Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  Harry and Ron will jump a foot when Mother Maidment, wearing a red nightgown covered in pink kittens, blinks into the Gryffindoor common room.

  Thank God for Polyjuice Potion.

  “Who the bloody hell trampled my hockey bag?”

  Dad’s home? He didn’t run off to Las Vegas to get a showgirl and win the jackpot. I sag with relief.

  I drag feet to the back door.

  Dad burps as he finally gets sorted. He’s boozy, but suddenly regards me with eyes steady and bright. “Nobody can hold three, pipsqueak.” He winks.

  Before I can pick my jaw up from the floor, he stumbles into the house proper.

  It occurs to me I got Moby Dick off Dad’s bookshelf. It occurs to me we should talk one day, once I know what questions to ask.

  The night is not done. I have to get that darned ring from Gollum before Mom wakes up.

  I wonder if he likes riddles.

  * * * * *

  Dwain Campbell is originally from Sussex, New Brunswick. After his university years in Halifax, he journeyed further east to begin a teaching career in Newfoundland. Twenty-nine years later, he is still a teacher in St. John’s. With retirement on the horizon, he hopes to devote more time to his first love, storytelling. Contemporary fantasy is his genre of choice, and Atlantic Canada is a rich source of inspiration. Neil Gaiman is his hero of the moment, though he will reluctantly admit to a lifelong fascination with Stephen King.

  Blizzard Warning

  Jason Barrett

  Tuktoyaktuk — or Tuk for short — is a remote community of about a thousand people. It is situated far above the tree line, perched on the Arctic coast. Four months of the year you can drive in or out by the ice road. The rest of the year you have to fly.

  You can count on two things in Tuktoyaktuk in January.

  Darkness and cold.

  I had lived in the north for the past ten years— including the last two in Tuk. Originally, the plan was to be up north for two years — just long enough to get some management experience — and then move back south.

  Ten years, five stores, and two territories later, I’m still up north. I’m not sure what happened to the plan.

  Tuk’s population is largely aboriginal— Inuvialuit to be precise. As opposed to a few generations ago, very few people rely on hunting as their primary source of food, which made this January all the more frustrating. The store had been short-handed all month, as every able-bodied man was out hunting. Since I was only person left in the grocery department, I spent most of my time filling shelves.

  One afternoon while I stocked the pop cooler, my favorite elder, Henry, came to the store. He had to be pushing eighty. He looked frail and walked with a stoop. I loved Henry for two reasons; his quirky sense of humour and because he was a walking piece of history. He was born in an igloo and grew up in the old nomadic way— moving with the caribou across the Arctic tundra. He was a great storyteller and I was always fascinated with his stories of the old ways.

  Henry was one of the few locals who could still speak Inuvialuktun. He tried to teach me a few words but the Inuvialuit language has sounds that don’t exist in English. I could never wrap my head, or tongue around them. Even if I did pronounce a word right, Henry said I sounded like a toddler and then proceeded to make baby sounds at me or pinch my cheek and tell me how cute I was.

  Henry loved to tease. He called me his favorite danaluq, which is the Inuvialuit word for a southerner. My first day in Tuk, he asked me where the ice cream was, except he pronounced it “ass cream.” I was showing him where the Rub A535 cream was when he went on about how he liked to put chocolate syrup on his “ass” cream and then share it with his girlfriends. He was a funny man.

  “Henry, where have you been?” I said, looking up from my work, “Haven’t seen you in a while. Your girlfriends finally letting you take a day off?”

  “Don’t go out tomorrow,” Henry replied. “Blizzard’s coming soon. Don’t even look outside when it comes. It’s dangerous.”

  “Come on, Henry, you know I am part Inuvialuit now. I’ll grab some ass cream and say bring it on.”

  “Danaluq, don’t patronize me. I talk, you listen.”

  “Whoa, Henry, relax. What’s going on?”

  “You know nothing about our ways. So I talk, you listen, you do.”

