Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  The thought must have occurred to the beast, too, for it rumbled awake out of its nicotine-coated sleep. Its fingers pried clumsily at the bottom of his esophagus; its tongue slithered up, soft and wet.

  Harry let it rise in his throat. He felt a warmth spread through his chest, a confidence he’d never before possessed; he felt he could lean down now and kiss her on the lips and it wouldn’t change their friendship, wouldn’t change that at all, it would only—

  A motor rumbled downriver. Alice sat up, pulling herself away, and the dream collapsed. The beast slithered back, dragging any confidence Harry might have felt down with it. Alice took a last, long pull, then stubbed out the cigarette on the pier.

  “Sounds like my brothers are almost back. You’d better get going.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, giving a small, false smile. He felt the heat of his face going red; he couldn’t let her see the shame that filled hollow where the beast had been. “Time to get home, anyway. Thanks for the smoke.”

  He put his lighter back in the bag, waved goodbye, and started back down the pier.

  *

  The beast had been with him from the time before he was. It found its skin off the stone-cradled coast of Baleswar and took teeth from the mouths of sightless catfish slicked in the muds of the Hooghly; it found fingers in the splintered iron wreck of a sunken steamer— those half-eaten Company men suspended in the deep watched, unseeing—and then pushed onward, upstream, to break the surface off Kolkata’s restless, sweat-streaked banks. Its lips—what practiced, deceitful lips—it pinched from a gora in a white cotton shirt and crisp straw boater, bent at the waist over the rail of a ferryboat, his cleanshaven face so close they all but kissed as it rose to meet him.

  On the banks it found a Bengali farmer, a devout Muslim and a newlywed, too, and it buried itself deep inside him. It stayed with him for a year, in guileless sleep, until the man and his wife sailed that unbordered ocean to a place they knew nothing of, a world they could hardly imagine but was richly described by their sahibs and Her Majesty’s Officers.

  One night when the ocean churned and the ship’s passengers cowered in darkness, all lanterns gone out, the merchant lay with his wife. The beast slicked itself inside the man’s heavy cock and spread itself inside his wife and when, at last, they emerged from the belly of that ship and stepped onto Georgetown’s streets, the beast lived inside yet another: a child who would be born to this unknown country, this ancient jungle.

  *

  Father had a motorcycle that had been brought by ship from London; a sleek, chrome-buffed Norton Manx painted a royal oxblood and fitted with all the most fashionable accoutrements. Though the sugar mill was only just over a mile from the house, Father still drove the bike there and back every day.

  “She’s got enough space for the both of us,” he assured Harry as they readied themselves the following morning. “Just be certain to hold onto me good and tight—they need to have another go at paving this road.”

  They puttered down the main road slowly, Father steering around rain-filled potholes but still managing to hit bumps and stones that jarred them both. The other Officers’ homes spun by, just beyond the wooden fence, and when they had passed the compound he took a turn that put them on a dirt road that traced the edge of the river. Indian and Arawak fishermen worked the banks, hauling crab pots out of the water, throwing nets, dragging buckets out of their mudstreaked boats that writhed with the morning’s catches: eel, chiclid, bushymouth catfish, snook, croakers, and lungfish as long as Harry’s arm.

  This flew by them, too, and soon they were past all the houses, past the docks. Harry knew they were close when they came to the prison: a building as uncannily tall as it was narrow, set back from the road, with rows and rows of blacked-out windows. A hundred years past, maybe more, it had been one of the colony’s first sugar refineries; its thick walls and iron-barred doors made it a prime candidate when the British decided the city needed holding cells.

  Father’s mill was just back from the prison, over the railroad tracks. It was, from what Harry could see beyond the stepped fence running the perimeter, like a small city itself. Several small, shack-like buildings encircled a three-story, whitewashed structure with a slanted roof. They crossed the fence, and Father slowed the motorcycle.

