Last Drink Bird Head

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Nigel finished shuffling the deck of cards and said, “Right, then. This is how it works. The red queens are birds… .” But Kate was whispering something into Martin’s ear, and Martin’s gaze was fixed on the television screen where Croatia was leading England one-nil. Oliver wasn’t paying attention either, but was staring at the girl who had brought their beers.

  “You aren’t even listening,” Nigel said.

  “Go ahead,” Martin said, not taking his gaze from the screen. “Red queens.” Kate watched Oliver still watching the girl. “Forget it,” Kate told him. “She doesn’t fancy you.”

  “She smiled at me,” Oliver said.

  “She smiles at everyone. It’s her job.”

  “No, serving drinks is her job. Smiling at me is her choice.”

  Nigel rapped the deck on the table. “Will you let me show you this thing?”

  “Kate,” said Oliver. “Nigel wants to show you his thing.”

  Kate said, “Not funny, Oliver. You really do need to get a girlfriend.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Martin said to the television. Then, “Ah. Missed a good chance there.”

  “As long as they don’t get impatient,” said a spectator from the next table. “Still plenty of time.”

  “So,” Nigel said. “The red queens are birds, and every time one turns over, and if there is already a king on the table, the first person to… .”

  “Oh, Christ!” shouted Martin. A collective groan went up throughout the pub.

  “What?” said Oliver.

  “Own goal,” said Martin. “Gary Neville makes a back-pass to Robinson, and Robinson misses it!” Nigel looked up, too, to see the replay of the ball rolling gently past the English goalie and into the net.

  “Hopeless,” Martin said.

  “And since it is hopeless,” Nigel announced, “you can all pay attention to me now.” He really wanted to show off Last Drink Bird Head, a drinking game, pub bet, and card trick all rolled into one.

  It had come to him last night in a dream, and it was the thing people would remember him for. I know the bloke who invented that.

  “The red queens…” he started to say. Then he noticed that Oliver was draining his glass. “Oliver, you’ve got to have something to drink.” He felt as if he were in one of those dreams where he wanted to run but could barely move. He couldn’t get past explaining the first rule.

  “It’s okay,” said Martin. “We’re listening.”

  “That’s right,” Oliver said. “Explain it first, then I’ll have another.”

  “I have to have a wee,” said Kate. She stood up.

  “In that case,” said Oliver. He waved to the girl, and when he couldn’t attract her attention, he got up and went to the bar.

  “There are still twenty minutes,” said Martin to the television.

  The man nearby shook his head. “It’d be a miracle.”

  Nigel took a deep breath and let it out. He shuffled the cards. Isaac Newton. Charles Darwin. Albert Einstein. They all must have had nights like this.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Nicholas Royle is the author of more than 100 short stories. His research trip to Execution Dock inspired two stories: the lost entry in Samuel Pepys's Diary that constitutes his contribution to the present volume, and “Train, Night”, which appeared in 3:AM London, New York, Paris (Social Disease) as a “response” to a story by M John Harrison.

  21st April

  Up while the chimes went seven, and to the office, where I did business all the morning. By appointment came Sir W Pen. Dinner at the Swan with much discourse of a successful issue, but after I did wander below Tower Hill and came in one of the alleys there upon a Corps. I could scarcely attribute it to the Plague, yet its appearance most unwelcome as reminder. Thence by scull to the Famous Angell by way of Redriffe, where to the joy of my soul I sat with Mrs. Bagwell awhile. On the balcony over the river in late afternoon sunlight, our pleasure each in the other’s company was marred by the vexing presence, at the other end of the balcony, of George Jeffreys. The Hanging Judge, as I have heard him called, was inebriated and did call out intemperate remarks at pirates being hanged across the river at Execution Dock. Mightily satisfied, he shouted that they were doing the Marshal’s dance. Mrs. Bagwell leaning closer to me did beg me to explain. I told her of prisoners being marched to the dock from Marshalsea and strung up, the rope too short to break a neck in the fall. They dance, I did inform her, as they die. They call it the Marshal’s dance. “Look at him,” shouted the Judge, pointing at one unfortunate and continuing to say that he did dance about like a chicken in the farmyard. When the poor man hung limp, his head at an angle like slaughtered poultry in Smithfield, Jeffreys extended his arm over the rail, tankard sloshing ale into the river, and did slur, “Last drink, bird head.”

