(There are two skulls on the floor—one of the bodies still has a helmet. They’re on either side of the ladder. Part of me wonders how the thing in the attic decapitated them. Most of me wants to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and scream I can’t hear you.)
“Talk to me, Shub,” I call. “You want to talk, don’t you? It’s the only way you or any of your brood are going to get out of here alive.”
The roof beams creak, as if something vast is adjusting its weight distribution. “Shub. Shub. Glurp. Daddy, it wants me to talk to you. Daddy? Will you come up here?”
I swallow bile and tense my leg muscles to flee. “No,” I say.
“Shub! Shub! Shub!” The thing with Ada in the attic, the thing working her vocal cords, booms at me, a menacing rumble. Obviously, it’s not happy about its latest self-propelled snack refusing to follow the lure upstairs. I use the rumbling as my cue to unhook the sample jars and look around. Her spawn crawls over the woodpile, near the dead and half-eaten troopers. Tiny horses and cone snails, swarming and chewing. I swallow again. Look sideways: near the door, a handful of snail shells crushed by boots. Survivors inch across the floor around them. I crouch down and use my forceps to take living samples, one per glass-walled tube. Snail, horse, snail, horse. They go back into the crush-resistant fiberglass box and I lock it and sling it over my shoulder.
That’s what I’m really here for, you know. It was pretty clear that this was a zero-survivor situation once Alan confirmed that brick three was missing. But anything I can learn from the Queen . . .
“We have met before,” the Queen says through Ada’s childish larynx.
“Have we?” I ask.
“You remember me. I was your Hetty. I said we would meet again. Isn’t that right?”
My skin crawls. I begin to frame a reply, then stop. I was going to say something human, but: do not disclose operational intelligence to happy fun serial group mind horror. I try again: “You wake up each time: reincarnation, isn’t it? You find yourself fat and sleepy and spawning in a warm, food-rich place. And you remember who you were—who you are. Is that right?”
“I knew you would understand! Come close and you can join me.”
Bingo. “And you keep trying to do better each time, don’t you? What was the idea, this time?”
“Will you join me if I tell you? I will make you immortal and we will thrive and feed and dance joyous through the aeons—”
“Yes,” I lie.
“It has been so long since I have mated with another mind . . . Yes, youmust join me! My idiot offspring eat their mother’s flesh and then their siblings, before they mate and grow sleek and strong and seek out a nest and settle down, and I awaken behind their eyes. One or two in each brood prosper that way. But I have worked out a way for more to survive to maturity. Join me, help me, and we will be fruitful and amplify and become myriad.”
“I don’t think so.” I can’t hold it back any more.
“Why won’t you—”
“Your last worker is on its way home to visit, carrying your last Renfield. But it’s not going to be allowed to get here, Shubby. We’re not going to let you distribute your spawn via the girls at St. Ninian’s. The school’s on lock-down, and they know what to search for. Acid baths, Shubby. Anything that looks like My Little Pony is going to take a one-way trip through an acid bath and a furnace on sight. Snails, too.”
A snarling animal scream cuts through the air behind me, from beyond the closed doors. It’s cut short by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire.
The thing above me roars in existential pain and heaves its bulk up, then brings it smashing down on the ceiling. Paint dust and splinters fall and the light bulb shakes, the shadows flickering across the room. “My children! My beautiful future flesh! My babies! Traitor! I would have loved and cherished your memories forever!” The snails and tiny horses swarm on the skeletonizing remains of the dead soldiers. Another voice cuts through the cacophony: “Dadd-ee! Help me!”
I step back towards the door. I tap my throat mike and speak quietly: “Got samples. No—” I glance at the ladder—“survivors. Over.”
“Roger,” Alan says calmly. “Target neutralized in yard behind you. Come on out. We’re falling back now. Over.”
I throw myself backwards at the woodshed doors. The ceiling creaks and screeches and then begins to buckle, giving way and drooping from the edges of the loft stairwell opening. Something huge is pushing through from above, something like the rasp of a slug the size of a bus, iridescent and putrefying and bubbling with feculent slime. It vents a warbling roar, “ShubShubShub.” The door gives way behind me as I topple, getting a vague impression of writhing tentacles, a huge nodding eyeless horse-head, something like a broken doll impaled on a wooden stick—
Someone catches me and then I’m sprawling across a back as they pick me up and run across a farmyard, dodging around the fallen bulk of another of the horses from hell. I can see stars and a high overcast of cirrus whirling overhead as my rescuer pounds across the packed earth. Wall to one side, reflecting the livid glare of a burning building. “Get down!” someone shouts in my ear as he drops me on the ground in the lee of a drystone wall.
“Got it—” I scramble for cover as the incendiary fireworks surge overhead and the woodshed lights off with a whump I can feel in my bladder.
And then I lie there until Sergeant Howe gives everyone the all clear and sends a medic to look me over for triage, clutching the sample box like grim death and telling myself that it was all over for Ada Doom Edgebaston long before I walked through the woodshed door.
Because reincarnation only works for alien group mind horrors, doesn’t it?
