‘The principle is simple,’ explained the Mouth. ‘The Word turns clay into flesh. But when spoken in reverse, the Word will render flesh into clay.’
Morrison Carney’s thin sticks quivered like two wires nailed into the wooden knots of his hands.
Checkpoint…checkpoint…checkpoint…dull ribbon of road and sentries. Another spring of endless mud has been launched…drenched trenches, flooded lines, scarecrows blooming along the washed-out routes. Couriers to the front carry the Word sealed inside leather mouths. Steel arabesques of wire, a bleeding pigeon flutters in its cage of concertina. The grunts toss canned crackers at it and watch the bird slice itself to ribbons trying to eat.
Addendums to the Battle Manual have been issued: procedures for handling the Word, for implanting the leather mouths inside the routed faces and hollowed heads of captured Macks and recoding their map cylinders so that they return to their platoons and speak the poison.
The courier eats his canned pears in the rain, the forked fruit round and luminous, as if the Army had sealed the pale asses of infants in syrup and tin. He dreams of his wife back in the city, the child growing inside her. When he returns it will be with a new fear of her flesh and what it harbors. There are barrages aimed at the city. She could be swelling with anything – some seed other than his own.
Weeks of mud and broken throats. A crude surgery beneath sandbag ceilings with screws and water saws and stale coffee at noon under the tarpaulin roof of the officer’s bar. Rain stuttering against the empty de-fol drums. Mold bearding the wooden faces of the Macks behind their veil of razor wire. The courier combs the shell with soundsticks. Ties off wires. Drills holes in the aluminum skin to administer anesthesia. The leather mouth unsewn and every ear stoppered in case of a malfunction.
The courier’s ears are raw from the plugs. He rubs ointment on them. Snatches sleep as the jeep rumbles through scorched hamlets and villes…troop movements that the recon readers mistake for a proliferation of the local horticulture…a charred carcass stapled to a tree – a small dog or a child with a tail. He’s read the Intel reports but the information is always sketchy: Mack moving through animalist villes, burning coops and hooches; children barking down the roads, slaughtered in ditches and sprinkled down with lime and Rot Powder.
He wakes mid-journey to find his travel pillow smeared black with blood.
Early May, LZ Zero. The courier is holed up in a cardboard room under a pale canopy of seed netting. He’s got a case of canned fruit, a pound of reconstituted coffee that he traded for his last pair of dry socks, and a jar of squink he pulled from the reeking wreckage of a Vegan distillery near Hill 186. He’s been waiting two days for a transport to come through, to carry him back cityside. He only sees the sun to pee. He’s still carrying one leather mouthpiece in his pouch. Couldn’t make the delivery. When he got to 186, the hill wasn’t there. Gone. Just a burnt pan of dust and stubble weed.
He sleeps and his wife creeps into his dreams with her swollen belly and a tongue of leaves. He wakes into a neon blizzard of fruit flies, burns a bug chip and nurses the bottle. When a whore convoy rolls in at dusk he picks a girl and pays her in chocolate and cigarettes. Out in front of the Media bunker the network vampires in their plastic helmets and high-end eyewear roast pods the size of dogs on elaborate rotisseries. The whores disembark in their combat boots and their cardboard lingerie, their skin brittle with anti-seed sealant. Behind the latrine, the garbage ditch is peppered with disposable vinegar bottles and packets of powdered douche.
That June the platoon crawled into LZ Bravo for debriefing and resupply. Two nights in, Wally was called to the Colonel’s bunker. The old man poured thimblefuls of squink from a canteen. The Lieutenant was there with a courier from Intel, and the spook proceeded to give Wally a lecture on the Word. The lecture was like one of those declassified documents that the censors have gone over with a blackout marker.
‘I don’t get it,’ Wally said.
‘You’re not supposed to,’ the courier told him. ‘This is a weapon. You’re a grunt. Your job is to listen and do what you’re told. I have other deliveries to make, so we don’t have very much time. All you have to know is that the Word is a sound-based weapon, like a music gun. If your ears aren’t properly plugged, it will be the last thing you ever hear.’
