The parasite’s race had traced and tapped the complex interface between the cortical integration of sense input and the neural output governing response. It had interposed its brain between, sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will, while hellishly articulate and agile in the service of the parasite’s. It was the host’s own hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins that experienced the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of their bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready for the consummation, it was his own strength that hauled the smoking entrails from them, and his own intimate tongue and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank, palpitating feast.
And the doctor had glimpses of the racial history that underlay the aliens’ predatory present. Glimpses of a dispassionate, inquiring breed so advanced in the analysis of its own mental fabric that, through scientific commitment and genetic self-sculpting, it had come to embody its own model of perfected consciousness. It had grown streamlined to permit its entry of other beings and its direct acquisition of their experiential worlds. All strictest scholarship at first, until there matured in the disembodied scholars their long-germinal and now blazing, jealous hatred for all ‘lesser’ minds rooted and clothed in the soil and sunlight of solid, particular worlds. The parasite spoke of the ‘cerebral music,’ the ‘symphonies of agonized paradox’ that were its invasion’s chief plunder. The doctor felt the truth behind this grandiloquence: the parasite’s actual harvest from the systematic violation of encoffined personalities was the experience of a barren supremacy of means over lives more primitive, perhaps, but vastly wealthier in the vividness and passionate concern with which life for them was imbued.
The corpse had reached into its thorax and with its dead hands aided the parasite’s retraction of its upper-body root system. More and more of its livid mass had gone dead, until only its head and the arm nearer the doctor remained animate, while the silvery worming mass grew in its bleeding abdominal nest.
Then Joe Allen’s face grinned, and his hand hoisted up the nude, regathered parasite from his sundered gut and held it for the doctor to view – his tenant-to-be. Winters saw that from the squirming mass of nerve cord one thick filament still draped down, remaining anchored in the canyoned chest toward the upper spine. This, he understood, would be the remote-control line by which it could work at a distance the crane of its old host’s body, transferring itself to Winters by means of a giant apparatus it no longer inhabited. This, he knew, was his last moment. Before his own personal horror should begin, and engulf him, he squarely met the corpse’s eyes and said:
‘Goodbye, Joe Allen. Eddie Sykes, I mean. I hope he gave you strength, the Golden Marcus. I love him too. You are guiltless. Peace be with you at the last.’
The demon smile stayed fixed, but, effortlessly, Winters looked through it to the real eyes, those of the encoffined man. Tormented eyes forseeing death, and craving it. The grinning corpse reached out its viscid cargo – a seething, rippling, multi-nodular lump that completely filled the erstwhile logger’s roomy palm. It reached this across and laid it on the doctor’s groin. He watched the hand set the bright medusa’s head – his new self – on his own skin, but felt nothing.
He watched the dead hand return to the table, take up the scalpel, reach back over, and make a twelve-inch incision up his abdomen, along his spinal axis. It was a deep, slow cut – sectioning, just straight down through the abdominal wall – and it proceeded in the eerie, utter absence of physical sensation. The moment this was done, the fiber that had stayed anchored in the corpse snapped free, whipped back across the gap, and rejoined the main body that now squirmed toward the incision, its port of entry.
The corpse collapsed. Emptied of all innervating energy, it sagged slack and flaccid, of course. Or had it…? Why was it…? That nearer arm was supinated. Both elbow and wrist at the full upturned twist. The palm lay open, offering. The scalpel still lay in the palm.
Simple death would have dropped the arm earthward, it would now hang slack. With a blaze, like a nova of light, Winters understood. The man, Sykes, had – for a microsecond before his end – repossessed himself. Had flung a dying impulse of his will down through his rotten, fading muscles and had managed a single independent gesture in the narrow interval between the demon’s departure and his own death. He had clutched the scalpel and flung out his arm, locking the joints as life left him.
It rekindled Winters’s own will, lit a fire of rage and vengefulness. He had caught hope from his predecessor.
How precariously the scalpel lay on the loosened fingers! The slightest tremor would unfix the arm’s joints, it would fall and hang and drop the scalpel down farther than Hell’s deepest recess from his grasp. And he could see that the scalpel was just – only just – in the reach of his fingers at his forearm’s fullest stretch from the bound elbow. The horror crouched on him and, even now slowly feeding its trunk line into his groin incision, at first stopped the doctor’s hand with a pang of terror. Then he reminded himself that, until implanted, the enemy was a senseless mass, bristling with plugs, with input jacks for senses, but, until installed in the physical amplifiers of eyes and ears, an utterly deaf, blind monad that waited in a perfect solipsism between two captive sensory envelopes.