Keep telling yourself that, Bob. Take your sample tubes back to R&D in London, leave the burning wreckage of the farm behind. Take your cold comfort where you can, and keep telling yourself that the nasty thing old HPL saw behind the woodshed was lying or mistaken, and that you’ll never meet it again.
Who knows? You might even be right . . .
HOME OFFICE
CONFIDENTIAL
Procurement Specification: HO/MPMU/46701
Date of Issue: May 3rd, 2006
Requirement for:
Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts for Police Mounted Units
It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century mounted police are seen as an anachronism by the public. Despite their clear advantages for crowd control and supervision of demonstrations and public sporting events, mounted operations are expensive to conduct, require extensive stabling and support infrastructure, and compete for resources with other specialist units (e.g. airborne, tactical firearms, scene of crime investigation).
This document contains the operational requirements for upgraded genetically engineered mounts that will enhance the capabilities and availability of our mounted officers . . .
Desirable characteristics:
Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:
· Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
· Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
· Ability to see in the dark
· Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands
· Invisible
· Bulletproof
· Carnivorous
· Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
State of Requirement
CANCELLED September 5th 2006
by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee
Reason for cancellation order:
Sussex mounted constabulary has no conceivable operational requirement for sentient weapons of mass destruction.
This requirement document has no identifiable orig
in within the Home Office.
It echoes historic attempts to induce adoption of Equoid-friendly facilities within the armed services via requirements raised within the MoD. All of these have been successfully resisted.
It is speculated that someone is trying to pull a fast one on us: does Shub-Niggurath have a posse in Whitehall? This matter warrants further enquiry, and has therefore been referred to External Assets for investigation and permanent closure.
“Equoid” copyright © 2013 by Charles Stross
ANDY DUNCAN
Andy Duncan (born 21 September 1964) is an award-winning American science fiction and fantasy writer whose work frequently deals with Southern U.S. themes.
He is a South Carolina native, has published stories in Asimov's, Cemetery Dance, Conjunctions, Event Horizon, Realms of Fantasy, Starlight 1,Starlight 3, Weird Tales and anthologies including The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. His previous SCIFICTION story, "The Pottawatomie Giant," won a World Fantasy Award in 2001, as did his first book, the Golden Gryphon collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. His novella "The Chief Designer" won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2002. He has been nominated four times for the Nebula Award and twice for the Hugo Award. His next book, to be published this summer by Tor, is Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, an anthology edited with F. Brett Cox. He teaches and advises student publications at the University of Alabama and will teach the fourth week of the Clarion writers' workshop at Michigan State University in summer 2004.
He lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Sydney.
The Pottawatomie Giant, by Andy Duncan
On the afternoon of November 30, 1915, Jess Willard, for seven months the heavyweight champion of the world, crouched, hands on knees, in his Los Angeles hotel window to watch a small figure swaying like a pendulum against the side of the Times building three blocks away.
"Cripes!" Willard said. "How's he keep from fainting, his head down like that, huh, Lou?"
"He trains, Champ," said his manager, one haunch on the sill. "Same's you."
Training had been a dispute between the two men lately, but Willard let it go. "Cripes!" Willard said again, his mouth dry.
The street below was a solid field of hats, with an occasional parasol like a daisy, and here and there a mounted policeman statue-still and gazing up like everyone. Thousands were yelling, as if sound alone would buoy the upside-down figure writhing 150 feet above the pavement.
"Attaboy, Harry!"
"Five minutes, that's too long! Someone bring him down!"
"Five minutes, hell, I seen him do thirty."
"At least he's not underwater this time."
"At least he ain't in a milk can!"
"Look at him go! The straitjacket's not made that can hold that boy, I tell you."
"You can do it, Harry!"
Willard himself hated crowds, but he had been drawing them all his life. One of the farm hands had caught him at age twelve toting a balky calf beneath one arm, and thereafter he couldn't go into town without people egging him on to lift things—livestock, Mr. Olsburg the banker, the log behind the fancy house. When people started offering cash money, he couldn't well refuse, having seen Mama and Papa re-count their jar at the end of every month, the stacks of old coins dull even in lamplight. So Jess Willard, at thirty-three, knew something about what physical feats earned, and what they cost. He watched this midair struggle, lost in jealousy, in sympathy, in professional admiration.
"God damn, will you look at this pop-eyed city," Lou said. "It's lousy with believers. I tell you, Champ, this fella has set a whole new standard for public miracles. When Jesus Christ Almighty comes back to town, he'll have to work his ass off to get in the newspapers at all." Lou tipped back his head, pursed his lips, and jetted cigar smoke upstairs.
"Do you mind?" asked the woman directly above, one of three crowding a ninth-floor window. She screwed up her face and fanned the air with her hands.
"Settle down, sister, smoke'll cure you soon enough," Lou said. He wedged the cigar back into his mouth and craned his neck to peer around Willard. "Have a heart, will you, Champ? It's like looking past Gibraltar."
