The Collected Short Fiction, page 8
“Amy. Where does he live?”
“Who.”
“Tommy. Where does he live?”
She turned and looked at him, a little crease of worry on her brow. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just tell me. Please.”
“Brian, don’t.”
He slammed his fist into the wall, startling himself. He screamed at her. “Tell me where he lives! God damn it!”
Tommy opened the door of his shotgun house, clad only in boxer shorts, and Brian greeted him with a blow to the face. Tommy staggered back into his house, due more to surprise than the force of the punch; his foot slipped on a throw rug and he crashed to the floor. The small house reverberated with the impact. Brian had a moment to take in Tommy’s hard physique and imagine his wife’s hands moving over it. He stepped forward and kicked him in the groin.
Tommy grunted and seemed to absorb it. He rolled over and pushed himself quickly to his feet. Tommy’s fist swung at him and he had time to experience a quick flaring terror before his head exploded with pain. He found himself on his knees, staring at the dust collecting in the crevices of the hardwood floor. Somewhere in the background a television chattered urgently.
A kick to the ribs sent Brian down again. Tommy straddled him, grabbed a fistful of hair, and slammed Brian’s face into the floor several times. Brian felt something in his face break and blood poured onto the floor. He wanted to cry, but it was impossible; he couldn’t get enough air. I’m going to die, he thought. He felt himself hauled up and thrown against a wall. Darkness crowded his vision. The world started to slide away.
Someone was yelling at him. There was a face in front of him, skin peeled back from its teeth in a smile or a grimace of rage. It looked like something from hell.
He awoke to the feel of cold grass, cold night air. The right side of his face burned like a signal flare; his left eye refused to open. It hurt to breathe. He pushed himself to his elbows and spit blood from his mouth; it immediately filled again. Something wrong in there. He rolled onto his back and laid there for a while, waiting for the pain to subside to a tolerable level. The night was high and dark. At one point he felt sure that he was rising from the ground, that something up there was pulling him into its empty hollows.
Somehow he managed the drive home. He remembered nothing of it except occasional stabs of pain as opposing headlights washed across his windshield; he would later consider his safe arrival a kind of miracle. He pulled into the driveway and honked the horn a few times until Amy came out and found him there. She looked at him with horror, and with something else.
“Oh, baby. What did you do. What did you do.”
She steered him toward the angel’s room. He stopped himself in the doorway, his heart pounding again, and he tried to catch his breath. It occurred to him, on a dim level, that his nose was broken. She tugged at his hand, but he resisted. Her face was limned by moonlight, streaming through the window like some mystical tide, and by the faint luminescence of the angel tucked into their son’s bed. She’d grown heavy over the years, and the past year had taken a harsh toll: the flesh on her face sagged, and was scored by grief. And yet he was stunned by her beauty.
Had she always looked like this?
“Come on,” she said. “Please.”
The left side of his face pulsed with hard beats of pain; it sang like a war drum. His working eye settled on the thing in the bed: its flat black eyes, its wickedly curved talons. Amy sat beside it and put her hand on its chest. It arched its back, seeming to coil beneath her.
“Come lay down,” she said. “He’s here for us. He’s come home for us.”
Brian took a step into Toby’s room, and then another. He knew she was wrong; that the angel was not home, that it had wandered here from somewhere far away.
Is heaven a dark place?
The angel extended a hand, its talons flexing. The sheets over its belly stirred as Brian drew closer. Amy took her husband’s hands, easing him onto the bed. He gripped her shoulders, squeezing them too tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Once he began he couldn’t stop. He said it over and over again, so many times it just became a sound, a sobbing plaint, and Amy pressed her hand against his mouth, entwined her fingers into his hair, saying, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” and finally she silenced him with a kiss. As they embraced each other the angel played its hands over their faces and their shoulders, its strange reedy breath and its narcotic musk drawing them down to it. They caressed each other, and they caressed the angel, and when they touched their lips to its skin the taste of it shot spikes of joy through their bodies. Brian felt her teeth on his neck and he bit into the angel, the sudden dark spurt of blood filling his mouth, the soft pale flesh tearing easily, sliding down his throat. He kissed his wife furiously and when she tasted the blood she nearly tore his tongue out; he pushed her face toward the angel’s body, and watched the blood blossom from beneath her. The angel’s eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling; it extended a shaking hand toward a wall decorated with a Spider-Man poster, its fingers twisted and bent.
They ate until they were full.
That night, heavy with the sludge of bliss, Brian and Amy made love again for the first time in nearly a year. It was wordless and slow, a synchronicity of pressures and tender familiarities. They were like rare creatures of a dying species, amazed by the sight of each other.
Brian drifts in and out of sleep. He has what will be the last dream about his son. It is morning in this dream, by the side of a small country road. It must have rained during the night, because the world shines with a wet glow. Droplets of water cling, dazzling, to the muzzle of a dog as it rests beside the road, unmenaced by traffic, languorous and dull-witted in the rising heat. It might even be Dodger. His snout is heavy with blood. Some distance away from him Toby rests on the street, a small pile of bones and torn flesh, glittering with dew, catching and throwing sunlight like a scattered pile of rubies and diamonds.