  Henry stared at me intensely, and silently, giving his words weight and time to sink in. I was trying to figure out if this was one of Henry’s jokes, or if he had finally just lost it. Luckily, I was saved by the page.

  The PA crackled. “Customer service to till two.”

  “Gotta run, Henry,” I said as I left the pop cooler and Henry as quickly as possible.

  “This is no ordinary blizzard,” Henry called after me. “Stay inside and don’t even look at it.”

  It turned out that Henry was right.

  The blizzard came over night. The wind howled and the buildings shook. Everything was closed the next day, including the store.

  I should have stayed home, but the best days to get work done are when the store is closed. With no interruptions, I might even get caught up for once. This blizzard might actually make my life easier.

  After ten hours of work I headed home. My house was less than a minute walk from the store but the white-out blizzard and the twenty-four-hour darkness made it feel like several minutes. The wind tore at my clothing and sliced my skin. I was halfway home when the power went out.

  Power outages are nothing new in the Arctic. There are usually several each year. I wasn’t even worried— but then I saw that light.

  At first I thought it was the streetlight from across the street but it was not high enough and it was too large. The white light glowed and moved. It came from behind the old sod houses — a popular tourist attraction in Tuk — and slowly made its way along the road, heading towards the ice cellar. I fought the urge to follow for as long as I could. I could have easily found my way home in the dark, but for some reason, I started towards that strange light.

  The wind increased and pushed me in the direction of the ice cellar.

  I allowed myself to be carried by it.

  The Inuvialuit once used the cellar to store meat, long before the danaluq brought their refrigerators and freezers to the north country.

  The small white wooden shed was just big enough to enclose a hole in the ground that served as the entrance. When I first saw it I thought it was an outhouse. The Inuvialuit used the cellar to store caribou, seal and whale meat. These days only a few of the elders still used the ice cellar.

  A howl rose above the wind. It chilled me to my very core. I stood there, frozen scared. Radiance bled out from the darkness behind me. My heart raced and sweat pooled inside my gloves.

  I turned to face the light.

  I saw a shape in the shadow behind the brightness.

  Hot breath and the strong reek of something that had been dead for a very long time hit me.

  I heard that howl again— long, low and shivery.

  Something struck me on the side of my head and everything dizzied down into darkness.

  I awoke in pitch blackness, and in the cold. The only thing visible was my breath ghosting upwards. My head throbbed.

  I was sitting, my back against a wall. Outside, the blizzard raged, the sound muted.

  I heard breathing.

  I wasn’t alone.

  Something chewed and slurped and crunched. It sounded like meat being eaten right off of the bone. Whatever it was, its breath came heavy and full of hungry snuffles.

  It sat across from me, tearing at its meal. I felt it watching me.

  I guess I looked like dessert.

  My keychain held one of those pocket flashlights. I slowly reached into my jacket pocket. Clumsy as I am, it fell out and the keys
clattered to the ground.

  Silence.

  It felt like several minutes without any noise or movement, other than the incessant pounding of my heart and the steady heavy breathing of the thing across from me.

  Something bounced off the wall beside me; perhaps a bone, maybe even a skull. The thing grunted, ripped another part off its meal and resumed feasting. It took me several more minutes before I had the courage to reach down for the flashlight. Without picking it up, I placed my finger over the button and turned it on.

  The walls were covered in permafrost. The wall itself was a swirling combination of rock colors; grey, brown and in-between. I was in the ice cellar, less than one hundred feet from my house, but also thirty feet below ground.

  The ice cellar had a dozen rooms. Each one had only one way out. I slowly picked up the flashlight and scanned the room. The sounds coming from the other side didn’t change. I shined the flashlight along the wall. When I came to where I thought the creature was I raised the beam to the top of the wall. I couldn’t bear to see it. The picture in my mind was bad enough; to confirm it was real would have led me to madness.

  I arced the light around the creature and eventually lit up the door, only a little more than ten feet from me, but only five feet away from the creature. It was open, but which way to the ladder and the land above?

