Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology)

by Tim Pratt

  Go ahead, pet my snout, but watch the tusks. No one wants the impossible. What human part of us remained didn’t want it either. It was a rough transition, coming to terms with the animal, but we helped each other. After we had time to settle into our hides, so to speak, there were some good times in the jungle. Moreau could only jab so many needles in your ass in a week, so the rest of the time we roamed the island. There was a lot of fucking too. I’ll never forget the sight of Caribou Woman and Skunk Man going at it on the beach, beneath the bright island sun. The only way I can describe it is by using a quote I remember from my school days, from Coleridge about metaphor, “the reconciliation of opposites.” I know, it means nothing to you.

  We all talked a lot and for some reason continued to understand each other. Everybody was pretty reasonable about getting along, and some of the smarter ones like Fish Guy helped to develop a general philosophy for the community of survivors. The Seven Precepts are simple and make perfect sense. I’ll list them, but before I do I want to point something out. Keep in mind what it states in the list below and then compare that to the dark, twisted version that appears in Laughton’s film version of the Wells’ novel, Island of Lost Souls. Monkey Man Number One and a couple of the others took the boat to Frisco, and by dark of night robbed a Macy’s. One of the things they brought back was a projector and an 8-millimeter version of the flick. I believe it’s Bela Lugosi who plays Speaker of the Law. I’ll refrain from saying “hambone” for the sake of Pig Lady’s feelings. That performance is an insult to the truth, but, on the otherhand, Laughton, himself was so much Moreau it startled us to see the film. Here are the real Seven Precepts, the list of how we live:

  1. Trust don’t Trust

  2. Sleep don’t Sleep

  3. Breathe don’t Breathe

  4. Laugh don’t Laugh

  5. Weep don’t Weep

  6. Eat don’t Eat

  7. Fuck Whenever You Want

  You see what I mean? Animal clarity, clean and sharp, like an owl’s gaze. Anyway, here we are, after Moreau. We’ve got the island to ourselves. There’s plenty to eat—all the animals that resided naturally and the exotic beasts Moreau brought in for the transmission of somatic essence—the raw ingredients to make us them. A good number of the latter escaped the fire, took to the jungle and reproduced. There are herds of suburban house cats that have wiped out the natural ostrich population and herds of water oxen that aren’t indigenous.

  Actually, there’s also a tiger that roams the lower slopes of the island’s one mountain. Ocelot Boy thought he could communicate with the tiger. He tracked the cat to its lair in a cave in the side of the mountain, and sat outside the entrance exchanging growls and snarls with the beast until the sun went down. Then the tiger killed and ate him. The tiger roared that night and the sound of its voice echoed down the mountain slope. Panther Woman, who lay with me in my wallow, trembled and whispered that the tiger was laughing.

  She also told me about how back in the days of the Doctor, when her tail and whiskers were still developing, she’d be brought naked to his kitchen and made to kneel and lap from a bowl of milk while Moreau, sitting in a chair with his pants around his ankles, boots still on, petted his knobby member. I asked Panther Woman why she thought he did it. She said, “He was so smart, he was stupid. I mean, what was he going for? People turning into animals part way? What kind of life goal is that? A big jerk-off.” We laughed, lying there in the moonlight.

  Where was I? I had to learn to love the water, but otherwise things weren’t bad. I had friends to talk to, and we survived because we stuck together, we shared, we sacrificed for the common good. Do I have to explain? Of course I do, but I’m not going to. I can’t remember where this was all headed. I had a point to make, here. What I can tell you right now is that Rooster Man went down today. He came to see me in the big river. I was bobbing in the flow with my real hippo friends when I noticed Rooster calling me from the bank. He was flapping a wing and his comb was moving in the breeze. Right behind him, he obviously had no idea, was a gigantic alligator. I could have called a warning to him, but I knew it was too late. Instead I just waved goodbye. He squawked bloody murder, and I finally dove under when I heard the crunch of his beak.