By the time he wakes, he has already forgotten it.
North American Lake Monsters
First published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, May 2008
Grady and Sarah shuffled out of the cabin, bundled in heavy jackets and clutching mugs of coffee that threw heat like dark little suns. Across the wide expanse of Tipton’s Lake the Blue Ridge Mountains breached the morning fog banks, their tree-lined backs resembling the foresty spines of some great kraken trawling the seas. Together they descended the steps from the front porch onto the unkempt grass and made their way down to the lake’s edge, and onto the small path which would lead them a couple hundred feet along until they came to the body of the strange creature that had washed ashore and died there.
They did not speak much as they walked. Out of jail for only three days after six years inside, Grady was struggling to recognize his thirteen-year-old daughter in the sullen-eyed, cynical presence striding along beside him. She had undergone some bizarre transformation since he’d last seen her. She’d dyed her hair black; strange silver adornments pocked her face: she had a ring in her left eyebrow, and a series of rings along the curve of one bejeweled conch of an ear. Worst of all, she’d put a stud through her tongue.
“Man, I can really smell that thing,” he said. Sarah had discovered it last night, and was eager to show it off. The early cold snap had held off the smell to some degree, but it was beginning to creep toward the cabin.
“Wait till you see it, Dad, it’s amazing.”
Sarah had not come to see him during his last three years in prison. At first that had been at his own insistence, and she’d taken it badly: he told her of his decision while she and her mother were visiting, and she threw a tantrum of such violence that the guards were obliged to cut their session short. His reasons, he thought, were both predictable and justified: he didn’t want his little girl to see him in that environment, slowly eroding into a smaller, meaner, beaten man. But the truth was simply that he was ashamed, and by keeping his daughter away he spared himself the humiliation he felt in her company. After less than a year of that, though, his resolve failed, and he asked his wife to start bringing her again. But Sarah never came back.
They rounded a thick copse of pines, cutting off their view of the cabin. From this vantage point it was easy to imagine themselves far from civilization and all its attendant rules. Cold air blew in off the lake. Grady lowered his chin into his jacket and closed his eyes, smelling the pine, the soft wet stink of the mud, the aroma of real coffee. He’d smelled nothing but sweat, urine, and disinfectant for so long that it seemed to him now that he was walking through the foothills of Heaven.
“I don’t know what you think you’re gonna do with it,” Sarah said, ranging ahead. She cradled the mug of coffee he’d made for her like a kitten against her chest. “It’s way too big to move.”
“Won’t know till I see it,” he said.
“I was just telling you,” she said, sounding hurt.
Grady was immediately irritated. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Christ, managing her moods was like handling nitroglycerin. Wasn’t she supposed to be tough, with all that shit on her face? The old anger—irrational and narcotic in its sweetness—stirred in him. “So who’s this boy your mother told me about? What’s his name... Tracy?”
“Travis,” she said, her voice muted.
“Oh. Travis.”
She said nothing, picking up her pace a little bit. She was on the defensive, which only provoked him. He wanted her to fight. “What grade is he in?”
Again, nothing.
“Does he even go to school?”
“Yes,” she said, but he could barely hear her.
“He better not be in fucking high school.”
She turned on him; he noticed, with some dismay, that she had tears in her eyes. “I know Mom already told you all about him! Why are you doing this?”
“Jesus, what are you crying about? Never mind what your mom told me, I want to hear this from you.”
“He’s in ninth grade, all right? You should be glad I’m dating an older boy, he’s not an immature shithead like the boys in my school!” Grady just stood there, trying to decide how to feel. He felt a calmness descend over him, in an inverse proportion to Sarah’s distress. He studied her. Did she really believe what she was saying? Had she grown so stupid in his absence?
“Well. I guess I ought to be grateful. Do I get to meet this Travis when we get back to Winston-Salem?”
She turned and continued down the path.
After a few more moments of trudging in strained silence, they rounded a small bend and came upon the monster. It was as big as a small van, still partly submerged in the lake, as though it had lunged onto the ground and expired from the effort. Grady drifted to a halt without realizing it, and Sarah went ahead without him, walking up to the huge carcass as casually as if she were approaching a boulder or a wrecked ship.
“Jesus, Sarah, don’t touch it.”
She ignored him and pressed her fingertips against its hide. “What are you afraid of? It’s dead.”
He was having trouble apprehending its shape. It looked like a huge, suppurated heart. It seemed a confusion of forms, as though the weight of the atmosphere crushed it out of true: he had the strong impression that underwater it would unfurl into something sensible, though perhaps no less strange. Its skin, glistening with dew and sickly excretions, was dark green, almost black. Enfolded in the flesh near the mud was an eye: saucer-sized, clouded, eclipsed by a nictitating membrane which covered it like a bone-white crescent moon. A two-foot-long gash was partially buried in the mud; it could have been a mouth, or the wound that killed it. An odor seeped from it like a gas, candy-sweet.
Grady felt his stomach buckle. “What... what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “It’s a dinosaur or something.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
She went silent, pacing calmly around it.