  ERIC SCHALLER

  You can find Eric Schaller’s stories in Postscripts, New Genre, and Nemonymous, and his artwork in The White Buffalo Gazette, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Jeff VanderMeer’s collection City of Saints and Madmen.

  There are doors.

  Three of them to be exact. Each painted the same shade of off-white. Each with an identical brass doorknob.

  “Which will it be? Do you choose door number one? Door number two? Or door number three?” A glittering smile. A hand held like a cocked gun points to each door in turn.

  Last Drink Bird Head twitches, jerking along with the designating finger. He scratches his head. Picks his nose and examines the booger clinging to his long hooked claw. Maybe he has just extracted the secret from his nose. No. Nothing to be found in there. He flicks his finger, finds the booger still clinging, and flicks again. Damn that booger. Now it’s on his thumb. Maybe they should package this stuff. Sell it as glue.

  “Which will it be?”

  Last Drink Bird Head scratches his side, dislodging a feather and leaving the booger behind. It will feed a family of mites for the next month.

  “Which will it be?”

  “All of them!”

  Somewhere a button is pressed and panels in the ceiling slide open. Hundreds of balloons spill out! One bounces off Last Drink Bird Head’s molting dome and he bats it away. Everyone in the audience is laughing and batting the balloons around. There are so many balloons in the air at any one time that it seems like their numbers have multiplied. But then, of course, people get the idea of popping them, and soon there are a lot less than a hundred.

  Last Drink Bird Head doesn’t care. He’s already down at the far end of the stage tugging open the first door.

  But what does he find? Squat. Bupkis. Not even a footprint mars the clean linoleum.

  Well you’ve got to figure there will be at least one dud in the bunch.

  What about the next door?

  Jesus Christ. More of the same it looks like at first. But he’s got good eyes. There’s a golden thread on the floor and that must mean something. Maybe it pulls open a trap door. Maybe it really is gold.

  Too bad. Just someone’s hair. A bit sticky with hairspray and it doesn’t even look like she was a natural blond.

  That leaves only door number three.

  His stomach churns in fear and anticipation. It’s like a goddamn cauldron inside him. He pounds his bony chest, burps, then opens the door.

  Bingo!

  The audience gasps. This is what they’ve waited for all along. They’ve sat through a thousand shows, witnessed more disappointing prizes than they care to count. But now it all seems worthwhile.

  On the floor is a cup of beaten silver, its burnished rim imprinted with the residue of lips two thousand years old. A lone cup, its final draught never swallowed and still glinting from the bottom of the bowl like a blood-red garnet.

  A lone cup once, but no more.

  Last Drink Bird Head and the cup will dance the drunkard’s waltz from bar to bar and gutter to gutter. They will party with executives in airport lounges and swill fermented grape jelly with bums clustered around a flaming barrel. Theirs w
ill be a friendship for the ages. Last Drink Bird Head and the Grail, together for now and forever, until last call at the Apocalypse.

  EKATERINA SEDIA

  Ekaterina Sedia is the author of The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, with The House of Discarded Dreams coming out in 2010. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com

  Obtain aged vinegar, put it in a bottle with a stopper made of amber or of desert glass; do not taste the vinegar for it will be bitter and infectious with misery.

  Obtain a swallow and pour vinegar in its eyes; pay no mind to the plaintive cries of the squirming bird—you have a purpose before you.

  Remove the eyes—and this is just a mild way of putting it, making it sound as if the eyes would just pop out of the skull, clean as grapes—no, you must wrench them out of the bird’s head, pry loose with your fingers, ignore the cries. The bird doesn’t know.