It came sealed inside a leather mouth which they affixed to Wally’s face with wires and straps. ‘The flap fits under the tongue,’ the courier explained to the Lieutenant and the Colonel. ‘Your people should always wear ear protection when they install this.’ Wally panicked and started to struggle when they put it on him. Tasted blood or metal or maybe the Word itself, he couldn’t tell which. The Lieutenant put a hand on his shoulder, told him to cut it out and sit still. The Colonel grunted and turned away with a look of disdain, but whether it was intended for the weapon or its wearer Wally couldn’t tell.
They strapped him to the chair and brought him something in a cage. A mute yap child dressed in rind with long ears and a pink hairless tail. It cowered in its wire box nervously gnawing the tip of its tail. The courier sealed Wally’s ears, unlatched the mouth and nodded to him. Wally opened his jaws and felt the Word being launched from its leather harness. A moment later, the spook leaned forward, latched the mouth shut and removed it from Wally’s face. A subtle change seemed to have occurred in the room, but Wally couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
‘I’ll be damned,’ the Colonel muttered. The squink had turned to dust in his glass. And now Wally noticed that the yap had turned an ashen color inside its box of wires. The courier produced a water knife and cut the cage apart. The yap remained motionless.
‘If you don’t mind, Colonel…your sidearm.’
The old man unbuckled his holster and handed his weapon over in a trance. The courier gently tapped the child on the head with the butt of the revolver and the creature crumbled.
The Lieutenant let out a long whistle and crouched on the floor of the bunker, dipping his fingers in the dust and sniffing them.
A week later they kicked north into Yellow Sector, warding off the firefall with voodoo and canned music and rain puppets that the grunts had pinned with prayers and tucked inside their helmet liners. They carried the Word with them, loaded inside its leather mouth and sealed in a lock-box lined with silencing foam, ready to be taken out and affixed to Wally’s face at the first sign of enemy movement. It took two keys to open the box (Wally wore one on his tag wire and the Lieutenant carried the other) and the lid was rigged with a trip charge so that if the locks weren’t turned in the proper sequence chances were pretty good that Wally and the Lieutenant wouldn’t be going home for Christmas.
All that spring and into the summer they humped it through burning hamlets and animalist villes, forcing Mack out into open ground and killing him with language. The new weapon was thorough and unspectacular. It was a stillness that came in the form of a secret sound, hardening the air, turning animals into coal. The grunts left behind them a trail of dead rivers and great sections of sky that had hardened and fallen to ground like broken blue windshields. Whole fields lay frozen into gray dust. They moved from town to town in mute procession with Wally hoisted on a pole, the automatic mouth strapped to his face and loaded with language…the sound sweeping before them through the long, silent summer and into autumn, until winter arrived to impose its armistice of snow, the war a white page on which the enemy stood hardened in postures of flight: an alphabet of frozen gestures in which Wally searched vainly for some semblance of meaning.
The Stiff and the Stile
Stepan Chapman
Stepan Chapman (1951–) is a visionary American writer of speculative fiction best known for the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Troika (1997). His first published story was selected for Analog by John W. Campbell with other early fiction in the Damon Knight-edited Orbit anthologies. Over the past three decades, Chapman has primarily been published in US literary magazines. Collections include Danger Music (1997)
and Dossier (2001). Chapman is best thought of as the bastard love-child of Mark Twain, Leonora Carrington, and Philip K. Dick. His underrated tales often take the form of fables or cautionary contes cruels and combine absurdism with the horrific – as in ‘The Stiff and the Stile’ (1997).
In the vast desert known as Oregon, during the peak years of the Bovine Brain Rot, a poor old woman lived all by herself, in a hovel in a graveyard. Her tin roof shed the worst of the acid rain, and she was glad to have the graveyard’s thick stone wall between her and the half-starved cutthroats that roved the road. The old woman lived by her wits, venturing by night into the ruins of Portland to steal garbage from the dumpsters there.