  Tomorrow I’ve got tea with the Boar family. I ran into old man Boar and he invited me and Panther Woman over to their cave. The Boars are a strange group. They all still wear human clothes – the ones that can do anyway. Old man Boar wears Moreau’s white suit and his Panama hat. It doesn’t seem to faze him in the least that there’s a big shit stain in the back of the pants. I’ve shared the Doctor’s old cigars with Boar. He blows smoke like the boat’s funnel and talks a crazy politics not of this world. I just nod and say yes to him, because he puts honey in his tea. Panther and I crave honey.

  The other day, when he offered the invitation, Boar told me under his breath that Giraffe Man was engaged in continuing experiments with Moreau’s formulas and techniques. He said the situation was dire, like a coconut with legs. I had no idea what he meant. I asked around, and a couple of the beast people told me it was true. Giraffe couldn’t leave well enough alone. He was injecting himself. Then a couple days after I confirmed old Boar’s claim, I heard they found Giraffe Man, on the floor of what remained of the old lab—a bubbling brown mass of putrescence.

  We gathered at the site and Fish Guy shoveled up Giraffe’s remains and buried them in the garden out back. Monkey Man Number Two played a requiem on the unburned half of the piano and Squirrel Girl, gray with age, read a poem that was a story of a tree that would grow in the spot Giraffe was buried and bear fruit that would allow us all to achieve complete animality. Everybody knew it would never happen but we all wished it would.

  When I loll in the big river, I think about the cosmos as if it’s a big river of stars. I eat fish and leaves and roots. Weasel Woman says it’s a healthy diet, and I guess it is. How would she know, though, really? As long as I stay with the herd of real hippos, I’m safe from the alligators. There have been close calls, believe me. When standing on land in the hot sun, sometimes I bleed from all my pores to cool my hide. Panther Woman has admitted this aspect of my nature disgusts her. To me she is beautiful in every way. The fur . . . you can’t imagine. She’s a hot furry number, and she’s gotten over her fear of water. I’m telling you, we do it in the river, with the stars watching, and it’s a smooth animal.

  If you find this message in this bottle, don’t come looking for us. It would be pointless. I can’t even remember what possessed me to write in the first place. You should see how pathetic it is to write with a hippo paw. My reason for writing is probably the same unknown thing that made Moreau want to turn people into beasts. Straight up human madness. No animal would do either.

  Monkey Man Numbers One and Two are trying to talk some of the others into going back to civilization to stay. They approached me and I asked them, “Why would I want to live the rest of my life as a sideshow freak?”

  Number Two said, “You know, eventually Panther Woman is going to turn on you. She’ll eat your heart for breakfast.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. Till then, it’s roots and leaves, fucking in the wallow, and bobbing in the flow, dreaming of the cosmos. Infrequently, there’s an uncertain memory of my family I left behind in the old life but the river’s current mercifully whisks that vague impression of pale faces to the sea.

  That should have been the end of the message, but I forgot to tell you something. This is important. We ate Moreau. That’s right. He screamed like the bird of paradise when we took him down. I don’t eat meat, but even I had a small toe. Sweet flesh for a bitter man. Mouse Person insisted on eating the brain, and no one cared to fight him for it. The only thing is, he got haunted inside from it. When we listened in his big ears, we heard voices. He kept telling us he was the Devil. At first we laughed, but he kept it up too long. A couple of us got together one night and pushed him off the sea cliff. The next day and for months after
, we searched the shore for his body, but never found it. Monkey Man Number One sniffs the air and swears the half-rodent is still alive on the island. We’ve found droppings.

  Jeffrey Ford’s most recent novels are The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short stories have been collected into three books, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. Ford’s stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and his work has been awarded The World Fantasy Award, The Nebula, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, The Fountain Award, and Le Grand Prix de l’imaginaire. He lives in South Jersey with his wife and two sons and works as a professor of Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College.