  Release the swallow and watch it: its flight will be fluttering and panicked, jagged, raw, bloody. With no sense of direction, it will plummet toward the earth and then overcompensate and head for the sun, despite the wet woolly embrace of the clouds and the growing heat, its empty eyesockets smoldering in its ruined head—this is the swallow’s last flight and it will not be long.

  You must then take the bird’s eye to the one afflicted and put the bloodied black marbles, tiny as currants, onto the blind person’s eyelids. You must press them on and make the person drink the bitter vinegar, pink with the bird’s blood, drink it all to the last drop. Their lips will pucker at the taste and their eyelids will flutter, waking.

  And you will stand there, wondering about the bird.

  RAMSEY SHEHADEH

  Ramsey Shehadeh writes code when he's not writing stories. You can find him at doodleplex.com

  Last created the universe and watched it spread across the endless absent vistas of nothing, spawning planets and stars and nebulae as it went.

  And then he began to destroy it.

  He poked his finger into galaxies and swirled them into spiral soups of star. He popped suns like zits. He punched black holes into the weft of creation and jammed solar systems down their yawning maws. He dragged constellations together across light years and arranged them into tortuous, lewd positions. He gave fragile pockets of intelligence the gift of fire, and watched them burn themselves into extinction.

  And it was good.

  One day he was screaming cloudform over a throng of terrified creatures when one of them lifted its head and looked at him. It had small black eyes, a black curved beak, black glass feathers. It said: “Drink.”

  Terror crawled down Last’s spine. He screamed, and destroyed the universe.

  For an eternity, Last lay cowering in the heart of nothing. And then, when his trembling subsided, he stood and whispered into the darkness. His words slid down the face of the void and spawned time, and time spawned distance, and distance spawned matter. Stars accreted and gave birth to planets that gave birth, in turn, to life.

  Last flicked worlds into one another, like marbles.

  He pissed on stars until they winked out.

  He poured streams of dark matter into galaxies until they broke free of their moorings and dropped down the dimensions, punching ragged wells through the strata of reality.

  And then Birdhead came for him, again, hurtling down the back of a meteor shower.

  Last screamed and stopped time, but Birdhead stepped out of causality and walked toward him atop its frozen obsidian surface.

  Last folded space so that every point looped back onto itself, but Birdhead phased into ubiquity and rushed toward him down the avenues of everywhere.

  Last searched through history, resolved to unmake the moment when Birdhead came into being. But there was no such moment. Birdhead had always been.

  Last destroyed the universe.

  Birdhead stepped out of the wreckage of creation. “Drink,” he said, and plunged into Last’s mouth and screamed down his throat, burning through the corridors of his body until—

  “Last drink, Birdhead,” she said, ruffling his spiked crest of hair.

  He looked up through the blear. His sister was fuzzy at the edges, oversaturated, vibrating slightly. She held a bottle in one hand, a spoon in the other. “Come on. One more sip.”

  He scraped his tongue across the back of his teeth, along the desiccated surface of his gums, and said: “I was a god.”

  “Good for you,” she said, absently, and put a hand on his forehead. “You’ve still got a fever.”

  “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “Well.” She put bottle and spoon on the bedside table, and stood. “Mom’s going to ask if you took your medicine, and I’m going to say yes. Don’t make a liar out of me, ok?” She ruffled his hair again. “Get some sleep.”

  He watched her go, then reached out a wobbly hand and brushed the bottle off the table. It shattered against the wood floor.

  He closed his eyes, and willed the sickness to surge up inside of him. When the darkness came, he made a new universe, nestled in his palm, precious and myriad and lovely. And then he closed his hand into a fist, and felt it shatter and die.

  He smiled, and extended his other hand.

  PETER STRAUB

  Peter Straub has written many novels and won, multiple times, every award his expanding genre bestows. He lives in New York City.