"Sorry," Willard said, and withdrew a couple of inches, taking care not to bang his head on the sash. He had already banged his head crossing from the corridor to the parlor, and from the bathroom to the bedroom. Not that it hurt—no, to be hurt, Willard's head had to be hit plenty harder than that. But he'd never forgotten how the other children laughed when he hit his head walking in the door, that day the Pottawatomie County sheriff finally made him go to school. All the children but Hattie. So he took precautions outside the ring, and seethed inside each time he forgot he was six foot seven. This usually happened in hotel suites, all designed for Lou-sized men, or less. Since Havana, Willard had lived mostly in hotel suites.
Leaning from the next-door window on the left was a jowly man in a derby hat. He had been looking at Houdini only half the time, Willard the other half. Now he rasped: "Hey, buddy. Hey. Jess Willard."
Willard dreaded autograph-seekers, but Lou said a champ had to make nice. "You're the champ, now, boy," Lou kept saying, "and a champ has gotta be seen!"
"Yeah, that's me," Willard said.
His neighbor looked startled. Most people were, when they heard Willard's bass rumble for the first time. "I just wanted to say congratulations, Champ, for putting that nigger on the canvas where he belongs."
"I appreciate it," Willard said. He had learned this response from his father, a man too proud to saythanks. He tried to focus again on Houdini. The man seemed to be doing sit-ups in midair, but at a frenzied rate, jackknifing himself repeatedly. The rope above him whipped from side to side. Willard wondered how much of the activity was necessary, how much for effect.
The derby-hatted guy wasn't done. "Twenty-six rounds, damn, you taught Mr. Coon Johnson something about white men, I reckon, hah?"
Ever since Havana. Cripes. Houdini's canvas sleeves, once bound across his chest, were now bound behind him. Somehow he'd worked his arms over his head—was the man double-jointed?
"Say, how come you ain't had nothing but exhibitions since? When you gonna take on Frank Moran, huh? I know that nigger ain't taken the fight out of you. I know you ain't left your balls down in Cuba." He laughed like a bull snorting.
Willard sighed. He'd leave this one to Lou. Lou wouldn't have lasted ten seconds in the ring, but he loved a quarrel better than any boxer Willard knew.
"Balls?" Lou squawked, right on schedule. "Balls? Let me tell you something, fella."
Now Houdini's arms were free, the long canvas strap dangling. The crowd roared.
"When Moran is ready, we'll be ready, you got me?" Lou leaned out to shake his finger and nearly lost his balance. "Whoa," he said, clutching his hat. "Fella, you're, why, you're just lucky there's no ledge here. Yeah. You think he's taking it so easy, well, maybe you want to spar a few rounds with him, huh?"
Now Houdini had looped the canvas strap across the soles of his feet, and was tugging at it like a madman. More and more of his white shirt was visible. Willard resolved that when he started training again—when Lou got tired of parties and banquets and Keys to the City and let Willard go home to the gymnasium, and to Hattie—he would try this upside-down thing, if he could find rope strong enough.
"Well, how about I spar with you, buddy? Who the hell are you, Mr. Milksop?"
"I'm his manager, that's who I am! And let me tell you another thing …"
Houdini whipped off the last of the jacket and held the husk out, dangling, for all to see. Then he dropped it and flung both arms out to the side, an upside-down T. Amid the pandemonium, the jacket flew into the crowd and vanished like a ghost. Trash rained from the windows, as people dropped whatever they were holding to applaud. Willard stared as a woman's dress fluttered down to drape a lamppost. It was blue and you could see through it. Even the guy with the derby was cheering, his hands clasped overh
ead. "Woo hoo!" he said, his quarrel forgotten. "Woo hoo hoo!"
With a smile and a shake of his head, Lou turned his back on it all. "The wizard of ballyhoo," he said. "Too bad they can't string up all the Jews, eh, Champ?" He patted Willard's shoulder and left the window.
As he was winched down, Houdini took inverted bows, and there was much laughter. Willard, who had neither cheered nor applauded, remained motionless at the window, tracking Houdini's descent. Someone's scented handkerchief landed on his head, and he brushed it away. He watched as the little dark-haired man in the ruffled shirt dropped headfirst into the sea that surged forward and engulfed him. His feet went last, bound at the ankles, patent-leather shoes side by side like a soldier's on review. Willard could imagine how they must shine.
· · · · ·
That night, as Willard followed Lou up the curving, ever-narrowing, crimson-carpeted stairs leading to the balconies of the Los Angeles Orpheum, the muffled laughter and applause through the interior wall seemed to jeer Willard's every step, his every clumsy negotiation of a chandelier, his every flustered pause while a giggling and feathered bevy of young women flowed around his waist. Hattie didn't need feathers, being framed, in Willard's mind, by the open sky. These women needed plenty. Those going down gaped at him, chins tipping upward, until they passed; those going up turned at the next landing for a backward and downward look of frank appraisal. "We had a whole box in Sacramento," Lou muttered as he squinted from the numbers on the wall to the crumpled paper in his hand. "Shit. I guess these Los Angeles boxes is for the quality." A woman with a powder-white face puckered her lips at Willard and winked. Grunting in triumph, Lou overshot a cuspidor and threw open a door with a brown grin. "Save one of the redheads for me, willya?" Lou hissed, as Willard ducked past him into darkness.
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