It didn’t tick.
Had someone followed her in? How? She knew she’d locked the door. And there hadn’t been any other way—she’d gone all around everywhere. Except for those two locked doors.
She pulled the pack back down to the landing and held it to her ear to be sure. Nothing. Let go of it and listened again. Louder, now, and faster. And coming from above—the opposite direction of whatever was behind the doors. And faster. And louder. Like a shower of rocks. Like a storm of hail—was that it? A storm? Maybe she should retreat to the ground floor for safety. A hurricane could rip an old building like this apart—there hadn’t been any predictions of a storm that bad, though. Had there?
She needed to see. But the worms were up there. Did the noise come from them? What were they doing?
She could find out looking from the street. She put her shoes on and grabbed the key and her flashlight. She turned that off at the bottom of the stairs for a moment and immediately stepped in a stray puddle. Great.
Sticking near the wall she reached the front door without further mishap. And of course it was locked like she’d left it.
But the ticking noise was loud, even down here. She went out on the sidewalk and it was worse.
At first Brit couldn’t see anything weird. The sky glowed a silvery grey with the city’s ambient light; it was filled with low, slow-moving clouds—no! Those were the worms! She’d never seen them outside their tents before. What were they crawling on? Like ghosts in a movie they looked sort of see-through, rippling along what she could gradually make out as branch-like structures—and filmy-looking—leaves? Fainter than the worms themselves, the “leaves” shimmered in a way that made Brit’s heart ache oddly, as if she was reading a sad love story.
What about that ticking noise, though, which she could hear all around now? It sounded tinier than the tiniest hail, and—she put her hands out to be certain—nothing was hitting her. Straining her eyes, Brit could finally see hundreds of minuscule white specks dropping from the worms. They bounced noiselessly off her skin and coat—and presumably her head—and clicked against the ground.
Experimentally she tried to crush some of them beneath her right Converse. Silence. Not even the soft scrape of a rubber sole on the cement. But when she lifted her foot she’d smashed the white specks beneath it to a powder, and an acrid smell wafted up to her from the pavement, like mildew. What—
On the street’s other side a parked van lit up for a second as its door opened and shut. The brief light showed a navy coat; a long, pale ponytail; a round, pink face—Crofutt! He’d followed her somehow. Via those fireworks and sparklers he’d babbled about?
“Hey! This isn’t a good place,” he shouted across the road. “You really ought to come with me—”
Who cared how he’d found her? Brit ran back inside the building and slammed the door shut and locked it.
Crofutt kept shouting. “Dreams are dying back these days, and I think the reason for that’s somewhere around here.”
Her shoes were wetter than ever. And her socks. First chance she got—
“They’re dying back. Something’s killing them, something dangerous.”
Dry socks and shoes. Clean underwear. She’d forgotten to—
“Are you listening? If you don’t come out I’m going to call the cops.”
“Go head!” Brit yelled back. What had he been raving about? Dreams dying back, like some kind of occult crop? “I’ve got a right to be here!” Well, she did, sort of—her parents had signed the mortgage papers yesterday. “What they gonna say bout you stalkin a underage girl?”
That shut him up. Only for a moment.
“I’ll call anonymously,” Crofutt amended. “You shouldn’t stay here. Not here.”
An anonymous tip? How quickly would the cops respond? She might get away before they came.
And go where?
“At least tell me what you saw?” the man asked.
“What I—” She ought to stop answering him. It only encouraged him to keep talking.
“You were looking up. What did you see?”
Well, this was one person who would probably believe what she said.
Brit described the tents, the worms, the leaves and branches. The rain of specks. When she was done it was quiet again. Except for the ticking.
“That explains a lot.” Crofutt wasn’t shouting anymore. His voice felt close, like he was leaning on the door.
“Explain what?”
Crofutt had it all figured out. He called Brit a “Visioner,” and said her power was translating the ways of “non-physical entities” into “concrete, manipulable analogies.” It boiled down to her boiling down demons, angels—and other things, things without names, all the things most people couldn’t see or understand—to simpler forms. The worms ate dreams—that was what the leaves were. The specks were their—excrement.
And so on. It was the nearest anyone had come to making sense, assuming she truly wasn’t crazy. Brit felt completely willing to listen to Crofutt—through the door.
“Say you right,” she finally half-admitted. “These worms eatin up everybody’s hopes an dreams till ain’t none left?”
“Pretty much. Then they’ll vanish—leave, starve, however you lay out the concept. I’ve seen the effects of the cycle over and over—the 60s, the 80s—a lot of innocent people got hurt.”
“I can look after myself okay,” Brit assured him. Maybe he wasn’t a creeper after all.
She still wasn’t about to let him in, though. He could prove that another time, in the daylight, around other people.
And part of what he said didn’t quite compute—“I can make these what you callin ‘entities’ do like I want by how I see em?”
“Sort of; what they do also influences how they appear to you—”
“Awright. So what these worms turn into after they eat up everyone dreams? Some kinda gigantic moth?”
“Hmmmm. Could be.”
