The Apex Book of World SF Volume 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  Darkness embraced him like clinging foam and it was warm, a familiar long–forgotten warmth. Spider laughed silently and his body danced to the rhythm of his laughter as it beat out a mad tattoo. Then he tripped over a clicking, resisting, something . Spider picked it up without thinking. Felt like a metal bar.

  In the end, he knew it was all one of Ant’s crazy dreams. You didn’t even have to think about it very long. But those dreams can get ugly very fast. One of his weapons. Always good to have a weapon. A weapon against the faceless things crouching in the chemical twilight zone.

  And then, the air wrapped around him, crackling, and the hair on his arms stood up as if the energy of the whole city was focused on him. Boyah, what a trip! But something was wrong with his vision. And a stench engulfed him, not knife–sharp corrosive ozone, but a rotting, sweet scent, like — oh, no, fuck.

  He knew his memories would bring them back, all the dead out of his past. And here they were already. But they’d never been so frightening. Those fucking bennies.

  It must be the bennies, Spider thought to himself; Ant must have given him bad stuff, and he had made it worse by taking them all at once. Panic shuddered through him. And the monster came closer — she came closer.

  Deftly she rushed toward him on the glistening thread. Her head was enormous and her three eyes were doors into other dimensions, terribly dangerous and sweetly fascinating. He wanted to run away, but something was making him walk toward this monstrous thing. All he could see were those eyes, and deep inside his head there was a humming sound — ancient, electric, insane. The bitter taste of vomit gagged in his throat. How could he let this happen — let her creep into his brain, let her do these things to him? She was not the Sliver Spider of his dreams.

  He swung the metal bar, surprised by how light it seemed in his hand. Almost as though it were an extension of his arm, or of his thoughts — or better yet, the fulfillment of his thoughts. Spider smiled grimly, and he wished she could see his expression.

  There was a “splatch!” as the metal bar hit her head. An ugly comic–sound. Spider had never thought it would sound like this. The head splattered and cracked open. Yellow matter erupted around him and covered his face, seeking to drown him, like a slimy, moldy blanket, like a liquid corpse.

  §

  Spider threw up and staggered away, sliding down at last against the wall. He felt the spider web against his back and bare arms. Again he vomited. Though he was so small and weak, he had destroyed the monster. And was alone. Alone as though he were in his grave.

  At last he knew what must be done. His hand knew what to do. The entire time he’d held the plug in one fist, a talisman against the night. He lifted the plug toward his neck and stopped, realizing at last what he was doing. But it was too late. Tricked, he was tricked. This wasn’t a dream at all. This was reality.

  Quiet. It was perfectly quiet, a sacred stillness. Time was without end and everything was meaningless — defeats, dreams and victories. Spider closed his eyes and stared at the featureless wall that was the interior of his skull.

  Waiting with Mortals

  Crystal Koo

  Born and raised in Manila in the Philippines, Crystal currently lives in Hong Kong. Her short stories have been published widely, including in Philippine Speculative Fiction and the anthology The Dragon and the Stars.

  The neon in Hong Kong is like the past: an image of blurred points of light, and haste and shallow focus where the only certainty is a vivid experience eventually misremembered.

  In the morning, the neon tubing is a tired present, dirty and impotent. Like tracing paper laid over the woodcut that is the city, the ghosts sit on unoccupied café tables, jaywalk, and wait with mortals for the double–decker buses that sway in the wind like sunflower heads.

  Squeezed next to a small arcade is a splinter of stairs leading underground. Businessmen and sales clerks mill outside, numbered stubs in their hands. The receptionist in front of the stairs is speaking into her headset, telling the manager there are so many people waiting that he might need to bring the extra tables out. I walk past everyone lining up and take the stairs down. No one stops me.

  In the teahouse, a real estate agent slurps up sour–and–spicy noodles from a bowl next to a small plate of thick slices of radish cake. To me, the smell of food is blunt but haunting, a lost luxury. Waiters walk through the ghosts lounging by the kitchen window. The ghosts and I don’t know each other and they glare at me: Don’t stare like you don’t watch mortals eat, too, what else are you here for? I follow a middle–aged mortal waitress in uniform, Sin Yi printed on her name tag, as she carries dirty bowls into the kitchen.