  The mill was already busy. Sweating men—Indian and black alike—heaved six- and eight-foot bundles of sugarcane out of the backs of trucks parked in the lot. They pressed the cane along what looked like a low gate that was banded together by a long iron bar along its top. The bottom of the gate swung inward, and the loose cane fell onto a conveyor that rolled it into the mill. Men stood on the other side of the low gate, huge bamboo rakes in hand, pulling the cane down onto the conveyor belt.

  “Come,” Father said after he’d parked in front of the mill. The motorbike’s polished, red chassis seemed alien amidst the white-andbrown tedium of the cane workers. “Let’s find Uncle Amir.”

  The interior of the mill was darker and noisier than Harry had expected. The conveyor belt carried the sugarcane into a central chamber filled with machines whose purposes he could hardly guess at: steel-sided shredders with rows of spinning teeth, thick pipes that ran the walls and hissed with steam, and vats filled with dark, boiling liquids. Men with heavy gloves moved like ants in an underground colony: each knowing exactly where he was going, but none saying a word to the others.

  “He should be up here,” Father said, shouldering open a door labeled Management Only. They climbed a steep flight of stairs that doubled back on itself and opened into a small room with a glass wall. The whole mill was visible beyond the glass, much as fish could be watched in a child’s aquarium.

  “Harry! So glad you came today.” Uncle Amir stood from behind a small oak desk, came over to shake his hands. “I haven’t seen you in so long, and now we get to see each other twice in one week! What grand luck. Would you like milk tea?”

  Harry shook his head, but Father insisted on tea for the three of them.

  While Amir boiled water, Father enumerated the job’s various daily tasks—invoices, vendor inquiries, customer relations, and management. “It’s tough keeping the coolies on track and making sure production is where the bosses need it to be. So much slips through the cracks. Right?” he asked, looking to Uncle Amir.

  “Right,” he said with a nod as he poured tea from a steaming pot.

  Father sat Harry down at a chair with a stack of invoices—“clerical work keeps the mind organized, son”—and retreated to his own desk to answer the ringing rotary phone.

  Harry’s concentration left him after alphabetizing the first six. He sat beside the only window in the room that looked outside. The view was bleak—mostly men hauling cane from the trucks, staggering with the weight—but the window had a small, wooden ledge and on the ledge was a dead caterpillar. It was an enormous, bloated creature that had only recently died. He peered closer: he recognized the markings. Mother had several moths in her collection with the same rows of dots on the wings, the same shallow—

  —Harry blinked. The caterpillar was dead, clearly dead, yet could have sworn he’d seen its skin ripple. Just a slight protuberance, as if some small heart, deep inside, beat once.

  His stomach turned at the thought, though the beast inside him didn’t move. In fact, despite being so far from the compound, the beast had hardly protested at all. It purred complacently—contentedly, even—from the thin lining of his intestines; he could barely tell it was there.

  Somewhere inside the mill, men started yelling. This was followed by the sound of metal shrieking against metal and a long hiss of steam.

  “Amir?” Father said.

  Uncle Amir looked up from his paperwork, keeping his gaze away from the window onto the workers.

  “Amir,” Father repeated, hanging up the phone. “Would you go look into that?”

  Uncle Amir feigned surprise. “Oh yes! Yes, of course. I’ll—I’ll just be back.” He nearly tripped over himself
getting down the stairs.

  Father gave a pained sigh and, when Harry didn’t inquire as to the reason for the sigh, he elaborated: “He’s been having trouble with the men. He’s usually so good with them, but this blasted People’s Progressive Party is driving them apart. Amir’s a reasonable man—he understands the benefits of us being here, running things. All coolies are not as reasonable as your Uncle, Harry. That’s a good first lesson.”

  The caterpillar’s skin had started moving again. First, one pulse— a single, small heartbeat—but then it came again, more strongly, pushing up against the necrotic flesh, distending it. The caterpillar’s skin tore with the pressure, and a small mouth emerged from inside: two black mandibles, sharp as sickles. A pin-waisted wasp pulled itself free, its wings slicked with the caterpillar’s viscera.