Images of Japanese monster movies flitted in and out of Brit’s head. She let them come and go. What she really needed to figure out was how to keep the worms from stripping all the silver dream leaves from people’s thought vines—that was what she had decided to name the translucent branches curling through the night: thought vines. Which could belong to anybody. They were tangled up but there must be a way to trace them to their roots, to their sources, which could be anyone. Even her parents. Even her.
Wet and hungry and tired—that didn’t matter. She had left home to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that she wasn’t a whack job. That she knew what she was doing. Which meant she had to know it.
She stopped answering Mr. Crofutt’s questions, and after a while he stopped asking them. She walked straight across the puddle to the stairway where her stuff was, not caring anymore how soaked she got. Because of the idea forming in her achy mind.
If the “entities” had to act like worms once she’d made them take that shape, they had to die like them. Die like worms.
She remembered from her sixth-grade science report how to kill tent caterpillars. You could cut down their nests and grind them to a pulp with heavy boots.
Brit didn’t have boots that big. Nobody did.
You could burn them out.
Could the nests only she saw catch fire? And if they did would the flames spread and burn down her parents’ building? Would the fire she set burn her to death?
She rolled up her sleeping bag and stuffed it in the pack. She pulled out her watch. Midnight. A long, long time till morning. Maybe she’d go home. Slog over to the Westin and find a cab. That’d be a laugh. She wouldn’t have accomplished anything except to piss off Mom and Dad.
She wasn’t scared. She climbed the rest of the way up and opened the door.
The roof was flat and covered in gravel. Brit scrunched over to the edge where the tent stuck up, betting it would be empty. Sure enough, the webbed walls were blank. No writhing. All the worms were out devouring dreams.
She took her box knife from her pants pocket and slashed at the nest’s nearest side, but the knife sank in past its hilt and left no trace, while her hand wouldn’t penetrate the webbing at all, not even a fraction of an inch. She remembered one of the rules for magic in the torn-up book of a runaway staying at their house: you should never use the same tools for mundane and spiritual tasks.
Brit cut things open with her box knife all the time. Mundane things. That left the cigar trimmer.
She hadn’t really been going to give it to Dad. She got it out of the pack and the shop’s bag: a pair of scissors with short, round blades. They made a nice, neat hole in the tent’s side.
She pushed her head into the hole before she could think too much about what she was doing. It was awful anyway. She cut and cut and cut, past layers and layers of webs. Like squirming deeper and deeper inside a haunted house. Arms, shoulders, chest, stomach—she wanted to throw up. Here came that salty taste and the extra spit squirting into her mouth.
She wiggled back out again and breathed through her mouth, hard. And heard a siren in the street below. That was the goad she needed. She grabbed up her pack and went back in the tent. Completely.
The siren died away in the distance. So Crofutt hadn’t turned her in after all. When she was sure they really weren’t coming to get her she wiggled back out again. Drizzle had begun to fall while she shuddered and gagged inside; she actually thought about staying inside the nest all night.
But she had no guarantee the worms would stay out eating till sunrise.
Instead she sat cross-legged on the cold, damp gravel. She took out and unrolled the bag and half unzipped it so it lay like a puffy, down mantilla on her head and neck and shoulders, and formed a little shelter on either side of her. She laid out her tools underneath it: the butterfly lighter, the six fat cigars, ends ritually trimmed, ready to burn.
Then she waited for the worms’ return. It wouldn’t do any good to destroy an empty nest.
She tried not to sleep but dozed off despite the cold and discomfort. Obviously that meant she wasn’t one bit scared of the morning. The red dawn. The horrible vibrations shaking the nest as its denizens poured back inside, ignoring—as she’d hoped they would—the slits and slices she’d made in their home.
Drawing on it as deeply as she could, Brit lit the first cigar. When it was going strong she reversed it and put the glowing end inside her mouth, bending to blow a stream of fragrant smoke into the nest’s heart.
At first the worms stirred at the intrusion, blind heads seeking nonexistent fresh air, but by the fourth cigar they settled down where they were. To rest. The fifth. To sleep. The sixth. To loosen the grips of their hooked legs, fall to the tent’s floor, and die.
She tossed the mantilla over the hole she’d used, changing it to a shroud.
Dizzy and nauseated, Brit struggled to her numb feet. Up, up, up: light and air and hope towered height upon height into heaven. The sun rose clear of a band of clouds. Too bright to the south and east to tell how many more nests awaited destruction.
She stumbled to the roof’s other end. Her shadow stretched north across the city. Beyond it lay her parents and her home. Warmth. Blessed dryness. Anger, undoubtedly. But she would apologize. Even go to the psychiatrist a few times if that was what they wanted. She’d tell them that she’d been wrong, that they were right. That she wasn’t scared anymore, because there had never been anything to be scared of.
She would tell them where she’d spent the night. And let them think they understood.
* * *
Nisi Shawls collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including The Years Best Fantasy and Horror. She was the 2011 Guest of Honor at the feminist SF convention WisCon and 2014 co-Guest of Honor for the Science Fiction Research Association. She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel “Everfair” is forthcoming in 2015 from Tor Books.