  No other ghosts here. Sin Yi dumps the bowls into the sink and tells a boy to clean it up. She plays coy with the tall, musky cook with the dirty apron, saying he wouldn’t leave his mainlander wife for her, would he? and goes to the toilet outside with a bag from one of the cupboards. When she returns, she’s out of her uniform and dressed in a patterned tunic two sizes too small, adjusting the strap of her bag. I slide my fingers into her ears and her nostrils and hike my foot onto her right hip. She quivers and I tear into her.

  I slam her consciousness into a corner before it knows what’s going on and it goes immediately to sleep. The body is tired and heavy. I stretch my limbs to fit hers, careful not to rip her apart. Her skin covers me with the earthly warmth of wool, solidifying the ground beneath my feet, and it feels as if I have surfaced from underwater to find myself in a different teahouse with brighter colors and ruder people. Everything is sharper. Cheap porcelain bowls crash, gossip ricochets against walls tacked with printouts of the day’s menu, and the dish boy reeks of onions.

  Sin Yi is bigger inside than she looks. I sink my head into feathery dreams of being a news anchorwoman, and bump against hard little notes about this month’s alimony. In curiosity, I try to find a picture of the ex–husband, but a fraying bag of tears gets in the way so I avoid it.

  The cook with the dirty apron asks the waitress if she’s all right — I get her to say she is. The cook tells her to go home and get some rest. A waiter carries a steaming plate of pork and chive dumplings in front of me and it aches not to reach out and scarf down the dumplings.

  I steer my waitress to the metal door at the corner of the kitchen and up the stairs that lead to a small lot above ground where the garbage bins are.

  J.G. Ip is sprawled on the concrete floor on her side, wearing a loose v–neck sweater over her leggings. Her nose is bleeding. Her mouth is pursed, as though she’s sucking on an invisible cigar, and she’s slowly exhaling and licking her lips. Her eyes are closed and she rocks herself feverishly like a buoy in the harbor.

  There’s no difference between her breath and the ghost. The ghost streams out of her nostrils and her mouth, reconstituting himself as J.G. steadies her breaths, keeping in time with her rocking motion. The blood drips on her lip. I wait until J.G. finishes exhaling and the ghost’s face is a little clearer. I don’t recognize him. He looks old enough to be my father and his face is mottled, as if he had died of liver disease. J.G.’s face has taken up the same splotches he has, down to the dark mark below his ear. He picks himself up and watches uncomfortably as the splotches on J.G. start to fade. It takes a while and for a moment, even I think they’re going to stick on her face.

  The old ghost leaves the money next to her hand. He hovers around her for a moment until he decides he doesn’t know what to do with her, and turns around to sidestep me, the blank–looking waitress too mortal to see him, and leaves by the metal door.

  J.G. vomits. A yellow–orange geyser overflows onto her neck.

  The waitress has a pack of wet tissues in her handbag. I take a few and start wiping J.G.’s neck.

  Hold your hair for me, I tell her in the waitress’ voice and gather the vomit into the little dip of J.G.’s clavicle before scooping it up.

  J.G. squints against the light in the same lazy way she did the last time I saw her drunk and asleep. Her
face looks more like herself now than the old ghost’s. She looks straight at Sin Yi and says, Hi, Ben.

  They’re after you, I tell her gently.

  §

  She had fallen asleep in the pot of a large houseplant in a hotel five years ago. We had been in a small bar across the road earlier, obnoxious and not supposed to be there. J.G. had been seventeen; I had been sixteen. That night I had walked out of an argument with my father and joined her in a cheap chain bar.

  She worked part–time selling cosmetics at the mall to help with her family’s bills. She had just finished her shift and still had little blooms of rouge on the back of her hand next to a whitish cigarette burn. She ordered a slew of drinks.

