by Ellen Datlow
Immediately, everything stopped: the wheel, the chain; out in the passage, the retreating effigy also came to a halt. The live wires that had electrified the wheel ceased to jump and spit.
A taut second passed. Then, from behind him, Mark heard Zoe breathing heavily. He turned. She shrank back, wet-eyed. “Happy now?” she said.
“You think that’s bad,” he replied, “wait ’til you see this.”
And he turned to the idol on the furnace, and raised his mace. He’d show them the meaning of disintegration. At this threat, however, the woman came violently to life.
“NO!” she howled, throwing herself onto his back, wrapping her arms around him.
He staggered forward and fell sideways, but managed to turn his body so that Zoe took the brunt of the impact. She gasped as he landed on her, then rolled away from him, agonized, clutching her ribs. He followed her on his knees, discarding the chain-mace and clasping his hands on her throat. “You want I should do you instead!” he panted. “You want I should make a martyr of you!”
And he began to squeeze. He hadn’t intended to go this far, but he was livid with rage. He saw her eyes dilate, her mouth gape to impossible width. How soft the muscle tissue beneath his hands; how easily he could ply it, meld it, throttle it. He didn’t want to do this, he told himself; he needed to. It had to be done. And then he heard something: a voice.
Slowly, dizzily, he came back to his senses. His hands loosened from the woman’s flesh. Wheezing, she sucked at the air.
Shaking, drunk with emotion, Mark stood up and tried to locate the direction of the voice. It was somewhere beyond the curtains: outside the house. He picked up the mace again, and thrust his way through the hanging vinyl, stumbling down the entrance tunnel. Someone was definitely talking out there. It sounded like Terri.
“ … maybe I could understand,” he thought she was saying. “ … this would be the best opportunity …”
Mark stopped for a second, as realization of who she must be speaking to dawned on him. Then he gave a shout and dashed the few remaining yards of passage, bursting out through the plastic strips onto the drive.
Again, the rain had eased off, and was now only coming in spatters. But the two women, who’d just emerged side-by-side from the trees, had clearly caught the worst of it. Their waterproofs ran and sparkled with droplets. One of them was Terri—and thank God for that, thank God on high. The other, however, was taller and more buxom, and having just pulled back her hood, had unraveled long tresses of hair that were still a shimmering gold. She looked up as Mark lurched across the driveway toward her, and even from this distance—maybe twenty yards—he could see that age had barely touched her. She was as young-old as ever, as beautiful, as wise. Yet his presence didn’t seem to register with her.
“Mum?” he whispered. Then, louder: “Mum, it’s me!”
He was so focused on the woman that at first he didn’t notice the supplicant standing still on the drive. Only when he walked past it, virtually rubbed shoulders with it, did he realize what it was. He stopped and stared round at it in disbelief. It might have worn a top hat and tails, and been bound around the body with S&M-type strapping, but there was no mistaking the negative photographic image that had been used to create its face. Because it was Terri.
They’d known about Terri as well?
Had they been watching him as closely as that? Had they manipulated even this most personal aspect of his life? And, if so, how close had they needed to get, and yet all the time remain hidden, watching from the shadows, interfering? Interfering for the better, admittedly, but still interfering—in fact controlling. Mark found himself shaking his head. It wasn’t right. None of it. He loved his mother, yes, and he would show her that now they were together again, but he was an adult, and he made his own rules and he chose his own woman, and none of this was fucking right. With a strangled cry, he drew the chain-mace back.
“No!” he heard someone scream from the house. Zoe again.
He swept the weapon down.
“No!” he heard from another direction. Terri? It didn’t matter, the hags would pay.
Deafening impacts followed as Mark assailed the supplicant. He struck at it front and back, and up and down, with great, savage, two-handed strokes. With each blow, pieces flew off it, the metal inside it rang out appallingly … .
“No,” Zoe wailed, grabbing his jacket, trying to drag him back.
He shrugged her off, though it scarcely mattered now. The effigy of his fiancée still stood upright, but at a gruesome angle. Its garb hung in shreds, its straw guts were disgorged all over the floor, and in many places its iron bones were visibly bent and broken. He only realized the full extent of his victory, however, when Terri—the real Terri—came toward him. For a second she seemed unsteady on her feet. Then blood began to trickle from the corners of her mouth, and he saw that her hands hung askew at the ends of her twisted arms. Before he could say anything, she sank to her knees, and with lids fluttering on eyes now brimming with crimson tears, she slumped down onto her side.
Mark felt his world start to spin. It wasn’t clear to him what had happened.
Somewhere behind, he could hear Zoe sobbing: “I told you, Mark, it’s the Goddess … it’s the power of the Goddess.”
Still it made no sense to him. His gaze flicked back and forth between the two mangled forms. Then his strength ebbed, and he dropped to all fours. He wanted to reach out and touch Terri, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything, except look up helplessly at his mother, who had now finally approached.