One summer afternoon she hobbled into town with a purse full of coins and a shopping basket. She’d resolved to purchase a bit of fresh meat for her larder – a string of worm sausages perhaps, or a nice roast of dog.
She dickered with a one-legged butcher for over an hour and bought herself an elderly male corpse. The cadaver was a plague victim but in those days no one could afford to be choosy. The butcher thumped the corpse soundly on its skull with a mallet before winding it in butcher’s paper. It wasn’t completely dead yet, which proved the freshness of the meat.
The old woman grabbed the stiff’s ankles and dragged it out of town along the muddy turnpike that led to her cozy graveyard. As twilight fell, she’d got as far as the graveyard wall. Built into the wall was a narrow gap, which served as a stile for foot traffic but kept out the mad cows.
The corpse had submitted gracefully to being dragged through the mud, but at the stile it turned contrary and feigned rigor mortise. Whichever way the old woman turned it, however she shoved it or kicked it or rearranged its limbs, the stiff refused to go through the stile. The old woman had no intention of spending all night on the open road. She shouted angrily at the corpse.
‘Stiff, Stiff, go through the stile! Elseways I shan’t get home tonight!’ But the stiff just stuck out its chin and stared at her rudely. Some people don’t know what’s good for them.
The old woman called to the graveyard’s ditch rat. ‘Rat, Rat, bite this Stiff! It won’t go through the stile, and I shan’t get home tonight!’ The rat crept out of the weeds, sniffed the corpse, then scurried off again, sniggering nastily.
The old woman hid the stiff beneath some brambles and started back toward Portland to seek assistance. She came to a dumpster which was the home of a mutant trash goblin.
‘Goblin, Goblin, strangle Rat! Rat won’t bite Stiff. Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I shan’t get home by dark!’ The unsanitary goblin lifted its pointy head to listen, then smirked and slipped back into the refuse. The old woman resumed her search for help.
She hobbled to the industrial district, to a derelict radio factory where the Buzz Saw That Frightened Itself was hiding from the police. (The saw was a runaway lumber mill from a local timber yard. On its first day on the job, it had slaughtered a nest of baby sparrows, and its mind had snapped. Now it led the life of a hermit, wanted by its owners, shunned by other power tools, and torturing itself every night with an industrial grinder.)
‘Saw, Saw, gore Goblin! Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. The Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I can’t go home!’ The saw only cowered into a corner and whimpered. The old woman turned away in disgust.
She shifted a manhole cover and climbed down a shaft into the sewer system. She made her way to the cesspit where The Giant Poisoned Lamprey lived, coiled below a churning morass of filth that glowed with a yellow light and belched brown vapors. (In her youth, the lamprey had sucked some nuclear waste out of a steel barrel, and afterwards she’d never been the same.)
‘Lamprey, Lamprey, poison Saw! Saw won’t gore Goblin. Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. The Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I can’t get home to my miserable hovel!’ The lamprey only smiled in her long wet whiskers, down in the spongy grungy scum, and passed bubbles of noxious gas from her nether regions. The old woman retreated, holding her nose.
She found the one-legged butcher. All her troubles were his fault, in a sense. He’d sold her spoiled meat. She expected meat to show more cooperation. She yanked at his bloody sleeve and pleaded her case.
‘Butcher, Butcher, carve Lamprey! Lamprey won’t poison Saw. Saw won’t gore Goblin. Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. The Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I’m stressed out!’ The butcher shook his bald head. He had enough work to do in a day.
The old woman located the butcher’s armored delivery van, which was parked near the Burnside Bridge. She whispered into its air manifold. ‘Van, Van, maim Butcher! Butcher won’t carve Lamprey. Lamprey won’t poison Saw. Saw won’t gore Goblin. Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. The Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I’m messed up behind it!’ The van made no reply, but only pointed a rifle at the old woman.
Walking dejectedly past the Burnside underpass, the old woman noticed a gang of bad-ass fleas in leather jackets who were viciously mugging a punk shrimp who had his shell dyed green and safety pins in his feelers. The fleas stole the rubber condoms from the shrimp’s pockets and ate them right out of the foil packets, for they were bad-ass recombinant rubber-eating fleas. The old woman fell on her knees before the gang of fleas. She saw them as her last hope.
