by Chris Capps
Willard reached out, touching his sister’s lower lip as she smiled, pulling it down and examining her gums. It was true. His own smile died as he stared at the swollen line of tissue beneath her teeth. He let go of her, raising his other hand to show her the apple.
“I know you’re dying,” he said offering it to her, “And I know how to save you. All of you.”
Chapter 10
“Michigan! Shut up!” Dr. Rosario shouted through his front screen door onto the porch. The dog had been barking madly since the chime, his snarling and howling elicited from two simple raps on the ornamental bell hanging off his front steps. Rosario nudged the yapping pug away with his foot as he stepped out onto his screened front porch, “Whoever you are, I’m done for the day. Go get one of the other doctors.”
And then he opened the screen door and looked down at Tanhauser. Molly Nayfack was draped across his arms, breathing shallowly. Her skin was pale, and there was blood clinging down the sides of one arm and one leg. Tanhauser stood with her on the steps shaking his head. His mouth was open, as if he didn’t know what to say.
Rosario’s hand drew up to his mouth. Hadn’t he just performed an autopsy on this girl? He opened the door, calling down the stairs at Tanhauser,
“Hospital’s another couple blocks, Harry. Best to keep moving.”
“Sam,” Tanhauser said moving up the steps, “She was attacked. Attacked by something that looked like her. She asked for my help, and I’m not leaving until you help her.”
Rosario looked down at the girl intermittently twitching in Harry’s arms. He looked up the street, noting the familiar sound of Sherriff Rind’s Crown Vic approaching. He could see the dim headlights flick on in the dying glow of the setting sun. Quickly he pushed the door open and stepped to the side,
“Well come on, then.”
“Thanks, Sam,” Tanhauser said shuffling up the stairs, “I don’t think she’s like the others. She seems different.”
Watching the patrol car's flickering red and blue, Rosario felt his palm shake against the door. What was he getting into? Michigan stopped barking the instant Harry crossed the threshold into the house, sniffing instead at the variety of graveyard smells he was tracking on his boots. Harry set Molly down on the stuffed paisley couch wrapped in clear plastic, reaching his rough broad hand up to Molly’s forehead and patting it. She was awake again, moving her arms in long slow swipes around her. But she wasn't talking.
“She’s delirious from blood loss,” Rosario said quickly moving to his desk to pick up his doctor‘s bag and pull out his stethoscope, “Go into the kitchen. You’ll find a couple bottles of blood in the ice box. Bring one of them here.”
As he sat down and scooted his office chair to the couch to check Molly’s vital signs, Harry paused. He stared back at the old man listening to her heart beat.
“You keep blood in your ice box?” Harry asked, “Why?”
“Same reason you came over here to drop her off,” Sam Rosario said pointing at the slowly writhing girl, “Believe it or not, sometimes people don't want to go to the hospital. Now hurry up.” Tanhauser hopped to, thudding into the kitchen and opening up the refrigerator.
Next to a six pack of McCarthy ale there was a large bottle filled to the top of its rubber cork with thick crimson fluid. He retrieved it, running back to where Rosario was sterilizing the crook of Molly’s elbow with a cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol. Rosario held up a hand, taking the bottle from Harry, “Couple that with the fact that I’m O Negative, and it becomes more unreasonable not to keep a bottle of my own blood in the kitchen.”
“There were a couple bottles in there. They both blood?” Harry said as the doctor connected the bottle to her vein, the life giving blood slowly drifting through a thin rubber tube Rosario had grabbed from his bag.
“Yeah,” Rosario said, handing the bottle back to Harry as he took the stethoscope out of his ears, “Maybe I’m also a little eccentric. Hold this up. Just let gravity do its work.”
“I just thought I shouldn’t take her to the hospital,” Harry said, uneasily shifting the bottle’s weight from hand to hand, “Not with the way things have been.”