Der Kommissar’s In Town
Nick Mamatas
Charlotte did not materialize in the middle of the encampment, though to Mickey it seemed like she had. Six feet tall, not counting the afro, long limbs, wide shoulders, the confident stride of someone who knows she’s untouchable, she just somehow passed through the border from Ptown to what the maps called Franklin Plaza, and the protesters called the Paris Commune. Charlotte had weaved through the all-hours drum circle; right past the power station of stationary bicycles, solar cells, and car batteries; and followed the food line to the mess tent and from there found the medical tent.
Charlotte was from the movement. Sent by the Internet. She was a kommissar in a short skirt and long jacket.
“You’re here about the body,” Mickey said.
“Bodies,” Charlotte said.
Mickey ran his tongue through the gap between his teeth. “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” he said, then giggled.
Charlotte shifted her eyes back and forth, as if considering. “Ten blocks from here the police are mustering. They have two armored personnel carriers, a water cannon, and according to the scanners, are contemplating just pulling a MOVE on you.” Mickey looked confused, so Charlotte pointed up and explained, “MOVE as in Philadelphia, 1985. The cops blew up a city block to eliminate the pan-African movement. Most of the chatter we’ve tapped into is about the usual riot cops, but nothing’s off the table.”
“So, bodies,” Mickey said. “Should we evacuate?”
Charlotte shrugged. “You’re surrounded. Where are you going to go?”
“Come inside.”
The body was on a makeshift gurney—it was a white person with male genitals. He was naked except for a smock of blood from where he had been gutted.
“Do you know anything about this person?” Charlotte asked. “Or who killed this person?”
Mickey was about to say the word he but looked at Charlotte and swallowed it. “This person was named Jason. Jason had been coming around for a while now, but generally left when night fell. He—uh, Jason had a third-shift job somewhere. QA on a website. I don't know what Jason’s politics or identity was, really.”
Charlotte just looked at Mickey, so Mickey offered, “He was never injured before now, so…oh, sorry.”
“Most people have a gender identity that matches their genitalia,” Charlotte said. “And look at the wound. Someone was very…enthusiastic. Passionate. This wasn’t a mugging or the result of him just losing a fight he’d made the mistake of escalating when his opponent had the upper hand. Intensity. Do you think he was straight?”
“If you’re asking if the killer was a woman, that’s a good guess because—”
“So, yes.”
“We have her tied up. Obviously not information we’d share online. She’s not talking anyway. We cleared out the tent nearest the police cordon and put her in it. Figure if the cops charge and someone gets run down—”
“Or if someone is a police agent…” Charlotte said. “It may as well be her who gets trampled, or who gets away.” Mickey had no answer.
Whoever had bound the killer had done an enthusiastic job. Had it been consensual, Charlotte would have admired the shibari. The killer’s arms were bound behind her back at the wrist, elbow, and triceps. The rope wound around her neck, under her breasts, then to her waist. A second rope had been snaked through all ten of her toes, and then twisted around her ankles. There was a gag in the girl’s mouth and probably a half an orange behind the gag, given the smell of her. Charlotte looked at her hair, her ears, and eyebrows, and quickly decided that she was middle-class and performing it despite her uniform of black jeans and a hoodie and artfully placed face smudge. A slummer of some sort.
“You can go,” Charlotte said to Mickey, who then left without a word and stepped outside the tent. “I can still see you!” Charlotte said t
o his silhouette, which was a mistake, as several more shadowy forms joined him, circling the tent.
“Lmm mmum um uh hhhrm,” the girl said through her gag, so Charlotte ignored the gathering crowd and took off her gag,
“Let’s put on a show,” she said, working her jaw.
“You killed someone,” Charlotte said. “Why?”
“That’s a pig question.”
Charlotte snorted. “You pick up the phrase ‘pig question’ last week when you decided to come down here and check out the scene?”
The girl repeated, “Check out the scene” in a faux baritone, then leaned forward and peered at Charlotte. “Are you a tranny?”
Charlotte smacked her across the face, hard. Shadows stirred all along the sides of the tent.
“How anti-oppressive of you,” the girl said. She ran her tongue over her teeth.
“You killed a man.”
“You’re a judge now too, eh?” the girl said. “How like a man.”
“You’ve had your taunt, I’ve had my slap, move on.”
“Do I look like I could kill a big guy like Jason all by myself?” the girl asked. “Even with a knife.”
Charlotte looked the girl over again. Soft skin, feet tiny enough to be bound, and uninjured save for Charlotte’s own handprint on the side of her face. That meant she surrendered willingly.
“You had accomplices and they abandoned you. They held him and you gutted him.”
The girl’s left eyebrow flickered. That counted to Charlotte as a tell.
Mickey stuck his head in through the tent flap. “There’s a discussion on; some of us want to build some barricades here and meet the police, others want to retreat to the other end of the plaza. The opinion of a kommissar would go a long way.” Both women peered at him. “I mean, we’d have to move this interview.”
The girl spoke. “Don’t retreat, don’t move forward. It’s not going to matter. If you can, go down.” She turned to Charlotte and winked. “Right?”
“Do what you want,” Charlotte snapped at Mickey, who ducked out of the tent. Then she turned to the girl. “Who are you?”
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