  Here is the code of the west, as it is known to all the old-time cowpokes, gunslingers, Fancy Dans, riverboat captains and the riverboat gamblers who inhabit their lounges, also sodbusters, floozies, and itinerant preachers, also ranch hands, bunkhouse carpenters, barroom piano players, bartenders, river trash, and the like: to drink your last, last drink in Bird Head, Nebraska. A last drink in Bird Head was pretty much the law back then, according to Bird Head—Bird Head McGraw, top dog amongst the poets of the chuck wagon and the open range – and so it remains to this day. Wagon wheels pop the skulls of the bird heads that pave the road into Bird Head—pop them like eggshells so they turn to powder and feathers the size of a comma. Comma-sized feathers and bird head powder make up a roadbed substance that for sturdiness and endurance cannot be bettered, try though you may. Yet the heads of the thousand birds lined up on the wooden fences swiveled as the carriage rolled by. Those flat merciless eyes…growing ever darker as the receding carriage dwindled down the bird-head road, they followed its progress toward Bird Head until it disappeared into the flatness of the Nebraska landscape. A motionless fury spoke from the bird heads. As Last Drink Turner always said, Nebraska in general was no Bird Head, but at least it filled the bill—sure as the dickens was a bird-head kind of state. And when the wagon rolled into Bird Head, NE, which when you come right down to it is a hell of a state, Turner’s barroom, called The Last Drink’s Bird Head Inn, welcomed the travelers with all of the frontier bird-head spirit these desperate last-drink travelers could ask for. Last drinks were in the atmosphere, a matter some of the old cowpokes and riverboat gamblers found sufficient to dampen the eye. The floozies cheered from the balconies. Bird Head McGraw and Last Drink Turner began setting up the drinks, true to the code of the west. For those boys, it was always the same thing—love or nothing.

  VICTORIA STRAUSS

  Victoria Strauss is the author of seven fantasy novels, including The Burning Land, and The Awakened City. This is her first ever published short fiction. Visit her at her website: www.victoriastrauss.com

  A man sits by his father’s hospital bed at three o’clock in the morning. Not long, the doctors said; a few hours, maybe a day. Behind the bed, screens jump with the jagged patterns of the father’s blood and breath. The father’s skin is yellow and tight over his bones. His eyes move behind closed lids—he is dreaming, whispering in his dream, words that mean nothing. Green turns left behind. Last drink bird head. The man watches the screens, and waits to be free.

  A woman sits alone at a table in a pub. She’s drunk, but only someone who loved her could tell. Cupped between her hands is a glass of single malt whiskey. T
his is her last drink; once it’s gone, she will never have another. The liquor speaks to her. It tells her what it might be like to wake up every morning, her head clear and her stomach peaceful, not having to wonder what she did the night before. It tells her that she will be back, at this table in the Bird’s Head, tomorrow night. That will be her last drink too.

  A group of survivors huddles in a basement. Outside it’s black dark, and ash drifts down like snow. Something terrible has happened—a nuclear bomb? A meteor strike? An alien invasion? Is the whole world devastated, or just this little part of it? It could be any of those things, or none of them. This could be a movie, or it could be real life. The survivors lean around a radio (there’s always a radio in these scenarios), while one of them twists dials. Static…static…and suddenly, words. The words make no sense (they never do in these situations). Eventually, though, the survivors will unlock their meaning, and emerge from the basement to bravely rebuild their lives. Or be eaten by aliens, depending on the whims of the filmmaker, or fate, whichever is in charge. For now, though, there are just the words, and the promise, or the threat, they hold. You already know what they are.

  A writer is invited to write a story. Four words are given to spark imagination. The writer repeats the words aloud to fix them in her memory, then sets them loose inside her head, hoping her unconscious will do the work. At odd moments they pull at her: a set of Scrabble tiles to be arranged and rearranged, a nonsense phrase that flies apart like a flock of birds, scraps of imagery that refuse to coalesce. When her husband speaks to her she doesn’t hear him, because she’s thinking of the words. At last, she decides to refuse the invitation. It is drinking up too much of her attention, and anyway, she’s fresh out of ideas.