  DEBRIS ENSUING FROM A VORTEX

  Brian Ames

  SD is back, guiding Blake to another memory. There is a grin on SD’s lips. Blake’s medicine smiles as wide as a black-green sky spinning over a storm. But this is a good good good thing, this bird’s mouth that feeds its young his recollections back one by one. The worms of foundation laid upon Blake’s tongue.

  Imagine that you are he. You live in a world you have forgotten. Every day people and places assume familiarity with you, but you aren’t having it. A female person called “Ginger,” for example, expresses some tenderness toward you. You fail to remember. You are taken through a place whose walls and angles are wholly foreign. People who populate it seem to know where they are, but you don’t.

  What Blake once knew flew away on a violent night wind.

  Put yourself into the date that happened. Search for a clue. Find out why Blake’s forgotten more than you’ve ever learned. Discover who this SD character is. Linger in a whorl of his fingerprint, suckle at the dugs of his DNA, worry through the pattern of his loss. Then you’ll know. Then you can help him, too, as SD does, or tries to do.

  The night Blake’s roof came off began as most did, with his return from work. The night his walls were sucked skyward featured a light supper of spinach salad, grilled tilapia wrapped in a tortilla with hot sauce, yellow peppers and onions, a cold beer. The night his furniture, wall hangings, stove, carpet, washer and dryer, hot water heater, books, autographed baseball collection, weight set, lamps, blender, alarm clock, refrigerator, rake and broom, toothbrush, candy dish, Johnny Cash record albums, commemorative program for the 1987 World Series, nose-hair trimmer, fireplace flew five ways off into space had him situated in a nest of undisturbed progression of positive trajectory, on an unmolested life path suddenly fucked by chance.

  All of those things suctioned into vortex. All that mattered nabbed by an F4 funnel thief. A spinning highwayman of random act stole his possessions. And in his possessions, the fundamentals of his memory.

  The news channels had made their seductive promise of dangerous weather. The sky had darkened and thrown its cloud-to-ground lightning. Thunder pealed urgently, proximately. A supercell, crushing air into heat, warped heaven. Windchimes on Blake’s porch toned merrily, anomalously. Rain gathered then dropped.

  As everyone living in flyover country knows as well as the palms of their own hands, a supercell thunderstorm takes the name mesocyclone when the National Weather Service, using Doppler radar, detects cyclonically rotating air. A tornadic vortex signature appears on the radar image as an area within the storm with changing wind directions of high periodicity. A tornado warning goes out to those in the path. Sirens go like mad. The lost-sheep television bleats.

  F4: 207-260 mph on the Fujita Scale. Devastating damage: Houses and other small structures can be razed entirely; automobiles are propelled through the air. Memories are sucked into the supervortex. Blown bookpages explode into flames.

  Blake’s failure to appreciate his evolving emergency results from his fascination with bright lights, shiny things. Lightning is smack to him. Watching it strike is akin to filling a vein. Mainline this energy. Let these synapses crackle with delicious dopamine fulminations. Hope for a bolt out of the blue.

  But too late—Blake’s ears pop like pistol shots as pressure plummets. Through the torn membranes of his eardrums: the runaway locomotive roar, shingles tearing away, rafters splintering, wallboard cracking, electrical wiring hissing free from its stays, copper pipe shrieking apart, glass bursting into spray, the vast universe-filling rise of everything and all.

  The loss, and then the quiet as the sky opens into calm, brilliant blue.

  Blake peers over the lip of the bathtub. His mind is a rubblescape like that which unfolds before him. He can scarcely blink as his stares out from his sanctuary. He remembers that this is a tub, that water will drain from a tub in a certain coriolis direction depending on whether the observer is in the Northern or Southern hemisphere. But as memories go, that’s about it. Sooner or later, emergency workers show up looking for the dead and living. There is question—even today—as to which camp Blake is in.

  But SD will help Blake find his memories, yes? Though Blake’s possessions are strewn across three counties, SD will guide him to them—and the recollections dwelling in each found object—over the course of several months. A broken picture frame discovered in a field near St. Paul puts Blake in mind of a man who was his father. A fragment of crystal at a crossroads near Blackjack makes him remember a college date that went unexpectedly well. There is the spare Michelin tire half submerged in Peruque Creek—Blake remembers being promoted at his firm.