He saw his straining fingers above the bright tool of freedom, thought with an insane smile of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and then, with a life span of surgeon’s fine control, plucked up the scalpel. The arm fell and hung.
‘Sleep,’ the doctor said. ‘Sleep revenged.’
But he found his retaliation harshly reined in by the alien’s careful provisions. His elbow had been fixed with his upper arm almost at right angles to his body’s long axis; his forearm could reach his hand inward and present it closely to the face, suiting the parasite’s need of an eye-hand coordinative check, but could not, even with the scalpel’s added reach, bring its point within four inches of his groin. Steadily the parasite fed in its tapline. It would usurp motor control in three or four minutes at most, to judge by the time its extrication from Allen had taken.
Frantically the doctor bent his wrist inward to its limit, trying to pick through the strap where it crossed his inner elbow. Sufficient pressure was impossible, and the hold so awkward that even feeble attempts threatened the loss of the scalpel. Smoothly the root of alien control sank into him. It was a defenseless thing of jelly against which he lay lethally armed, and he was still doomed – a preview of all his thrall’s impotence-to-be.
But of course there was a way. Not to survive. But to escape, and to have vengeance. For a moment he stared at his captor, hardening his mettle in the blaze of hate it lit in him. Then, swiftly, he determined the order of his moves, and began.
He reached the scalpel to his neck and opened his superior thyroid vein – his inkwell. He laid the scalpel by his ear, dipped his finger in his blood, and began to write on the metal surface of the gurney, beginning by his thigh and moving toward his armpit. Oddly, the incision of his neck, though this was muscularly awake, had been painless, which gave him hopes that raised his courage for what remained to do.
When he had done the message read:
ALIEN
IN
ME
CUT
KILL
He wanted to write goodbye to his friend, but the alien had begun to pay out smaller auxiliary filaments collaterally with the main one, and all now lay in speed.
He took up the scalpel, rolled his head to the left, and plunged the blade deep in his ear.
Miracle! Last accidental mercy! It was painless. Some procedural, highly specific anesthetic was in effect. With careful plunges, he obliterated the right inner ear and then thrust silence, with equal thoroughness, into the left. The slashing of the vocal cords followed, then the tendons in the back of the neck that hold it erect. He wished he were free to unst
ring knees and elbows too, but it could not be. But blinded, deaf, with centers of balance lost, with only rough motor control – all these conditions should fetter the alien’s escape, should it in the first place manage the reanimation of a bloodless corpse in which it had not yet achieved a fine-tuned interweave. Before he extinguished his eyes, he paused, the scalpel poised above his face, and blinked them to clear his aim of tears. The right, then the left, both retinas meticulously carved away, the yolk of vision quite scooped out of them. The scalpel’s last task, once it had tilted the head sideways to guide the blood flow absolutely clear of possible effacement of the message, was to slash the external carotid artery.
When this was done, the old man sighed with relief and laid his scalpel down. Even as he did so, he felt the deep inward prickle of an alien energy – something that flared, crackled, flared, groped for, but did not quite find its purchase. And inwardly, as the doctor sank toward sleep – cerebrally, as a voiceless man must speak – he spoke to the parasite these carefully chosen words:
‘Welcome to your new house. I’m afraid there’s been some vandalism – the lights don’t work, and the plumbing has a very bad leak. There are some other things wrong as well – the neighborhood is perhaps a little too quiet, and you may find it hard to get around very easily. But it’s been a lovely home to me for fifty-seven years, and somehow I think you’ll stay…’
The face, turned toward the body of Joe Allen, seemed to weep scarlet tears, but its last movement before death was to smile.
The Belonging Kind
William Gibson and John Shirley
William Gibson (1948–) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the ‘noir prophet’ of the cyberpunk subgenre. John Shirley (1953–) is an American writer of novels, short stories, and film scripts, associated with both cyberpunk and splatterpunk. Gibson met Shirley at a science convention in the early 1980s and they became good friends. ‘The Belonging Kind’ (1981) originally appeared in Charles Grant’s classic Shadows anthology series and seems to synthesize the best of Gibson’s and Shirley’s solo work. It’s a wonderful weird form of speculative fiction, creepy and thought-provoking – and also the only collaborative story in The Weird.
It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo’s, or Sad Jack’s, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he’d first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke…She moved through her natural element, one bar after another.
Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.
He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It was called the Backdoor because you entered through a narrow back alley. The alley’s walls crawled with graffiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
He wasn’t very good at conversation with strangers, not at parties and not in bars. He was fine at the community college where he lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with the head of his department about sequencing and options in conversational openings. But he could never talk to strangers in bars or at parties. He didn’t go to many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
Coretti didn’t know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn’t look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn’t liked her saying that, because it was true.