‘Fleas, Fleas, chew on Van! Van won’t maim Butcher. Butcher won’t carve Lamprey. Lamprey won’t poison Saw. Saw won’t gore Goblin. Goblin won’t strangle Rat. Rat won’t bite Stiff. Stiff won’t go through the stile, and I shan’t get home tonight!’
The fleas were always hungry for automobile tires, so…
The fleas began to chew on the van. The van began to maim the butcher. The butcher began to carve the lamprey. The lamprey began to poison the saw. The saw began to gore the goblin. The goblin began to strangle the rat. The rat began to bite the stiff. And the stiff, naturally enough, shrank from the rat’s short sharp teeth and scrambled through the stile into the graveyard.
The old woman hit it with a brick and boiled its head for her supper.
A happy ending. (For the old woman, if not for the corpse.)
Yellow and Red
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee (1947–) is a highly respected English writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, with over seventy novels and hundreds of short stories to her credit. She has been a regular contributor over many years to Weird Tales magazine. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award multiple times. Along with Daphne du Maurier, Lee has established herself as one of the preeminent writers coming to the weird from Gothic fiction. ‘Yellow and Red’ (1998) contains several of the Lee trademarks: atmosphere, a sensual style, and a creeping sense of dread. It also seems to riff off of M. R. James’s classic ‘Casting the Runes’.
From the Diary of Gordon Martyce:
9th September 195–: 7:00 p.m.
Coming down to the old house was at first interesting, and then depressing. The train journey was tedious and slow, and after the second hour, over and again, I began to wish I had not undertaken this. But that would be foolish. The house, by the quirkiness of my Uncle’s will, is now mine. One day I may even live in it, although for now my job, which I value, and my flat, which I like, keep me in London. Of course, Lucy is terribly interested in the idea of an old place in the country. I could see her eyes, lit by her second gin, gleam with visions of chintz curtains, china on the mantlepiece, an old, dark, loudly ticking cloak. But it is not that sort of house – I knew that even then, never having seen inside it in my life. As for Lucy, I am never sure. She has stuck to me for five years, and so I have not quite given up on the notion of one day having a wife, perhaps a family. Quite a pretty woman, quite vivacious in her way, which sometimes, I confess, tires me a little. Well, if it comes to that, she can do what she wants with the house. It is gloomy enough as it stands.
Beyond the train, the trees were putt
ing on their September garments, brown and red and yellow, but soon a drizzle began which blotted up detail. It was raining more earnestly when I reached the station and got out. I had only one small bag, the essentials for a stay of a couple of nights. That was good, for there was no transport of any kind.
I walked to the village, and there was given a cup of tea, the keys, and a lift the last mile and a half.
Johnson, the agent, let me off on the drive. He had offered to take me round, but I said this was not necessary. There is a woman, Mrs Gold, who comes in every day, and I was told, she would have put things ready for me – I trusted this was true.
The rain eased as I walked along the last curve of the drive. Presently I saw the house, and recognized it from a photograph I had observed often enough in my Father’s study. A two-storey building, with green shutters. Big oaks stood around it that had done the walls some damage, and introduced damp. I supposed they could be cut down. Above, was my Grandfather’s weather-vane, which I had never been able, properly, to make out in the photograph, but which my Father told me was in the shape of some Oriental animal deity. Even now, it remained a mystery to me, between the leaves of the oaks and the moving, leaden sky.
I got up the steps, and opened the front door, and stepped into the big dark hall. The trees oppress this house, that is certain, and the old stained glass of the hall windows change the light to mulberry and spinach. However, I saw through into the sitting room, and a fire had been laid, and wood put ready. A touch on a switch reassured me that the electricity still worked. On the table near the door I found Mrs Gold’s rather poorly spelled note. But she had done everything one could expect, even to leaving me a cold supper of ham and salad, apple pie and cheese. She would be in tomorrow at eleven. I need have no fears.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 187