  I pushed to my feet, careful not to make any sudden movements. I inched towards the door. The thing in the dark continued to eat and didn’t show any interest that its dessert was about to make a run for it.

  I was halfway to the door when I stopped— I needed to see it. One voice in me said, forget it, you only have one chance to live and you need to act now. Another voice demanded curiosity be satisfied, damn the consequences. It was mad to want to know what was chewing and slurping, but madness was within me that night. Sense didn’t seem to have a say anymore.

  I shined the flashlight at my kidnapper. To my surprise, the creature was just a man, an elder. I had never seen him before. He was short and scrawny and bare-chested, but wore white sealskin pants and mukluks. His face was weathered, framed by shoulder-length hair, graying and uncombed.

  He was crouched over an animal carcass, possibly a fox, maybe a dog. An assortment of fur, bones, guts and blood littered the floor around him. He looked right at me, never once shielding his eyes. Then he reached down into the animal, pulled out its heart and offered it to me.

  So absurd was the situation that I laughed. My monster turned out to be a withered, elderly man. It was a short laugh that I never got to finish. The elder jumped and pushed me against the wall. My feet dangled off the ground. The man changed— he transformed into a beast.

  It happened so fast. The scrawny old man had grown to an enormous size— at least eight feet tall. I pulled at his hand, now covered in white fur, just like the rest of his body. The flashlight fell but his fur gave off a white glow that had lured me through the blizzard. I choked as his claws dug into my throat. His head, which looked like a polar bear with a much smaller snout, came close. Razor-sharp tusks jutted from his mouth, nearly cutting my cheek.

  Black pupils stared out from bright yellow irises but his larger third eye was the most disturbing. He roared and fetid breath blasted me. Spit and blood from his feast spattered my cheeks. The beast’s mouth opened wide. Tentacles lashed out and wrapped around my head. The tusks dug into the back of my neck. The more I struggled the more the tentacles tightened. My blood ran down my neck.

  I prayed this nightmare would end, but it didn’t.

  Then he pulled back, the tentacles retreating, turned his head to the side and listened. Now I heard it as well. It sounded like a drum, every fifth beat louder than the others. I saw a dim blue light shining across the walls of the ice cellar. With every fifth beat, the light pulsed.

  Something was coming.

  Something — with each beat of the drum — grew closer.

  I grew weak trying to draw air through my constricted throat. The beast sucked in a breath and turned to face the light.

  It let go of me and I fell to the ground.

  The drumming reverberated through the frozen floor.

  The light grew brighter. The drumming, louder.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-Boom!

  The vibration bounced me off the ground by an inch or two. The beast howled after each boom and then lifted me by my hair.

  I saw the blue light clearly now. It was another man; the blue aura surrounding him, just like the monster’s fur made him glow. I recognized the man; it was Henry, who had warned me about the blizzard. He was dressed in traditional Inuvialuit jacket and pants made out of caribou fur, and mukluks from sealskin. Henry no longer walked hunched over; he stood straight and at least six feet tall.

  He held a staff made of two long caribou antlers that swirled around each other, with many carvings adorning them. I had heard rumors that Henry was a shaman but I had never believed it.

  Now, I prayed it to be true.

  Henry chanted in Inuvialuktun and tapped the staff on the ground, booming in rhythm; tap-tap-tap-tap-Boom! The blue light moved like a wave from his body, in every direction. The beast howled as the light hit him. The chant grew louder— faster. Tap-tap-tap-tap-Boom! The blue light hit the beast and thrust him backwards.

  He threw me behind him to the wall and took a step forward. Henry chanted faster and louder. The staff came down again. The blue light waxed brighter each time. The beast howled even louder and was pushed back by the force of the wave.

  Again, the chant, the staff, the boom, the wave and the howl.