  Another wasp crawled up through the hole, and the caterpillar’s body began to boil: ten more heads pushed up into the dead skin, biting hole after hole until the caterpillar was nothing more than a heap of dislocated parts, a first meal for a host of sickly-orange wasps with legs sharp as needles.

  “Reginald!” Uncle Amir called from the bottom of the stairwell. “Might you—might you come down, please?”

  “What’s the trouble?” Father asked from his desk. The shouting from the men downstairs grew louder as Uncle Amir kept the door propped open.

  “You should bring the boy with you!” Amir yelled, and then they heard the door slam shut.

  Harry pulled himself away from the caterpillar—there were just two wasps left, now; the others had taken off into the midday heat— and he followed Father downstairs.

  The mill’s workfloor was chaotic: workers ran back and forth, some with pails of water from spigots outside, others with burlap tarps. The far end of the chamber was starting to fill with black smoke, and the room reeked of burning timber. One of the workers, a tall, broad black man, was yelling at Uncle Amir. His accent was too heavy for Harry to understand much of what he was saying.

  Father stood paralyzed at Harry’s side. He gripped the back of Harry’s neck in his hand, squeezing just too tight.

  “Should you see what’s wrong?” Harry asked. “

  I—I think we should just—”

  Uncle Amir jogged over. “It’s one of the processors, Reginald,” he said, his voice hoarse with inhaled smoke. “It’s lit the cane chips somehow. You should get him out of here.”

  “Are you sure? I could stay if there’s anything—”

  “It’s under control,” Amir retorted. He turned to go back to his men.

  Father took Harry by the hand and they started out of the facility. Harry turned just before they got out, though, to see the workfloor one last time. His gaze slid from the billowing smoke to the black worker, who was standing there, watching them go. His face dripped with sweat and was streaked darkly with ash and his eyes went wide and wild with such fear, such rage, that Harry had to turn his face away.

  *

  The fires were put out, and the mill and all the cane workers survived. The mill would need some time for repairs, Father explained, but it would be back in no time at all. The fire started due to faulty machinery. All of the processors were years too old, but that wasn’t his fault, he was careful to say, that was something Amir should have told him about long before it had gotten this far.

  He spoke with the bluff of bravery, but he was clearly shaken by the incident. He kept to the drawing room, fingertips stained from the endless chain of cigarettes passing through them. He came out for short, silent meals with Harry and Mother, then excused himself.

  The image of the mill worker had stayed with Harry, too: he had never seen such terror carved into one man’s face. Father’s immediate retreat from the mill filled him with embarrassment, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to Father about it, or to be there when Mother found out what had happened.

  So he stayed away from the compound. Later in the week, after a day spent in too-hot classrooms thinking about his mother and her love of Frank de Caires, he found himself wandering back toward the Demerara, picking his way along a road he’d walked many times when he was a child. His mother’s house had been down this way, he thought. He had few memories of the place—he’d been so young when Father took him away to live at the compound—but there were still feelings that stayed: the croaking calls of toucans with beaks the color of ripened papaya; the static joy of hearing cricket games in countries across an ocean, broadcast over transistor radio; his mother coming home from work, her apron curry-stained, her smile wider than the river.

  As it always did, the beast grew restless. It smelled the river’s sucking mud and the jackfruit trees in bloom; it tasted the brick-red dirt he kicked up from the road and the winds that brought clouds from the west blue with rain. But Harry had pilfered the kitchen before he left for school, taking what little Majid had left after breakfast: a pine tart and a tennis roll. He took a starchy bite out of a tart, and the beast quieted itself.

  He came upon a house he thought he remembered. It was a splitlevel with wide, screenless windows, a green-tiled roof, and small yard full of mango trees. Two boys, one his age and one much younger, played with a ball and cricket bat in the front yard. Harry thought he recognized the older boy. He watched them play for a while, and, when the younger boy went to fetch the ball after a particularly enthusiastic hit, the older boy came over.