“We need to uh... we need to get rid of it. Push it in or something.” The thought of this smell rolling into the cabin windows at night fueled an irrational rage inside him. It wasn’t right that this atrocity should ruin his homecoming.
“You can’t. I already tried.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll try again.” He placed his hands on it with great reluctance and gave it a cursory push to get a sense of its weight. The flesh gave a bit, and he felt his hands sink. He wrenched them away, making a high-pitched sound he didn’t recognize as his own. His hands were covered in a sticky film, as though he’d gripped a sappy tree. Nausea swelled in his body; the ground swung up to meet him and he vomited into the mud.
“Oh my God. Dad?”
He continued to dry heave until it felt like his guts were crawling up his throat. He smelled coffee on the ground in front of him, and he crawled away from it. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”
Sarah pulled at his shoulders. “Dad? Are you okay?”
He managed to lean back into a sitting position, rubbing his hands hard against his pants, trying to wipe off the sticky residue. He thought that if he moved it would trigger another spasm, so he sat still for a few moments and gathered himself. He could hear his daughter’s voice. It seemed to come from an immeasurable distance. He crawled over to the water and thrust his hands into it, trying to scrape the residue from his hands without success.
The thing would have to be destroyed. Maybe if he hacked it up he could push it back into the lake. They were staying at his father-in-law’s cabin; surely the man kept a chainsaw or an axe around for chopping wood.
Eventually, he grabbed her arm, hauling himself to his feet. His mug lay near the monster, splashed in mud. He decided to leave it there.
“Let’s go,” he said. He started back along the path without waiting to see if she’d follow. He continued to scrape his hands on his thighs, but he was beginning to doubt the stuff would come off.
Tina was awake by the time they returned. She was leaning against the porch railing, one hand clutching her robe closed at her neck and the other holding a cigarette. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her hair sleep-crushed, her hangover as heavy as a mantle of chains. She stood up there like a promise of life, and something stirred in Grady at the sight of her, grateful and tender. He summoned a smile from some resolute part of himself and raised a hand in greeting.
“You look like shit,” she said amiably.
He looked down at himself. “I fell.”
“So did you see it?”
“Oh yeah, I saw it.”
“Mom, he got sick!”
He closed his eyes. “Sarah...”
“You got sick, baby?”
“Just, I—yeah, okay, I got sick. It’s fucking disgusting.”
They climbed the stairs and joined her on the porch. Tina brushed at his pants with one hand, her cigarette clenched in her teeth. “Sarah, go get a towel from the bathroom. You can’t walk into the cabin like this.”
“It’s all over my hands,” Grady said.
“What is?”
“I don’t know, some weird sticky shit on the, on the thing. I think it gave me a reaction or something.”
“We should get you to a doctor, Dad,” said Sarah.
“Don’t be stupid. I just got a little dizzy.”
“Dad, you—”
“Goddamnit, Sarah!”
She stepped back from him as though she’d been struck. Tina gestured at her without looking, still brushing her husband’s pants. “Sarah—honey—a towel. Please.”
Sarah’s mouth moved silently for a moment; then she said, “Fine,” and went inside. Grady watched her go, fighting down a spike of anger.
“What’s your problem?” said Tina, giving up on his pants.
“My problem? Is that a joke?”
“You been gone six years, Grady. Give her a chance.”
“Well, it was her choice not to see me for the last three of them. I didn’t ask her to stay away. Not at the end. And anyway, is that what you’re doing? Giving her a chance? Is that what the rings in her face and that shit in her tongue is all about?”
He watched a door close somewhere inside her. “Grady...”
“What. ‘Grady,’ what.”
“Just... don’t, okay?”
“No, I want to hear it. ‘Grady,’ what. ‘Grady, I fucked up’? ‘Grady, our daughter is a walking car wreck and it’s because I spent so much time drunk I didn’t even care’?”
She wouldn’t look at him. She smoked her cigarette and focused her gaze beyond him: on the lake, or on the mountains, or on some distant place he couldn’t see.
“How about, ‘Grady, I spent so much time banging Mitch while you were in jail that I forgot how to be a wife and a mother’?”
She shook her head; it was barely perceptible. “You’re so goddamned mean,” she said. “I was kinda hoping you’d of changed.”
He leaned in close and spoke right into her ear. “No, fuck that. I’m more me than ever.”
Grady showered—discovering that the substance on his hands was apparently impervious to soap—and the girls retreated to their rooms, nurturing their hurts, stranding him in the living room. He drank more coffee and flipped through the channels on TV. It was not unlike how he spent rec hour in jail, and he felt a profound self-pity at the realization. Goddamn evil bitches, he thought. I’m back a few days and they’re already giving me the cold shoulder. It’s disrespectful. He knew how to handle disrespect in prison; out here he felt emasculated by it.
He knew he should use this time to go out to the monster and start breaking it down. He’d only regret it if he allowed it to stay longer. But it would be gruesome, grueling work, and the very thought of it made his body sag into the couch. And anyway, it wasn’t fair. These two weeks at the cabin were supposed to be for him, a celebration. He shouldn’t have to climb up to his waist in fucking monster gore.