She stared down at him, but again it was as if she didn’t know him. He looked into her violet eyes, which peered right through him, as though through mist, and seeing the serene smile on her face, with a sudden clarity of understanding he remembered the many things he’d read suggesting those closest to the deities were the completely innocent, the completely calm, the completely happy. And it struck him as perhaps inevitable, and maybe fitting, that after so many centuries of torture and torment—and being denied—the Goddess was mad.
The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast
LUCIUS SHEPARD
Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and now lives in Vancouver, Washington. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Writers Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
His latest books are a nonfiction book about Honduras, Christmas in Honduras, a short novel, Softspoken, and a short fiction collection, The Iron Shore. Forthcoming are two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It, and two short novels, Beautiful Blood and Unknown Admirer.
Me and Molly Bruin were lying on our stomachs atop a sea cliff overlooking Droughans Beach, fresh from a fuck, and lolling there, our skins stuck with bits from the weeds and tall grasses that cloaked our sin, with the wind in our faces and our lives yet to be lived. For want of anything to say, I scooted forward and hung my head down so I could see beneath the overhang. Just below the lip, a chunk of earth had been ripped from the cliff face, laying bare a tangle of roots, some thick as a child’s arm, from which sprang the spindly shrub that poked up beside me, producing from its topmost twig a single pink bloom, the sum of all that tortuous subterranean effort. It annoyed me, that flower, the way it was dandled, bobbing in a stiff breeze like vegetable laughter, and I snapped it off, intending to crumple it in my fist.
“For me?” asked Molly with mock delight, knowing I hadn’t meant to give her the flower. She plucked it from my hand and sat up, fixing it in her black hair. Her torso was decorated with green and blue ink. Traceries of vines and leaves interwoven with the random grace of natural growth coiled about her breasts, trellised across her belly. With the flower capping her curly head, she might have been a nymph born of some mystic union, and not the daughter of a drunk and the bloated misery that was his wife. Even the scatter of acne
across her cheek seemed put there by design.
“We should go down,” she said.
“Not yet.”
A hill sloped upward from the edge of the cliff and, just below its summit, gone to nature amid a wrangle of bushes and stunted trees, there stood a ruined cottage with a caved-in roof and a gaping doorway, home to mice and spiders, shadows and snakes. By unfocusing my eyes, I could make it into a soldier’s remains, a giant fallen during an assault, his body collapsed to rib bones, tenting up the brown-and-black camouflage of the boards. A cover of soft gray clouds was being drawn across the sky.
“We should see what the others are doing,” Molly said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“In a minute.” I rolled back onto my stomach. “You took the sauce out of me with that one.”
Pleased, she lay down in the grass, nudging against my shoulder and hip, and went to braiding grass blades together. She stretched a hand out beside mine, as if comparing the two in size and pallor, then rested her head on her arm and said, “Let’s stay here tonight.”
“Where?”
“I saw a couple places back in town.”
“Too expensive.”
“We don’t have to find a place, we can stay awake all night.” She rolled over and grabbed a baggie from a purse, showed it to me—it held a quantity of white powder and, in a little plastic bottle, a rainbow confection of pills. “We have this,” she said, and shook the baggie, making it rustle.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I don’t care.”
She pitched her voice low in imitation of mine. “‘Whatever. I don’t care.’”
“I don’t.”
“It’s all so depressing.” She threw herself down in the grass and pressed her forearm to her brow, as if overborne by the world’s brutishness. “Whatever. I don’t care.”
There were five of us that day and, it seemed, all our days. Molly, me, TK, James, and Doria. We traveled in a small disheveled pod, when we traveled at all, and we liked to ride the driverless white buses that trundled up and down the coast, controlled by electric cells along the road. Often we rode them to Droughans Beach. I had stolen a tool from a repairman’s kit that enabled me to open a panel on the floor and control the stops and starts. If there were other passengers on board, they would ask to be let off, and so we stretched out across the seats, scrawling our names (though not our true ones) and affections on the windows and walls, shouting, and pissing in the aisles, knowing that by the time anyone responded to the signal sent by the wounded bus, we would be off into the next chapter of our vandal’s tale. We were none of us eighteen (I had almost reached that defining age), living in a city squat with half-a-dozen of our peers, surviving by means of stealing, prostitution, and panhandling, and these little excursions were the height of our criminal joy. We could all tell each other the same true stories of abuse, deprivation, rape, but there was no point to it, so we told one another the same lies, an equally pointless and dissatisfying exercise, but more fun. We lived to lie, we were professional quality liars, and the finest lies we told were the ones we could not help believing ourselves.