“Rind is losing it,” Rosario said, wrapping his palms around the cold bottle to warm it with his hands, “Has been since he came back. I talked to Chance Cooper this morning. Had to leave. Rind isn’t interested in figuring this thing out. All he wants is to find this girl and kill her. He had a way about him when he said it to me. Over and over he said.”
“Over and over what?” Tanhauser asked.
“Kill her,” Rosario said nodding his head once at Molly, “He wants her dead. And if he saw you here right now, he might want you dead too.”
Giving up on warming the bottle of blood, Rosario opened up his filing drawer and took out a glass, setting it on the table, blowing the dust out and pouring it half full of whiskey from the desk.
“She’s resting now,” he said, “I’d give her a sedative, but not until this first bottle’s empty. It‘ll be another hour or so before I‘ll feel comfortable saying she‘s going to be okay. After that maybe she tries to kill us. Or maybe she explains just what the hell is going on.”
“What is going on, doctor?” Harry asked. Rosario only shook his head, taking a swig from the bottle and resting it on his lap,
“Sure I’ve got a theory. Just like everybody else. Only I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Go ahead,” Harry said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Sherriff says it’s the devil, but I don’t know what to call it. There’s something out there in the woods. Something far off that we haven’t found. Only Molly found it, or maybe it found her. Best theory I can come up with is it makes her. Over and over again she keeps getting copied by this thing. It’s like a stamp, or a printing press for people. She’s been out there in the woods with copies of herself. Living. When she comes out of the process, whatever it is, she’s the same age as when she first met it. No memory beyond that point. Only what she brings with her. Everything else is the same, right down to the clothes she‘s wearing.”
“That’s...” Harry began, only he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. All he could do was tilt the glass back, letting the last drop of whiskey drip out and wet his quickly drying tongue.
“There’s more,” Dr. Rosario said extending two fingers, waggling them in the air over his shoulder, “Two things. One is she didn’t have anything to eat out there in the woods. No crops for miles, nothing to eat for years while she was out there wandering. Only there was one thing that there was a whole lot of other than the trees and grass and the fog. Actually,” the doctor stood up, reaching over his head for the donor bottle, taking it from Harry, “You’d better give this to me, son. You’re not going to like this part.” Tanhauser nodded, walking back to the desk and pouring whiskey into his glass. Rosario took his chair, resting his foot up on it and leaning on his knee to keep the bottle of blood steady, “The truth is, when I did her autopsy yesterday I looked in her stomach. It was hard to tell at first, but after a couple of tests I confirmed it. I always wondered if I’d be able to do it, if I was starving I mean.”
“What are you saying, doc?” Tanhauser asked, “Has she been eating people this whole time?”
“Not people,” the doctor said looking down at Molly, “Herself. It’s all she’s got."
"Jesus!" Harry said dropping the bottle of whiskey to the floor. He leaned down, dabbing at the liquid with a cloth rag, his eyes furrowed as he stared into the swirling sea of whiskey and broken glass. Herself. The doctor continued,
"I thought that might happen. I’ve been thinking back on my college days. She reproduces asexually, she consumes copies of herself, she‘s taken herself out of the ecosystem as much as she can. As long as this factory, whatever it is, keeps making her she’ll never change. And I keep thinking we might have to rethink a couple things about what we call human.”
Tanhauser had given up on the mess crunc
hing beneath his boots and sat on the desk uneasily. His mind was turning the facts over in his mind, turning them and turning them. Finally, after a full minute, he had to ask,
“Is she going to try and kill us when she wakes up?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said, “I have an awful thought, though. I think she’s going to wake up harmless as a butterfly.”
“What's wrong with that?” Tanhauser said.
“I mean harmless. Gentle. More like the Molly Nayfack that left town those years ago. Whatever happens to them, whatever turns them bad can’t be a simple process. And it wouldn’t be necessary all the time. You see I think this one wasn’t made to join them. I think this one’s for eating.”
“That’s not going to matter to the Sherriff,” Harry said.
