Last Drink Bird Head

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Rappel into the swifts’ cave, ignoring their stings and reproaches. Locate the brood wall, and admire the Pythagorean whorl of the nests. Sap and spittle are their substance—hardened by the beating of a mated pairs’ wings—and their segmented spirals reveal the number of clutches each has held. Pry the oldest from the rock, and do not spill the eggs. The coiled fury of the embryonic swifts will power your next undertaking. Poach them in their shells; enjoy with field greens dusted in powdered stag ejaculate.

  Return to the motor lodge. Masking your contempt for the proprietress, request a container for mailing. Wrap the spiral vessel of the swifts’ procreative hopes and mail it to the one who wronged you.

  Consult Appendix XVII to provision your next expedition. If you have followed the vocal regimen prescribed in Chapter Six, you will have perfected your imitation of the Godawful Kingfisher—named for the religious mania it inspired in the spiritually maddened settlers of the Delmarva Peninsula. Row into the salt swamp, and welcome the Green Fairy Horsefly’s biting. Its saliva contains numbing agents to dull the conscience.

  You have penetrated the core of the Delmarva salt swamp when slanting sun shafts awaken a frisson of moral rapture in you. Suppress this feeling. Toss back your head, and release the mating call of the Kingfisher. Know what it is to betray.

  When the Kingfisher perches above you—black beak gleaming in holy menace—don your gasmask, and open your halothane canisters. Slit the breast of the stupefied bird; let his juices run down your throat. Chase with Crested Pigeon crop milk (Chapter Four).

  Bag the remaining denizens of the tree. Should they revive on your journey back, turn up the radio. Boil your bycatch for five hours, making a hearty stock. The Superb Sunbirds collected in Chapter Two should be deep in hibernation in your freezer. Stop your sink with mementoes of your fickle beloved, and arrange the birds’ brittle bodies into a pyramid. Pour your bycatch bouillon over them. Stir. Submerge your head; do not come up for air till you have exhausted the basin.

  Stagger; fall. Break your scalded head on the floor and savor your deliverance. Your shame and anger have burst from you; you have returned to the innocence of infancy. Die.

  Putrefy, and yield your nutrients to decomposers. You are the brood chamber of the new pterodactyls. Ten months hence they will bear your love and rage to the one who harmed you, to her husband—your friend—and to the hideous wall-eyed child who should have been yours.

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  Conrad Williams is the author of the novels Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One and Decay Inevitable. His most recent short story is “The Cold”, which appears in an anthology called Hellbound Hearts, which contains fiction inspired by Clive Barker’s cenobites.

  London. Denuded. Barren. Haggard. So he drinks. Trying to create a buffer between himself and the darkness, the city, the things he does undercover of it. This is how you mix the drink he drinks. Lover’s Delight, bitters, honey: 1 part Cointreau, 2 parts Cognac, 1 part forbidden fruit. The angostura turns the drink into something harsher than it ought to be. He likes the sweet and sour; alien flavours dragging his tongue this way and that. Like with her. Debra. Last night, other nights too. Text messages. Exclusive hotels. Debra: lacy dress, breasts high. Lifts, Dorchester: breath hot. Knotting themselves on an Emperor bed, fucksore as light returns to the room, reaffirming him, showing him what he has sunk to. Lorraine, his wife, ghosts on to the stool next to his. She appears bright, scrubbed. Younger. The lights, the smoke. His mouth turns dry despite the cocktail. Seeing her here, unexpected, uninvited, spears him with guilt and dread.

  ”You following me?” he asks. She smirks. Shrugs. Orders a refill for him. The barman places the drink on a paper coaster, inches from his left hand. Nevertheless, she reaches over and grips the glass, shifts it closer.

  “Bird Head,” she says.

  It kills him, that name. He’s owned it since she saw a school photograph of him caught in the middle of a sneeze. The hair at the back of his head flicked up, his face blurred, giving the impression of length, like a bill.

  “You look like a tufted duck. Bird Head.”

  The name spoken with tenderness then. But now? How could the same words be so venomized?

  “Late Darling,” she says. “Bus home?”

