by Ken Liu
Well. Fine. If he wouldn't let me come with him, I'd have to stop him another way. I'd just find another fisherman later this afternoon who'd agree to take me out in his own boat and give chase.
The next day dawned chill and rainy. I pretended to sleep as Einar and Olaf dressed and slipped from the baðstofa, then sprinted like a fox to the house of Björn and Ingi Ísólfsson, twin brothers who seemed to move more slowly than the undulating reynisdrangar themselves. It was all I could do to stand still while they calmly readied their boat, dropping in new rope in careful, fat coils inch by excruciatingly gradual inch.
We finally made it out to sea. The wind was restless, and the water, choppy. I didn't like the look of the sky, but when I asked Björn and Ingi, "Storm coming on?" all I received was a laconic, "Maybe."
The wind rose. A heavy fog whipped in, covering the bay in fleecy dimness. We fished in silence. The catch was poor. The waves grew rougher, and several times, under Ingi's direction, we had to stop and move from one part of the boat to another, to steady it. "Should we go in?" I asked, nervously.
"Maybe," said Ingi.
I started to argue my case, but the wind carried a cheery creaking to my ears—Olaf singing somewhere in the fog. If Einar wasn't quitting, neither was I. "Actually. Can we go now? To the reynisdrangar?"
The twins looked at each other. The sound of Olaf's boat receded.
"I have a feeling," I said. "Please. Listen, you're barely catching anything as it is. Take me now and I'll come out in the boat with you tomorrow, too. Please?"
The twins looked at each other again. God in Heaven, how is it possible for two men to turn their heads so slowly?
"Maybe," said Ingi.
My bargaining turned to begging, and my begging turned frantic and unmanly. Ingi finally relented with a sharp and uncomfortable, "Fine." I had embarrassed him. I was embarrassed myself, and we rowed to the rocks with me hanging my head in red-faced shame.
When we reached the basalt, my shame was joined by fear. Olaf's craft was moored right up against a rock face, wriggling frantically in the waves while a handful of accompanying children on board squealed and screamed in delight. No sign of Einar. My fear grew like the rising winds. "Bring me close."
"This is as close as we get," said Ingi, bringing up the oars. He wouldn't look at me.
"I need to get to the rock face!"
"Olaf's in the only good spot," said Björn. "No other place to risk landing."
I stood. "Must I throw myself overboard and swim there?"
"If you want to," said Ingi, "that's your business."
I squeezed my hands into panicked fists, nearly ready to charge into Ingi and knock him overboard myself. I looked up at the cliff face, receding upward into darkness and fog, and when the wind shifted, I caught the unmistakable sound of steel chipping into stone. Ching, ching, ching. "He's up there, doing it already!" I cried. "Can't you hear it? Don't you know what that madman is trying to do?"
"Time to go back," said Ingi to Björn. "We're done for the day."
"Please!" I shouted. In Olaf's boat, the children reached out tiny hands, daring to just touch the basalt before pulling away with a joyful shriek. The rock was more alive than ever, breathing and settling, breathing and settling, a ghoulish backdrop to Olaf's laughter and the high peals of Einar's madness. Ching, ching, ching. "Please—he's trying to carve the stone! Don't you know what that would do? It would free the…" I was suddenly aware of how foolish I sounded. My ravings sputtered out. "…the troll ship…"
The twins looked at each other.
Then Ingi turned his head to Olaf. "Olaf," he called. "Move your boat."
My thanks gushed forth. The twins seemed not to hear. Olaf and Ingi called out to each other, and masterful Olaf finally maneuvered his craft away from the cleft he'd wedged it into—choppy seas, swirling tides, screaming children, and all.
Ingi and Björn worked to take his place. Their boat lodged with a jolt. Where we were moored, there was no shelf or landing. Only dark, weather-beaten cliff face, towering over the pounding waves. "Up you go," said Ingi, nodding. "There's plenty of handholds. Don't look down."
I didn't.