  The beast was almost pushed right back against the wall when I heard a voice in my head. “Danaluq, kailagin.” It sounded like Henry. Another blue wave of light pressed the monster back and he howled. The voice in my head screamed at me, “Danaluq! Kailagin!” Henry beckoned me.

  I dragged myself back to my feet as another wave hit. Tap-tap-tap-tap-Boom! “Danaluq! Kangma!”

  Tap…

  It took all my strength but I pushed away from the wall.

  Tap…

  I took a step forward.

  Tap…

  The claws dug deep into my wrist. I turned, trying to pull free.

  Tap…

  “Pisagininikemin,” I’m sorry, the voice said sadly.

  Boom!

  The beast’s howl cut off as everything went black.

  Today — whatever day it is — I am still in the ice cellar.

  Some days I can see people, or at least I can see their flashlights. I tried screaming for help, but no one hears, or sees me. I don’t try anymore.

  I am in the ice.

  I am not alone. I can’t see him but the beast is beside me— still hungry.

  I can feel its claws slowly digging into my wrist.

  I pray for the thaw.

  * * * * *

  Jason Barrett was born in Newfoundland, grew up in Alberta and Ontario but has spent the last nine years living within the Arctic Circle. He currently resides in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, on the Arctic Coast. Jason lives with his girlfriend, Rachel, and their cat, named Cat. He would like to thank the people of Tuktoyaktuk for thier assistance and inspiration. “The Blizzard Warning” is his first published story.

  M.E.L.

  Dianne Homan

  M.E.L. and V.N.F. teased anyone with a W among their call letters. All those stupid syllables! So they taunted, “Wormy wobbly witch,” or “Weird weak wastebasket.”

  They hardly knew what those teasing words meant. They were underworld words from a long time ago before the planet was perfected. Even adults could hardly explain. They’d say, “Wormy is something like the opposite of impermeable, and wobbly is sort of the opposite of smooth. Witches were underworld beings, so there is nothing to know.” Oh well, it was fun to say them any
way. The girls shared new words at the speed tube stop with other kids on the way to school. “Dirt.” They’d snicker. “Bacteria.” They’d laugh.

  Call letters and the teasing they inspired helped to establish the Essential Pecking Order. But they were also important as connectors between friends. When V.N.F. said Merry Energetic Lady or Most Evanescent Light, and when M.E.L. replied with Very Nice Forget-Me-Not or Vivacious Neat Friend, the bonds between them strengthened and the time they shared became more perfect.

  They lived on P.P.A., Perfect Planet A. It was the original perfect planet, and the girls were taught in school that it was the best, because it was where life began. Planets B and C had been established, and D was under construction but required more atmospheric and hydrospheric support than P.P.A. The girls sometimes talked about their X, Y and Z call letter siblings and wondered which perfect planet, B or C, they lived on. Those bio-pairings were always shipped away because by the time the twenty-fourth through twenty-sixth children were grown, in M.E.L.’s case, from eggs of a biological donor whose first call letter was M, there was occasionally some protein breakdown or chromosomal damage which led to less than perfect children.

  Much as M.E.L. loved her friend V.N.F., she wondered about her creation. V.N.F. was not high on the intelligence scale. The F at the end of her call letters indicated she was only the sixth V bio-pairing. But maybe one or both of her parents had had a V or W as their third call letter. To make sure her mental slowness did not result in a pecking order drop, V.N.F. had honed her teasing skills. Sometimes what she said was hurtful. She suggested that Ws should be relocated along with Xs, Ys and Zs, because their names were too much trouble to say.

  All children spent four hours a day at standardized learning terminals in school with breaks for nutrition intake, breath work, and exercise periods. Then they had two hours of free time before being required to report to their First Letter houses. Thus M children, like M.E.L., lived in a house staffed by M mothers. All children privately claimed one of the mothers as their biological egg donor. M.E.L.’s favorite was M.L.P., whose call letters, she whispered to herself, stood for My Loving Parent. M.E.L. had not met an E father, either at school or on recreational outings, whom she cared to imagine as her possible sperm donor.