  I’ll have the same, I said, trying to look like I understood what I was getting into.

  An old American rock song played softly through the speakers, and J.G. was dressed in a tight blouse and a denim miniskirt. The mascara around her eyes was thick with adolescent drama.

  The bartender gave us diluted swill but we were drunk in fifteen minutes. A responsible waitress dressed–down the bartender and threw us back out into the summer night. I saw the gleam in J.G’s bloodshot eyes, a cold quick light, like a flash of the sun on someone’s glasses. She was intoxicating in the darkness, beautiful and free from any obligation to be anything but herself.

  Then she had thrown up. After I had helped her clean up, she stroked my face and said, There will never be another boy like you, Ben.

  I wanted to know what she meant. I wanted to know if she recognized I had something the seniors at school who paid for her cab rides and the perfume men who stole samples for her from the ladies’ section would never have. I wanted to take her to a kebab place nearby, where it was clean and well–lit and I knew the owner and the Nepalese staff and the pungent, gamey meat, and I could impress her with my familiarity with all of them. Instead she dashed across the road between two shrieking cars. I was close to vomiting myself, and the alcohol had stuffed up my nose. I barely followed her into the slightly damp lobby of the small hotel, where I found her at the reception desk.

  How weird would it be if we got a room, she asked me.

  Should we, I said, the alcohol making me bold.

  She rolled her eyes and smiled. Don’t be an idiot, she said, you’re drunk. I didn’t know what the smile meant, and I covered my humiliation by mirroring it.

  I sat on the sofa but she insisted on climbing into the potted plant next to it. She stuck her feet into the mulch and sat on the rim of the gigantic clay pot. I remember furiously summoning hopes, schemes, impossibilities, dreams of courage, before falling asleep. Two days later, the apartment where my family and I lived caught fire at three in the morning.

  J.G. is twenty–two now and hosting ghosts.

  §

  People are stupid.

  I don’t want to listen to this, I say to my father.

  You’re turning into one of those people, he tells me. My father has always been a big man with a face people call pugnacious, though it could be just them projecting it onto him. I don’t think so. A cop’s postured violence is a stereotype, but that doesn’t make it any less true for my father. Even when he had worn pajamas, he retained that aggression reserved wholly for people who had no intention of provoking him.

  People are stupid, he continues. They’re not happy because they don’t let themselves be. Suck it up, like the rest of us, and keep up.

  We’re in an empty parking lot close to the station. This is where my father and his friends used to smoke during breaks when he was alive. When he speaks, he addresses the news magazine in front of him instead of me. Property prices are up again, and there’s a new scandal of capitalistic heartlessness on the mainland. This is one of the days when he says something about the general spinelessness of people, so his intended audience can contradict him and start a fight. This habit has become worse since the fire. Sometimes I think it’s his way of trying to feel alive again, the closest he can get to the buzz that cigarettes used to give him.

  Tuesday is his day off from the force’s ghost division. He sits on a big rubber tire, the glossy news magazine on top of a cardboard box, and turns the page only when the breeze comes because he’s afraid someone would notice, but he’s too proud to read it indoors with no mortal around. We pretend it’s just the pace of his reading. I wonder if he appreciates me never calling him out.

  How’s the hosting case? I ask.

  We’ve found out it’s a girl, he says. She’s crazy.

  A lot of ghosts like it, I say. They get to eat, drink, have sex, smoke, talk to mortals. Fix some old business. Stuff I heard.

  Perverts. Ghosts who can’t suck it up. Are you hanging around them?

  It’s consensual. People have done worse for money.

  If she doesn’t do it for money, she’s really perverted. Maybe she likes blanking out and having us play with her body like she’s a puppet. Some kind of bondage, domination, whatever trash they call it now. Disgusting.

  The breeze flips a page for my father and he says, If that’s the kind of rough–housing she likes, we’re getting the old boys at the mortal division to cuff her soon, so we’ll find out how far she goes.

  I tremble. How soon?

  Ah Kit’s going in as a client. Lucky bastard. The things we’d like to do inside her. Are you interested? Is that why you’re asking all this?