  He can’t meet her eye as he shakes his head. In the mirror behind the bar he sees Debra, sinuous, dangerous. She’s panthering around on the raised platform above the dance floor, the lights from the glitterball playing hopscotch across the left half of her face.

  Lover’s Delight. He knocks back the drink in two big swallows. The barman left out the bitters. It tastes all wrong. Too cloying. A drink he’s never tried before.

  Lorraine’s hand on his. He still can’t meet her gaze; his flutters up, away. She follows it. He forces it down but it’s too late. He is almost in awe of her control, her marble restraint.

  “Let’s dance,” she says and, as they pass beneath her shadow, Lorraine tilts her head Debra’s way. “Bed her?”

  He pulls her close, to stifle his denial, his admission. He can’t help feeling she’s keeping him upright. A lull in the music and she pushes him away. She smiles at Debra. Points at him. “Large dick? Back hairy?”

  Debra leaves. It’s all the proof Lorraine needs, if she ever needed any. He staggers back to his stool. Two cocktails and he feels like this? Her fingerprint on the glass. He’s about to slide off into night when she catches hold of his lapel, just long enough for her to whisper four final words.

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She is currently published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), and appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s and other magazines.

  Last Drink Bird Head sits on the edge of the world, shoulders hunched, feathers blowing in the world’s last wind. The sun has blown out like a candle; stars shiver in the dark. Last Drink Bird Head thinks of flowers, of green vines growing, twining up between earth and moon, ladders for the ones who climb high. Last Drink Bird Head is the highest climber of all, the shaman walker-between-worlds, the one who has endured. First male, then different, then male again: Last Drink Bird Head is the Form-that-changes, become god, the dead would say, but the dead are long gone, no more than a flickering in the shadows and then not even that. With the world dying, ties between spirit and planet wither and fade, vines in snowfall, soon lost.

  Last Drink Bird Head can’t hear a sound above the wind, couldn’t hear the dead speak even if they had something to say.

  Torch of Earth, last life, spark in darkness. Take a crimson feather and drop it down, listen hard, look harder, but there’s no sign of landing. Last Drink Bird Head thinks that the world has lived too long, takes a step spaceward, plummets into molten black, world-soul falling.

  NEIL WILLIAMSON

  Neil Williamson lives in Glasgow where he can be found trading custard pie recipes with other members of the culinary clowning conservatory known as the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. Details of his crazy (but tasty) antics can be found at www.neilwilliamson.org.uk

  There’s little shelter on the Head. The wind plucks Margueritte’s cloak like an aerialist’s costume. Taunts her to fly. She’s tempted, but won’t be bullied. Not even by the wind.

  Margueritte traces the black steps up the greensward into the cloud-dark twilight. At the summit is the inn, and inside: Oliver Waugh, wizard of flight, wisest barman in the world. Her saviour.

  The wind stings. The sluggish sea below reminds her of the pursuit of happiness.

  Margueritte reties her cloak, clutches the flask, and climbs. The steps are slick, but the tread is deadened with gravel and ash, supplemented by ropes of wrack, screes of shells and delicate bird bones.

  Her steps crunch only softly. Buoyed, she runs, reckless of the wind, but as she ascends she gains gravity. Wrack pops, shells crack, bones snap. A gust billows the cloa
k into a sail, lifting her, but she is still too heavy. Margueritte’s instinct is split: to control the cloak or to let it flap and drink from the flask. Safety wins, and only once she is secure does she heft the flask.

  Just a drop, and save what remains.

  Beautiful, bitter aroma.

  Two drops burn her tongue with cold.

  Once, she was married. A ponderous husband who, on the advent of their albatross child, turned to drink. Terrified of petrification, a blasted stone woman rooted to the sofa, Margueritte ran away to join the circus.

  The circus taught her the semblance of flying. It was a good simulacrum of freedom, at first, but it wasn’t enough. Not with the faces of the ponderous husband and the albatross child staring up at her from the crowd.

  That was when she had turned to drink.

  Her feet hardly touch the gravel now. And this becomes the pattern: she drinks lightness and climbs until her gravity scares her. She drinks, climbs, all the while afraid that the flask will too soon be empty.