“No,” Sam said, “it won’t. But Chance Cooper knows something. The Sherriff kicked me out of Cooper’s interrogation before I heard too much. But he said something that finally cemented all this in my mind. He said he knew where they came from.”
***
The fog was already a deep shade of sunset red when Willard Nayfack, following his sister Molly, reached the lake. They had talked briefly on the journey about life in town, Willard recounting what he knew of the events he had witnessed personally. The use of the conversation to Molly was no mystery to him. He knew what she was really after during these long walks into the deep woods. She wanted information about Cairo - and its people. What use she had for the information, Willard didn't know. He was perfectly happy just to be around someone who understood him, someone who was family.
Molly stopped at the edge of the lake, pointing out across its waves to the island behind heavy fog.
"Listen," she said, "You can hear them."
Willard was silent once more. There was sound coming out from the island today. Laughter, crying, screaming - they all melted together like the lapping waves ahead of them. It was a multitude of choruses, lost in wild ecstatic suffering. Though he had never seen the island personally, Willard imagined what it must look like, even in the quiet moments. And even though he knew his sister, in that moment he knew she had become something wholly alien to him. She smiled, and trembled as they drew near the bank, bathed in the sound. There was a deep, knowing fear in her voice, "Someone just died."
"Who?" Willard asked. She shook her head,
"That's not what you're here for. It's time."
Willard nodded, gripping the apple behind his back. She held her arm out to a small pathway that snaked deeper into the woods, away from the lake, away from the island. He glanced back, shivering, and walked alone down the path. He had never seen the Icarin personally, had always been told it was not yet time. Molly knew what was best for him, would protect him even now that she herself would soon be hunted by the people of his town. He rubbed his thumb against the smooth glassy skin of the apple as he trod between the rocks toward the house he had only heard about. And as the sun slowly set, drawing the fog toward deep purple and finally a barely lit grey, he slowed his pace.
Over the hill a silence found him. It was a windless ringing silence that he never quite realized he had been missing. It surrounded him, jealously followed his footsteps, and muted them. It set the path ahead of him with a thick carpet of moss between the rocks. And as he looked down at the cotton moss beneath his feet, he hardly noticed the house ahead of him escape the fog and embrace the full frame of his vision. The door was hanging open in a windless night. There was lit candle inside. As he reached his hand out to open the ash covered door, something caught his eye down and to the right.
It sat on the ground staring forward, its hushed breath now the only thing filling Willard's ears. There was a bald head, sunken eyes. If it had been a man, Willard would have sworn it was the Sherriff. And yet this broken thing leaning against the house was a shadow, sitting in complete silence. He was waiting for something, cradling something in his arms. He looked up, a savage drooling grin splitting his features. And the thing in his arms, being cradled like a baby was his service pistol.
He moved upon seeing Willard, the toothy grin opening wide without humor. He leaned over, shuffling onto his side where he slipped and fell. The fog obscured most of him, but Willard could see and hear the pistol leave his arms, shuffling onto the moss with only a whisper. And when the Sherriff tried to pick it up, Willard could see why he had been holding the gun so strangely.
His arms, which ended at blackened wrists, twisted around the gun, tried to leverage it up again, catching the grip and shuffling it forward, spinning it just out of his reach. The man opened his mouth in a grimace, a look of pain that could only be accompanied by screaming. And yet there were no screams.
Rind, or rather this Rind, had been silenced. It pushed the pistol around, thumping its stump against the ash covered wall in anguish. It was such a sound, that gentle thump, that Willard quickly reached down to retrieve the gun. The Sherriff now stared at him, the smile of a man made gentle leaving the rest of him behind. He stared at Willard from those recessed shadowed eyes, daring him even now to pull the trigger. Willard felt his throat closing, a prickling reach up the back of his neck. He and the Sherriff were not alone. He reached down and put the gun back in Rind's arms, and turned without looking at him back to the door. He knocked only once before it opened.