  “I remember you,” he said, to Harry’s surprise. “You’re Harold, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, I don’t remember … ”

  “We grew up down the street. You’re Auntie Bibi’s kid, yeah?”

  “That’s right,” Harry said. He flushed with the embarrassment of not remembering anything about this boy.

  “Yeah, I remember. You always looked white. You know, like your father.”

  Harry, opened his mouth, unsure of what to say.

  “Well, I’m Bobby,” the boy continued, rapid fire. “Want a turn with the bat?”

  He offered it over. Harry paused, startled. He wasn’t any good at cricket, and he had very little food left for the beast. It had started its rumblings again; slipping itself around the pit of his stomach, prodding those tender walls with its tongue.

  “It’s gonna rain soon,” Bobby said, gesturing with his full eyebrows to the changing sky. “Might as well get a few hits in while you can.”

  Harry took the bat, and walked to meet Bobby’s little brother.

  He played for fifteen awkward minutes, missing more throws than he should have and failing to catch any of the balls that came his way. The other boys were good sports, though, and Harry found himself laughing more than he had in a long while.

  Then, while he stood between the mango trees, watching the younger brother, Abed, pitch to his brother, Harry saw a man coming down the road. He came from the direction of the prison and the mill, dressed in a fine suit and a starched shirt. He walked haltingly, swinging long arms and drunkenly swaying.

  The boys stopped their game; the ball went rolling through the grass, into the thickets beyond.

  “Do you know who it is?” Harry asked.

  “No, I can’t quite—”

  The man staggered closer, and Harry saw that there was something wrong with his face. Half was swollen, his left eye nearly shut, and his lips were distended and purpled. Blood had run down his forehead and dried over his eyebrows, caking them.

  He came near enough that all three boys could make out the rest of his face: his thin moustache, his teeth so thick his lips could hardly cover them.

  They all went running.

  “Uncle Amir!” Bobby called as they neared.

  He looked at them but there was no recognition in his eyes, no light behind them at all. He half-fell into Bobby’s arms, and the boy couldn’t hold his weight so they collapsed together into the dirt.

  “Run and get Bhauji,” Bobby said to his brother. “Run!”

  The boy took bolted for the houses far down the road.

  “And
you, go and get the ferryman’s wife. She’s a nurse,” Bobby said.

  Harry balked; his heart stuttered in his throat.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  Bobby looked up. He had taken the corner of his shirt, wet it with his tongue, and was wiping blood off of Uncle Amir’s face. Uncle Amir’s one open eye closed.

  “Down this road. Left at the fish market, left at the baker—”

  Harry was nodding but he was hardly listening. The beast had grown hungrier still; it pulled at the inside of his guts with its practiced fingers; it licked at the base of his throat so he had to swallow, and swallow, and swallow—

  “Shit, man,” Bobby said. “I’ll go. You stay here with him!”

  Bobby ran in the opposite direction, puffs of dust rising behind him.

  Harry got to his knees beside Uncle Amir. He had never felt a hunger like this before; it opened his mouth for him, wet his tongue. A long line of spit trailed from the corner of Uncle Amir’s mouth; as it moved down his cheek it crossed a line of dry blood. The beast hummed inside Harry, it pressed lips to the back of his frantic mind.

  Harry leaned down. His nose brushed Uncle Amir’s cheek and his lips touched the line of spit and the flaking blood. Oh, what sweetness, what sugar! His tongue lapped out of his mouth and he soaked in the rest of Uncle Amir’s spittle and blood. He licked the face clean of dirt and sweat and the beast rejoiced with the flavors: the salt, the tang, the sticky sweet!

  Harry pulled back. He was filled with the desire to take a bite— Amir’s cheek was so full, so fatty. The beast asked, then begged. Then it didn’t beg, it demanded. Pain ripped through his bowels like the sting of spider-killing wasp boring through his intestines. He leaned forward at once, opening his mouth—