somewhere else entirely, far Away, further than anywhere – came walking through their gates on foot one two-sun day, at suns’-set, and when asked to remove his mask as a gesture of friendship, claimed he didn’t wear one.
Couldn’t they tell? you ask, reasonably enough. But Ringo just shakes his head.
He looked . . . different, supposedly. Pale, yellow, with horns, all over – no one could think that was really his face; that’s what they say. And yet . . . That’s why the volcano blew up, you know. So they say.
Because of the King?
Because he wouldn’t leave. So the people in Other Carcosa City made it happen, to make sure he did.
Wouldn’t that have destroyed them, too?
Ringo shrugs. Concluding, after a beat: well, no, supposedly. They’re – different.
Later, back at camp, Judy maintains she’s actually heard this same story a few times already, from other islanders. Which surprises the hell out of Ken, who – for all his bitching – probably hasn’t tried talking to anybody without Ringo translating since he got here. Jutras easily confirms it, though, by pulling out an .mp3 he made on his phone of a woman (Miss Sexy London Astur?) telling the tale in Stage One Pidgin, the Malacca-Malay-inflected version of English Carcosans might’ve picked up from passing sailors, peppered with words you either can’t hear or don’t understand, your brain papering over the lacunae with whatever seems most contextually appropriate—
Many and many, one time there is to be being one [king] [magician] [warlord] [traitor], who is to be having all strength from the black pit of [stars] [salt] [silt], the bottom of every [hole] [mouth] [grave]. He is to be wearing no [mask] [face] [name]. He is to be being torn apart and ground down, thrown in seas, sunk deep, for fish to be eating. But then one time there are fish to be eating him, and islanders are to be eating the fish, with [pieces] [seeds] [bones] of him inside them. And then islanders are to be having children with [no bones] [no names] [no faces] . . .
You gulp, taste bile. Jesus, you say. So . . . that’s it, right? The motive. That’s why?
Classic Othering, with a fairytale spin, Jutras agrees. I particularly like the whole Evil King deal that obviously keeps being trotted out every time these throwback genetic payloads pop up; you wait ’til it gets obvious, re-brand them as changelings spawned by the Enemy, then take ’em over to Funeral Rock and let “nature” take its course. “We ‘had’ to kill them, you see, because they weren’t human, not really. Not like us.”
Look who’s talkin’, Ken mutters.
Judy frowns. What I don’t understand, though, is where this all came from, originally. The idea of this Evil King, of Other Carcosa City . . . all of it.
“Away”, I guess, Jutras replies. Except . . . no, they were doing this long before anybody else ever came by here, so – some sort of primal phobia about the sea, maybe: all that water, everything underneath it, the earthquakes, all the instability. It has to be somebody’s fault. A pause. That’s the theory, anyways. Except it’s hard to say, because, uh . . . nobody will say.
You can’t possibly believe—
Of course not, Alice, but they believe it. Enough to kill twenty-three children, and God knows how many more . . .
Now it’s your turn to nod, to stare. And reply, eventually:
. . . I should show you something, probably.
Looking at what you’ve so neatly laid out on a canvas tarp in a shallow trench three feet from the grave’s lip, elementssheltered under a fresh new tent, Jutras says nothing, just stares down. You don’t blame him, exactly; did it yourself, the first time you finally thought to stop and breathe. Now the words spill out in a similar rush, barely interrupted, monologue paced to an adrenaline rush tachycardia beat, so fast it barely seems to be your voice you’re both hearing say these things, with complete declarative confidence – the same authoritarian, spell-casting rhythm which renders truth from lies, makes fiction into fact, simply by stating even the most ridiculous-sounding things out loud.
You study him closely as you speak, too, just in case: strain to read every minor shift, each muscle-twitch, each spasm. Almost as though you think that at some point his own eye-whites are going to turn blue, jaw and temples deforming, as the planes of his skull soften ’til they slide to form someone else’s face entirely.
Remember how Ken kept saying these people weren’t like us? Well, asshole that he is, turns out he’s actually right. The adult human body has two hundred and six bones. These . . . have more. Best approximate total: just over three hundred and fifty, like a human infant, almost as though their bones never fused properly – and three times the normal amount of cartilage, so it doesn’t much matter that they didn’t. Like they were never meant to; like they were supposed to reach adulthood able to squeeze themselves easily through spaces that’d break a normal adult human’s neck.
Also, the reason it’s “just over” is because it seems each body’s inevitably got two duplicates of one particular bone . . . except it’s never the same one. This woman has two fibulae. This man has two second thoracic vertebrae. This child has two mandibles – must’ve made it hard to talk, especially since the second one is adult-sized. It’s like God was smuggling a whole other person into Carcosa, hidden inside these people’s bodies.
But – what can I say; I guess everybody caught on.
Oh, and now that we’ve reached the bottom – did that yesterday – you know how many corpses a
re in this grave, exactly? Three hundred and fifty.
Plus one.
It’s that “plus one” Jutras’ looking at right now, the nameless guest at this carrion feast, painstakingly pieced together in anatomical explode-a-view. On its own, it’d seem like some drunk pre-med student practical joke, a botched bastardisation Transformered together from three or more skeletons at once: spine articulated like a boa constrictor’s, ribs everywhere, even in its limbs; skull like a Rubik’s helmet, slabbed and fluted and interlocking, a puzzle-box with a million solutions but no answers. The fact that it proved surprisingly easy to assemble is the least of your worries, a strangeness so trivial it’s barely worth sparing the energy to consider . . . not when there’s just so much more about the whole exercise to avoid thinking about at all, in retrospect.
How long has that mould been growing on it? Jutras asks.
What mould?
He points, and you finally see it: grey as the bones themselves, furry. Hard to tell what you thought it was before, if you even registered its existence – moisture? Condensation?
I . . . don’t know. Why?
. . . no reason.
But he’s already backing away, step by step; peeling the flap without looking, shimmying himself free. You hear him take a long, shaky breath, almost like he’s tensing against nausea, trying not to vomit. His walkie gives an almighty crackling howl.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books) Page 33