  He looks at me hopefully. He thinks he’s found some kind of frightful common ground with me. That he assumes I’d have anything to do with the plans he and his friends have for J.G. makes me recoil. I don’t say anything.

  There’s always an open position for you in the force, he reminds me. Tell me when you’re ready to be an adult. Ready to get off the streets and make yourself useful.

  He probably thinks he’s being tactful. I squash the old panic I feel at my father’s disappointment in me. My father has always tried to recruit me, dead or alive, and I’ve always managed to refuse. I’m not a child, I say, feeling like one.

  He laughs.

  It’s not the same rules here, I say, wanting to wrestle the laughter out of his mouth. You don’t need a job or an education. None of that can help you cross over. They don’t matter.

  He says, I have a job making sure that sick people don’t harm other people who want to do right with their lives. Are you saying I don’t matter?

  You like your job, that’s different. Maybe that would help you but it doesn’t work the same way for everyone.

  You’re stupid.

  Ma didn’t have much of an education and she barely had a job. She crossed over the same night.

  If my father had been mortal, he would have gone red. He doesn’t like being reminded she beat him to it. I was surprised she had crossed over in the first place, being married to my father till her death, until I found out later, that earlier that day she had gone to legal aid to file for divorce. I don’t blame her. My father would arrest me on the spot just for knowing J.G.

  §

  You’re a criminal, J.G. tells me, nudging the crook of my arm with her toe. Do you know what forced entry can get you?

  I’m in the body of a man only a little older than her, his face clean–shaven and sharp. He fits me like a glove and I want to keep him and his apartment, with J.G. and me stretched out on the L–shaped suede couch, looking at a view of the racecourse.

  We can live here, I had told J.G. I can take him to his small new office with its increasing share prices and Swedish furniture. This guy’s rich, you wouldn’t have to host anymore. It’s been okay so far but you shouldn’t push your body. Ghosts leave a lot of residue. You can stop now.

  This was when she had called me a criminal, and I sensed the nervous retort behind her words. I was so close to her I could have traced the pink shell of her ear with my fingers and put my lips into it and asked if my death has made her miss me. Her eyes are duller now from having ghosts use them everyday, and her skin looks bloated and wan, like a drowned body. I grab her fo
ot to massage her ankles and she lets me.

  I don’t think Ah Wai would like it, she says.

  Wai is her fixer. He hosts her clients for a few minutes while they negotiate. He gets fifteen percent. I don’t know if he will like her living with me or having my hands all over her foot or not. I’ve never met him but with a body like this I feel I can take on anybody.

  Do you know his name? she asks.

  Who?

  His. She taps the hand I’m using to weave through her toes. Then she pulls her foot away and grabs the wallet sticking out of my back pocket. Brian Kwok, she reads from his ID, then shows me his symmetrical face, saying, He’s cute, even in pictures.

  I draw J.G. closer to me, taking her by the waist, but she rolls away to the other side of the couch.

  You’ve changed, she says, lip–smiling.

  I’m Brian Kwok now.

  What happened to the waitress?

  I got out of her in the toilet and left her a paracetamol. She was sick all over the place.

  Do you like it? Getting in people that way? Is that why you do it?

  I don’t know if she’s mocking or provoking me. I answer, How else would I be able to talk to you and keep you from getting caught?

  She angles her head with the lip–smile still on. Wouldn’t it be funny if I hosted you? she asks. Can you imagine that? When was the last time you tasted food, Ben?

  I don’t answer. The question cunningly wavers between an invitation and an innocent new topic. I don’t know why she’s asking this. It’s the hotel five years ago all over again.

  She says, It isn’t true that girl ghosts are more curious. They leave you alone and do what they came to do. But the guys come into you and they run through everything in you like a bulldozer. Frantic. Almost desperate.

  J.G. makes an outward, splaying movement with her hands. It takes a few minutes with girls but with guys, I black out immediately, she says. Like they just can’t wait to look at you from the inside. I like that about them.