  At the summit, the wind hurries her into the brick structure at the cliff edge.

  The barroom is desolated. Its roof is gone. Where the rear wall used to be is now a vista of leaden waves.

  “We’re closed.”

  She can barely see him in that chair, surrounded by empty bottles.

  She proffers her flask. “Please.”

  “I drank it all. Go away.”

  She can’t believe it. All this way for nothing. “I can’t go back.”

  “Then stay. I don’t care.”

  Then Margueritte sees. Even here there are no wizards. Waugh is ponderous, concrete.

  He’s not slumped in the chair, he’s part of it. And it’s not balanced on the splintered pinions of the floorboards, it’s an outcropping of the Head.

  She cannot return, but gravity drags harder with every heartbeat.

  Margueritte uncaps the flask for the last time. There is no liquid left, only vapour, so she drinks that. Gets drunk on the air itself. It fills her, feathers her skin, cores her bones.

  And, for a time, she accepts the wind’s dare, and flies out of the Head.

  CALEB WILSON

  Caleb Wilson’s fiction has been printed in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and Weird Tales. He and his wife live in Illinois, where his alter-ego works at a library.

  Unlike those other video games with an obvious goal, be it blasting alien starcrafts or slaying swarms of orcs, Last Drink Bird Head preferred that I wander confused and directionless through its twisted world. Sometimes the game’s style smacked of a bad translation and sometimes it seemed the product of a diseased mind.

  The game-play was simple but baffling. I’d hold down a button, and Bird Head, in his peculiar mincing hop, would travel perhaps from East Island, perfectly square and standing on pylons from an ocean of liquid bleach, up the Ganzir, the Great Stair, where he could visit King Arthrizand’s Seraglio that floated in a saffron-tinted sunset. There the King’s Inflatable Pontiff might give him a special mission to slay the Burlap Dragoon.

  The burbling music changed to indicate Bird Head’s fortunes. The happy wandering song could be interrupted at any moment by the chirping aria when a siren tempted Bird Head over a cliff to land in a bed of razors. Or by a fast, minor march when a wandering hangman captured Bird Head and forced him along the crimson carpet to his portable gibbet. Or the Olde Knight’s theme, all Medieval dissonance in bloops and cheeps, which raised the hairs on the back of my neck to hear it, because it meant that gruesome revenant was nearby.

  A multitude of dangers, impossible to predict and nearly as tricky to avoid, struck Bird Head at every turn. He seemed to die at a touch, his pixilated form crumbling apart, and then a dismal bleeping dirge would play while the screen displayed a tiny gravestone and the epigraph “Here lieth a Fool.”

  The score was indicated by a row of numbers in the screen’s upper right corner. Six zeroes hinted at the possibility of a score in the millions, but no actions ever seemed to net points. Licking the twelve pneumatic tortoises in the order given to Bird Head by the Penultimate Czar was worth three points, but such a task might take me all afternoon, and my hands would grow sweaty and my thumbs would start to cramp, and then one of Bird Head’s enemies, such as the Mechannibal, might tear off his leg and I’d lose five points.

  Eventually I became convinced that the point of the game was to send the score negative. I’d take on missions with low chances of success, like seeking the Analect of Dreams blindfolded and riding a chicken-footed chaise lounge.

  Once, on such a mission, the screen cluttered with icons indicating that Bird Head was suffering from sleeping sickness, leprosy, bone vacuum, and beetle-rot, I reached the bottom level of the Aphid Paste Mines, and there—for a second—I saw it—two steps away from Bird Head—the titular drink—a glass of fizzing green liquid—and my three-year-old sister ran into the room and switched off the console—.

  GENE WOLFE

  For some years Damon Knight’s Milford Writers Conference was a central part of Gene Wolfe’s life. He met Anne McCaffrey, Carol Emshwiller, and Harlan Ellison there, and many, many more – among them Virginia Kidd, who became his literary agent.

  Bartenders are, as all the world knows, the great modern models of probity. There’s one in this little story—a bartender sadly misled—and that alone should vouch for its truthfulness.