The Icarin was standing there. This wasn't how he had imagined their meeting. Willard had been told of the great power the Icarin possessed, the incredible insight it had into the mind of man. He had been told it was an alien. And yet here it stood before him with a hand on a simple dusty house's door. Even with the bizarre scene he had just witnessed, Willard had not expected the creature to so simply occupy space like this.
It stood staring out from the sides of its head, recessed black globes serving for eyes drawn far back onto a beaked face. And then Willard saw that the thing he stared at was not a head at all, but a mask crafted from bone and black feathers. It stepped backward, clicking its talon-like fingers together. Back into a candle lit room.
As Willard stepped through leaving the door open behind him, he noticed many things. Though the conditions were spare, he found himself surprised by what he did see. Looking at an old chair, he considered that the Icarin must sit. Seeing a bed he learned that it slept. And reaching down to pick up an old copy of the Reader's digest book of small engine repair, he learned that it could read. Looking back up at the creature that stood before him, near the door, Willard smiled and opened his arms.
They embraced one another in a sustained affectionate hug. And in that hug Willard reached behind the mask and pulled it off, so that when they stood face to face once again he could see her. She had aged ten years. Unlike the others, this Molly was his big sister.
They embraced again, with Willard saying,
"I knew. I wouldn't have come out all this way to save a monster."
"Willard Nayfack," she said with a dry voice, "Old friend."
"So many questions," Willard said, "I knew one day I'd meet the original. The one that left me those years ago and wandered into the forest."
"Sit," the Icarin, Willard's true sister said, "Tell me what made you finally come here. How do we even begin?"
"I brought you something," Willard said setting the apple on the table, watching for her reaction, "And I want you to hear me before you ask why. Dr. Rosario did an autopsy on the one you sent to the town meeting. She was dying of a vitamin deficiency. The guide you sent me has told me a lot. She told me you only eat amongst yourselves. She called it the symmetry of the harvest. Call me crazy, but I kind of understand it. But please understand that this vitamin deficiency is killing you all. If you plan on winning this coming struggle, you'll need your strength. This is why you die out every couple of years. Why you had to keep sending new guides."
"I know," Molly said gently, rolling the apple backwards toward her, "I figured it out a long time ago when I first started feeling ill. Of course I knew, brother, how else could I have survived this long? Scu
rvy takes only a couple years to kill you. I eat fruit whenever I can."
"The guide said it was forbidden," Willard said blinking as she picked the apple up and took a bite, "Why would she lie?"
"She wasn't lying," Molly said. She pushed a large red book against the table toward him. It was red, bound in leather, with a small insignia typed against the inside of the front cover. Willard read the stamped inscription inside the cover aloud,
"Made in China. This is just a notebook."
"They were originally inscribed on trees. I should know. I put them there. After a while it became dangerous for some of the symbols to be left behind. I had them torn up, the wood beneath them scorched. They're the last words I spoke, a little bit each time I started to slip away from this world and die. This notebook was blank when it was taken from town. I keep it here. And now you hold it."
"What's in it?" Willard asked flipping over to the first page.
"Two hundred pages of text and illustrations, all symbols I used the moment I was about to die. The most important things in me, Willard. Things that I found I would respond to without fail when I returned. Things that allowed me to truly know myself. These are my keys. Their sermons move me, their laws bind me. They are the thoughts that live. And you too. Whole sections of this book are about you. Swathes of who I was to you. Your protector. A girl alone in a world with her brother."
Willard opened to the first page. The Lake. A hand drawn lake had been carefully and intricately drawn in brown ink across the page, wrapping around a small island and the fountain at its center. A word was there too, splattered across the page with none of the care that had been given to the rest of the drawing. The letters were long, trailing down into the waters themselves. He spoke the word aloud,
"Icarin."
"That's me now," Molly said, a melancholic grin crossing her face, "I am the Icarin. I'm the guide, the crow faced man, the watcher of nightmares, the comfort in death. I am the Icarin. Grower of crops. Gatherer of the things greater than truth."