Spray licked my calves and soaked my legs, despite the foul oilskin clothes Björn had loaned me. Wet wind blinded me. The handholds were slick but sharp, like crumbled glass, and as I climbed, I cut my palms and yowled as sea salt rubbed into the wounds. A fulmar screamed past my ear, a flash of angry white that nearly made me lose my grip as I moved too near its perch. It wheeled round and dove at me. I leaned away and my foothold crumpled.
My toes kicked out for a grip and hit nothing but void. I cried out and clung on with nerveless fingers, begging Our Lord and Savior to see me through this.
A strong hand closed down upon mine. A merciful angel pulled me upward, to a hidden ledge in the lee of the wind. But God has a strange sense of humor, and this angel came in the guise of a terrible fool indeed.
"Gunnar!" said Einar, pulling me in from the edge. "You've got to be careful up here! How are you? You all right?" He looked me up and down, his grin awful and out of a place on a man who had almost watched his friend die. "I'm so glad you came after all! You've got to see this—someone has got to see this. The basalt, it's so weathered, it just crumbles right away. And the ship—sweet Lord bless me, it's right there waiting underneath. Look, Gunnar! Look at what marvels the chisel can free!"
I looked.
I know now what it means to be sick with terror. It means vertigo and roaring in your ears, and spots of blackness in front of your eyes, and a terminal weakness in your knees. Einar caught me in a near-swoon. "Isn't it magnificent?" he cried.
It was not. It was monstrous. A single arm, grotesque and gargantuan, writhed oh so slowly on the surface of that breathing, heaving stone. In my faint delirium, I could imagine the outline of the rest of the beast, a rude suggestion of a creature lying supine in the arch of a gigantic window or doorway. The massive arm, so much crisper now that Einar had worked it over, dangled down to the ledge we stood upon. Its great, hooked claws undulated within inches of Einar's abandoned chisel and mallet.
The wind shifted. My back was hit with a wall of icy wet, and another wave of vertigo overtook me. I dropped to my knees. Einar raved on, squinting into the wind and shouting into the roar, one finger pointing and waving behind him. "Isn't it a wonder? Those claws, those knucklebones, those sinews and joints. You can nearly see it flexing!"
Nearly? I did. The arm flexed. With a terrible, grinding boom, those claws tore free of the stone and reached down.
"Just think of what the Alþingi will say when I tell them of this! Just think of the glory we can reveal, right here in the shadow of Dyrhólaey, moored off the coast for all ages and all time!"
The claws grasped Einar's sharpened chisel.
"Greater than the Pyramids! The Colossus at Rhodes! Or even China's Great Wall!"
I screamed.
Einar turned. The arm lashed out. I threw myself forward, wrapping my own arms around Einar's shock-frozen body, my face mashing into his soaked and filthy oilskin. We skidded along the ledge, beneath the full length of the arm, but with a sound like deafening thunder, more of the limb tore free. I didn't even see the chisel coming after us. I only felt the wind of it against my neck.
Ching-ching-ching. Basalt hailed down upon us, into my hair, stinging my eyes. The thing was striking blindly, but that luck wouldn't last long. I rubbed one eye free of grit and looked up.
The chisel was raised high, ready to plunge into Einar's heart.
I kicked off the breathing wall and rolled, pulling Einar away from the deathblow. But I rolled too far. The ledge vanished beneath me, and then there was nothing but wet wind whistling in my ears and Einar's heartbeat slamming against my arms.
I didn't even have time for a prayer.
Luck was with us. Instead of striking rocks, we plunged into the sea, and instead of breaking anything, we only nearly drowned. The remainder of our visit toget
her, instead of being spent gamboling innocently over the countryside, was spent recovering under the thorough but taciturn care of Björn and Ingi. Considering that we had very nearly lost our lives, I didn't mind.
I returned to Galtafell. Einar returned to his new studio in Reykjavík. As before, we sent each other letters, but also as before, it was not the same. He was very busy with work. He got married. He moved to America for a time, and became quite famous. His letters became infrequent, and eventually trickled to nothing.