Close to where Molly and me lay, a wooden stair led to the beach, descending in two tiers past boarded-up cottages, though not so ruinous as the one on the clifftop. Near dusk we climbed down the stair, a precarious route due to broken steps and a rickety railing, and out onto the sand. Droughans Beach was approximately a hundred and fifty yards wide at low tide and stretched unbroken for nine miles. The sand was so fine that when Molly slid her bare feet along it, she produced a distinct musical tone. Facing the stair, a fragment of a giant’s fossilized jaw thrust up some thirty feet from the shallows, gone a dull grayish green with age; two worn teeth of the same color, a molar and a canine, showed clear of a light surf—it had been lying there for so many centuries, it had blended with the landscape and might have been mistaken for a natural formation. To its right stood a massive rock over two hundred feet high, shaped like the giant’s ancient tool shed, its peaked roof topped by greenery that sprouted from a thick layer of birdlime left by the gulls and puffins that roosted there in the thousands. That evening, water foamed around its base and waves broke over its sides, sending sprays into the air; once the tide receded, however, you could stroll out almost to its seaward end and keep your shoes dry.
Molly ran off to find our friends among the thirty or forty people who were walking the beach, and I hunkered on the sand close to the tidal margin. There was scant wind where I sat, but it was blowing hard atop the rock—the gulls went off balance as they landed, beating their wings to stay level, getting one foot down and tottering before they settled on their perch. Their distant cries sounded like a baying of tiny, trebly hounds. The landward face of the rock looked to have been sheared away down to a skirt of rough stone that spread out from the base; inscribed thereon, covering a quarter of its surface, was a great design of whitish lines that, although it, too, might have been a product of wind and weathers, revealed the aspect of the embryonic creature that had been sealed within the rock centuries before. I thought about that half-liquefied monstrosity, left to mature in the solitary dark, and wondered what shape it had taken, and whether it had grown to the limits of its prison or been stunted and deformed by the blackness.
I sat there for what seemed an hour, my thoughts plunging to places as black as that prison and soaring into bright fantasies wherein Molly and me, TK, James, and Doria, all our friends in the city, lived in a circumstance with good health and good food and drugs enough never to know a vengeful feeling or bloody desire; and then I lay down in the sand, not because I was sleepy, but because I was oppressed—it was as though a hand, irresistible in its power, were pushing me onto my back, I was so overcome with hopelessness, with the understanding that our fates already had been decided. As surely as I saw that design of white lines left by the ancients to warn against what was sealed within, I also saw lesser lines that described Molly beaten by a trick, TK overdosed, James done in by an untreated disease, Doria with her throat cut. All still young, still wanting life. The only death I could not see was my own, but I felt it closing around me.
Eventually I did sleep and when I woke it was dark. Most of the strollers and shell collectors had left the beach, and Molly and the rest, made visible by moonlight, were gathered around a boulder that the tide, receding now, had left bare. I was angry at them for letting me sleep and I walked toward them, brushing sand from my clothes, thinking how to express my displeasure. They were talking to an old man in a plaid cap and shabby clothing. He was holding a battery lamp that, now and then, he switched on, underlighting the other’s faces and his own as he shined it over the pool. I could tell they were screwing with him. TK, with his rabbity bones, a few hairs on his upper lip playing at being a mustache, still a boy; James, sullen and muscular, yet half-a-head shorter than I; and Doria, her hair part-blond, part-blue, with a bitter, sexy face: they, and Molly as well, each wore sober looks, as if intent on what he said, but I knew they were repressing their derision.
“When I was no older than you kids,” he was saying, “I was on patrol down here.”
“You were a cop, huh?” asked TK.
“Oh, no! I was part of an environmental patrol. The town hired seven of us kids to make sure no one disturbed the tide pools. We’d catch someone sitting on the rocks, like you were doing, and we’d tell them they were sitting on living creatures.” He played his light over the boulder. “See there? Acorn barnacles and tube barnacles. Anemones. Tiny ones. If you look close you can see ’em poking out their tongues.”
“For real?” said Doria. “Sitting on them might get a girl off, huh?”
James said, “Why seven?”
The old man acted confused; he glanced at James anxiously.
“Why’d they hire seven?” asked James with studied thickness. “’Cause it was like a magic number?”
“It was just for the summer,” said the old man weakly.
“Did you guys call yourself something?
” asked TK. “Like, did you have a name? The Seven … you know. Whatevers.”
“Beachmasters!” suggested Molly, provoking laughter from James.
“Assbags!” Doria looked to the group for approval, but no one found her remark funny.
“We weren’t …” The old man blinked, licked his lips. “We …”
“Suppose you saw someone doing this?” James went tromping, splashing through the tide pool. “What would you do? Blow your little whistle?”
“I’d probably fucking kill you,” I said.
The old man shined his lamp full on me.
I threw up an arm to shield my eyes and said, “Turn that damn thing off!”
For the reaction it brought, my voice might have been a roar. The old man dropped the lamp into the tide pool and stumbled back against TK. I shouldered past Doria and said to him, “You know this is an evil place. Especially at night.”
He stared fearfully at me, one red-veined eye rolling like a horse’s, a horrible, unlucky thing, and I told him to look away from me. When he had done so, I put my mouth to his ear and said, “Suppose you’re here when the beast breaks loose? It would tear you apart.”