  “Have I shown you this?” SD asks, and Blake sees the weather-soaked, bloated pages of a collection of short stories by Jeffery Deaver. Blake smiles. He had a daughter—or was it a niece?—once.

  But SD must exact a price, too. His services don’t come free. Blake’s memory finder, the redeemer of his mind, must also bring back those bitternesses, those aches, those turn-aways we’d rather all forget.

  For Blake was a dog-kicker. A yellow-piss-soaked sycophant in the hierarchy of his corporation. A liar, cheat, thief. An apostate. A black-hearted cynic. A denier of culpability. A finger-pointer. A mocker of principles and a hater of fellows.

  All of these things, too, must and will come back. SD will reveal them as Blake’s lost things are found.

  We can all judge whether he would have been better off dead, blown upward into the vortex. But only SD can help him navigate.

  Self diagnoser. Sad doppelganger. Sin doll. Systolic diastolicist. Simulacrum demon. Sharp-tongued dagger. Sainted dalliance. Stained dumpling. Shattering destroyer. So-called doorway. Sabertoothed dancer. Skull donkey. Sabotage dilettante. Spiritual desperado. Sagging dopefiend. Sex-crazed deathmonger. Suck dream. Surely damned.

  Shit Disturber.

  Brian Ames writes from St. Charles County, Missouri. He is the author of the novel Salt Lick (Pocol Press, 2007) and four short-fiction collections: Smoke Follows Beauty (Pocol Press, 2002), Head Full of Traffic (Pocol Press, 2004), Eighty-Sixed (Word Riot Press, 2004), and As Many Hands as God (Pocol Press, 2008).

  WHEN THE GENTLEMEN GO BY

  Margaret Ronald

  It wasn’t a sound that woke her this time, nor the soft slow lights that came dancing through the curtains. She thought in that first wakening haze that it might be a scent, like the “bad air” her mother had talked about, creeping in to announce their presence. Then full wakefulness and knowledge struck her, and her only thought was Not yet.

  Laura rolled out of bed, making sure not to disturb Jenny, who’d crawled in about an hour after bedtime. Toby, in the crib, slept like a swaddled stone. The nightlight cast a weak gold glow over them, but the first hints of blue had begun to creep in, cool and unfriendly. She glanced back once at the sound of Jenny’s whimper, then turned her back on her sleeping children.

  At least their father wasn’t here.

  It was an old bargain, old as the Hollow at least. With bargains you had to uphold your side; she’d learned that early, probably before she even knew about the Gentlemen.

  Her bedroom in her parents’ house had faced the street, and when she was five the changing shapes of headl
ights across the far wall had fascinated her. One night she woke to see a block of light against the far wall, flickering in all the colors of frost. When the light stayed put, as if the car that cast it had parked outside, she sat up in bed, then turned to the window.

  The light was just outside, on the strip of green that her father liked to call the lawn. She crawled out of bed, dropping the last couple of inches to the floor, and reached for the curtain.

  “Don’t look.”

  Laura turned to see her mother standing in the doorway. “Mumma?”

  Her mother crossed the room in two strides and took Laura into her arms, cradling her head against her shoulder. “Don’t look, baby, don’t look.”

  Obediently, Laura laid her head against her mother’s shoulder and listened as something huge or a hundred smaller somethings passed by with a thunderous shussh. Her mother’s eyes were closed tight, and she rocked Laura as if she were an infant again, even though Laura had two little brothers and hadn’t been rocked since the first one was born. The sleeve of her mother’s bathrobe was damp with a thousand tiny droplets.

  In the morning, she tried to talk about it. “I had a dream last night—” she said at the breakfast table.

  “I expect we all had dreams,” her mother said, pouring milk over her Cheerios. “What with all that pizza last night. Bet you had them worst of all, right, Kyle?”