I remained on the family farm and dreamed about the reynisdrangar—about what writhes upon a certain hidden ledge, on days dark and foggy, a rusted chisel clutched in a misshapen fist. I dream that it knows what to do, so that it may someday free its brothers from the shadow of Dyrhólaey. Ching, ching, ching.
Einar's work has become strange and fantastic, now, in his old age. Angels, homunculi, giants, gods, wolves, monsters, crucifixes, Madonnas, tangled together in symmetric, mystical clumps loaded with anxiety and symbolism many people cannot understand. He's very spiritual now, they say, becoming more and more devout as time goes on, becoming enmeshed in pondering the unknowable.
But this is wrong. Even across such time and distance as lies between us now, to some degree, his thoughts are still mine, and I know from what obsession his tangled phantasms spring.
He dreams about that rusted chisel, too, and is afraid.
© 2013 by KJ Kabza
First published in Pen-Ultimate: A Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by LJ Cohen and Talib S. Hussain, 2013.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
KJ Kabza has sold over 50 stories to venues such as F&SF, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Buzzy Mag, Flash Fiction Online, and many more. He's been anthologized in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2014 (Prime Books), The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 6 (Night Shade Books), The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008, and The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year 2. His senior project for his B.A. in Creative Writing was a werewolf novel, and his life and career have unfolded predictably ever since.
Passenger Space
Julia Watson
My foot touches the platform and it hits me, a plunging sensation in my gut—I feel light and the lightness is wrong.
Merciless, the impatient momentum of the crowd pulls me the wrong way. All wrong. I check my pockets: Gum. Keys. Ticket-stub.
Something is missing. Something else.
"Hey, what's the hold up?" a man snarls, shoves ahead of me.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I recognize this stop. I can't see the stairs, but just ahead all the people are disappearing up, into emptiness.
It pulls again, harder now—a sharp ache, a phantom limb that always and never was, plucked out by the root. And it's wrong.
I turn back.
"Sorry." I squeeze past a hungry-eyed woman as she pushes forward with the rest. A choking press of bodies all around me, I fight my way back towards the doors. I'm too late. They're closing.
"Wait," I wrest my shoulder from the jaws of the crowd. "Wait!" Thrust myself through the narrowing gap.
The train lurches onward. No one else has gotten on here. Just me.
"Last stop ahead," wheezes an overhead speaker, dislodging a puff of dust.
Clutching the safety rails to keep my feet on the floor, I make my way to the back as we enter the tunnel, tiptoeing around the edge of what's missing, holding the emptiness, the untethered dizziness at bay. How could the people back at the station bear it?
The train barrels on and the darkness hiccups past a wire-caged bulb, bright and bare. And another, and another still, throwing stripes of light across their faces—what we had to leave behind: the droopy-skinned old man with the runny nose and rheumy eyes, practically at my elbow; two little girls in sailor suits on the row of seats across the way, solemn and staring. All of them, weighted down.
But none of these here are mine. I can't remember where I was sitting. It couldn't have wandered far.
There are more towards the back, milling about. More bruise than man, blue-black and livid, one rocks himself in his seat, eyes closed, humming low, and near him, a mousy woman with one pale fist clenched, pressed to her chest. In a corner seat, a grandmotherly matron knits a scarf, stony silent. No, not her, I think. But I do a double take. There's something sturdy about her, something settling. Maybe-
Without looking up, she flicks her long, forked tongue out to silence a fly, points one of her needles towards the back of the train, directing me on.
It's darker here. I can just make out a familiar figure, small and hunched on the floor up ahead. Each step more solid than the last, my feet finally holding me down, I move closer.
The light comes again, catches its movement in flicker-light stop motion. One claw, like a straight razor casing, traces a slow line in the blood on the floor, like a little kid trying to remember how to write his own name.
It looks up, cocks its head to the side, needle-fine curved fangs jutting up and down from the protruding 'v' of its lower jaw. It blinks, unsure, the inky wells of its eyes fixed on me.
Something low comes home to roost.
The brakes keen. Bored, the conductor calls, "End of the line."
Outside, the gates beckon. Up? Or down?