  I fear, however, that it will not. The modern mind, conditioned by government pronouncements and network news broadcasts, is deeply suspicious. It’s distrustful, above all, of anything avowed by a writer of fiction. I am one and I encounter the prejudice daily, particularly from my wife. There are three writers of fiction here, so you see.

  Worse, the story concerns a beverage now forgotten, the cocktail. We drink wine or we drink beer. One or the other. Yet there was a time, not so remote as mead but almost as remote as bath-tub gin, when everyone over the age of ten drank cocktails. There was the Pink Lady, the Old Fashioned, the Rob Roy, the Jack Rose, and many another, cocktails so popular as to be plebeian. Less popular yet entirely real were scores of others. Elderly gentlemen like me may still harbor a sneaking affection for the French Seventy-five (5 oz. champagne, 1/4 oz. gin, 1/4 oz. Cointreau, 1/4 oz. lemon juice). We may, I say. But we don’t order it, and the reasons should be obvious.

  What bartender today can compound an Up In Mable’s Room? What bartender would try (1/2 rye whiskey, 1/4 gin, 1/4 honey)? I’ve been writing a book about a pirate, but I give you my word that I’ll never sample the Yo Ho (equal parts rum, Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and apple brandy). Nevertheless such drinks were popular, a fact to keep in mind.

  Damon Knight (equal parts author, editor, and critic) made it a habit to order a White Piano whenever a bartender asked what he wanted before Damon had settled upon it (Damon was not easy to please). The unfortunate bartender would consult bar books and at last return, shamefaced, to confess that he didn’t know how to mix a White Piano. Damon would exclaim, “Well, I’m not about to drink your first one!” and order a Manhattan—or whatever he’d decided on.

  His friends Gordon R. Dickson and Harry Harrison observed this; I had the story from Gordie, and a more honest spinner of fantastic tales never lived.

  They found a small bar some distance from Damon’s usual haunts, entered before the cocktail hour, and ordered White Pianos. Soon, of course, the bartender confessed he did not know how to make one.

  “Oh, it’s the easiest drink in the world! Equal parts sloe gin and milk. Add a teaspoonful of sugar, shake over ice, and serve.”

  He made two. They drank them, praised them to the skies, and tipped lavishly. They did this several times.

  They took Damon to their favorite bar; and while he fooled around with the bobbing-head bird that had shared a last drink with the guy passed out in the corner, Gordie ordered beer, and Harry wine. You can imagine the rest.

  The moral of this little story is that we must never,
ever deceive innocent bartenders. Or borrow other people’s toys without asking.

  Providence will accord justice to them both.

  JONATHAN WOOD

  Jonathan Wood’s writing can be found in magazines such as Weird Tales, Chizine, Fantasy Magazine, and Electric Velocipede. Links to them can be found at www.cogsandneurons.com

  We begin, you and I, with black ink and white paper. We begin with lines, their intersections, with syntax and grammar. Our theoreticals are dead but still we build life. Slowly we build our skeleton, build dimensions, build up. Slowly we begin to dream.

  We build our workshop around us. We place windows high, let light sluice down on the workbench. Yes, we see it before us now. Run your hands over it. How does it feel? Steel or oak? Can you say yet?

  Let us build more. Let us see what is to come. Our breath stirs the air before us. It builds viscera between bones, strings muscle to tendon to bone. Words pass unspoken between us, and we layer skin, layer ornamentation upon this, our creation, our Last Drink Bird Head. Yes, that is its name. Of course that is its name. What else would it be?

  And now, we find, there are beaks and eyes, feathers and scales, and tails, and flails, and wings. Such beautiful wings! They shimmer like rainbows, like light catching rivers.

  And once our minds are infected with such images, we must see them. We turn, splash black ink, find a set of double doors. Light seeps around them—white, bleaching, everything beyond as yet unseen.

  We throw them open, and behind us Last Drink Bird Head stirs, raises its head, opens its eyes. It spreads its wings. And then it is off and out, soaring up, up, and up, and up. And the colors—yes there are colors, do you see them now?—they leak from its wings, run like paint in the rain.