He hadn’t ever had a girl like the one who sat with her back arched slightly in the undersea light that splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light was screwed into the lenses of the bartender’s glasses, wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the green of young corn, like a husk half stripped away, showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that night. And, that night, her eyes were green.
He pushed resolutely between the empty chrome and Formica tables until he reached the bar, where he ordered a straight bourbon. He took off his duffle coat, and wound up holding it on his lap when he sat down one stool away from her. Great, he screamed to himself, she’ll think you’re hiding an erection. And he was startled to realize that he had one to hide. He studied himself in the mirror behind the bar, a thirtyish man with thinning dark hair and a pale, narrow face on a long neck, too long for the open collar of the nylon shirt printed with engravings of 1910 automobiles in three vivid colors. He wore a tie with broad maroon and black diagonals, too narrow, he supposed, for what he now saw as the grotesquely long points of his collar. Or it was the wrong color. Something.
Beside him, in the dark clarity of the mirror, the green-eyed woman looked like Irma La Douce. But looking closer, studying her face, he shivered. A face like an animal’s. A beautiful face, but simple, cunning, two-dimensional. When she senses you’re looking at her, Coretti thought, she’ll give you the smile, disdainful amusement – or whatever you’d expect.
Coretti blurted, ‘May I, um, buy you a drink?’ At moments like these, Coretti was possessed by an agonizingly stiff, schoolmasterish linguistic tic. Um. He winced. Um.
‘You would, um, like to buy me a drink? Why, how kind of you,’ she said, astonishing him. ‘That would be very nice.’ Distantly, he noticed that her reply was as stilted and insecure as his own. She added, ‘A Tom Collins, on this occasion, would be lovely.’
On this occasion? Lovely? Rattled, Coretti ordered two drinks and paid.
A big woman in jeans and an embroidered cowboy shirt bellied up to the bar beside him and asked the bartender for change. ‘Well, hey,’ she said. Then she strutted to the jukebox and punched for Conway and Loretta’s ‘You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.’ Coretti turned to the woman in green, and murmured haltingly:
‘Do you enjoy country-and-western music?’ Do you enjoy…? He groaned secretly at his phrasing, and tried to smile.
‘Yes indeed,’ she answered, the faintest twang edging her voice, ‘I sure do.’
The cowgirl sat down beside him and asked her, winking, ‘This li’l terror here givin’ you a hard time?’
And the animal-eyed lady in green replied, ‘Oh, hell no, honey, I got my eye on ’im.’ And laughed. Just the right amount of laugh. The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass.
‘The name’s Coretti,’ he said, his verbal poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing tough-guy mode, ‘Michael Coretti.’
‘A pleasure,’ she said, too softly for the other woman to hear, and again she had slipped into the lame parody of Emily Post.
‘Conway and Loretta,’ said the cowgirl, to no one in particular.
‘Antoinette,’ said the woman in green, and inclined her head. She finished her drink, pretended to glance at a watch, said thank-you-for-the-drink too damn politely, and left.
Ten minutes later Coretti was following her down Third Avenue. He had never followed anyone in his life and it both frightened and excited him.
Forty feet seemed a discreet distance, but what should he do if she happened to glance over her shoulder?
Third Avenue isn’t a dark street, and it was there, in the light of a streetlamp, like a stage light, that she began to change. The street was dese
rted.
She was crossing the street. She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair – at first he thought they were reflections. But there was no neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared, color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors bled away and in three seconds she was white-blond. He was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began to writhe, twisting across her body like shrink-wrap plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabulous animal. When Coretti passed, it was green foam, fizzing, dissolving, gone. He looked back up at her and the dress was another dress, green satin, shifting with reflections. Her shoes had changed too. Her shoulders were bare except for thin straps that crossed at the small of her back. Her hair had become short, spiky.
He found that he was leaning against a jeweler’s plate-glass window, his breath coming ragged and harsh with the damp of the autumn evening. He heard the disco’s heartbeat from two blocks away. As she neared it, her movements began subtly to take on a new rhythm – a shift in emphasis in the sway of her hips, in the way she put her heels down on the sidewalk. The doorman let her pass with a vague nod. He stopped Coretti and stared at his driver’s license and frowned at his duffle coat. Coretti anxiously scanned the wash of lights at the top of a milky plastic stairway beyond the doorman. She had vanished there, into robotic flashing and redundant thunder.
Grudgingly the man let him pass, and he pounded up the stairs, his haste disturbing the lights beneath the translucent plastic steps.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 124