I hold out my hand. It hobbles towards me and smiles.
© 2014 by Julia Watson
* * *
Julia Watson studied screenwriting and fiction on the island of misfit toys, also known as the low-residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. After getting her start as a pro blogger for Showtime Networks’ OurChart.com (companion social media site to their hit show, THE L WORD) in 2007, she went on to become an entertainment editor at Velvetpark Magazine online, and later served as the Film & Plays editor at The Coachella Review. Her fiction and nonfiction have also appeared at The Hipster Book Club, Pure Slush and Reviewer Magazine.
Letters to the Editor of Tempestas Arcana
Alexander Plummer
The heap was in the usual order—dangling above chaos as if by the tree branch of vague categorization. My apprentices (or unpaid interns now, blast the "synergy seminar" that Mr. Lexius had given) had them in piles. The snowbank of envelopes was mostly (and mercifully) white, though a few red and green ones peeked out and promised unwelcome entertainment. The traditionalists comprised the second stack, with vellum and parchment and one papyrus scroll (where do they even get papyrus nowadays?).
And between those two piles was the cage, of course, with the pigeons and crows and owls and one unfortunate fish floating in a hastily-conjured bubble of water (who'd either got caught up in the excitement or whose master missed the point by a fair mark).
And the odd packages (an award-winning distinction in this crowd). A dwarf had sent a stone tablet through the postal service, tracking sticker taped over his first-millennium runic script. The blood-letter from the ghoul commune out in the Yukon was scrawled on what I fervently hoped (in futility, of course) was not human skin. The Feds had a nice little note attached to that one, asking-but-not-really-asking for a visit. And that pretentious technomage from L.A. had sent another one of his mystifying electron-shadow-things, all flashing lights and quarks and Judeo-Christian-God knows what.
I leaned back in my chair as the printing press clacked on, red lightning from the rod on the roof powering the arcane crystal that made it go. Magus Tyrne swears that an outlet and an extension cord would work more reliably, but I'll trade my robes for a suit and my staff for a PDA (whatever that stands for) before I admit the superiority of any municipal power grid over my conjuration circle.
The last pile was the smallest (yet why was it so heavy?). A letter from Mr. Lexius about the libel lawsuit from the northwest coven. Three years now (I didn't even write the damned editorial, I just printed it) and those neo-sanguinites were still looking for defamation damages. And then there was another st
atement about rent on the tower ten days past due (I don't care what the architect says about the viability of long-term occupancy for a building with no support structures, bound together by my will. It has to be a tower). A letter from my familiar in Africa brought a pang (sure, he's still saying it's just a trial separation, but it's been over a year now. He's not coming back).
I considered burning this last pile to ash, but with a flick of my wrist sent it into my drawer instead. I looked at the letters, started to sweep them aside, paused at one, address crudely lettered (print, of course; no one teaches proper writing anymore). The envelope shredded with a thought revealing the letter inside. I paused and…
Mr. Wizard,
My dad says there is no magic but I saw your paper and you say there is and so what is magic?
Love,
-Billy
and
(Magic is waking up on a spring morning after a storm and standing at the window while the frost turns to dew and ozone hangs above the mist wait! no magic is touching the hand of the person you love for the first time and feeling the pulse of their blood wait! not that magic is standing in the rain at the gravestone of your best friend and blaming yourself for not weeping no not that! magic is when you stand in absolute darkness in your own room and know despite what you know that you are not alone no it is when you stand at the top of the tower and look down and down but)
(Magic is why you jump from the tower, and magic is why you survive the fall.)
Paper rustled, cork popped, quill scratched.
Billy, I wrote, let me tell you about magic.
I scribbled, and did not notice when the lightning press stopped.
© 2014 by Alexander Plummer
* * *
Alexander Plummer is a writer of prose and poetry in many genres, including fantasy and science fiction. His work has been published or will be published in Scifaikuest and Star*Line,. He also works as a first reader for Dagan Books on their magazine Lakeside Circus. Alex studied writing at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he worked as a tutor in writing.