04
Mar 10

**Haiku for 2012 Fantasists**

New Age believers
Idiots, with flowers, chant:
“Mayan Calendar!”


10
Feb 10

**CUL-DE-SAC**

Another in a series of ‘lost stories’ that were obscurely published, and now rediscovered…

A lost story by John Shirley

I started to see things other people couldn’t see when I was at the hospital. I mean real things, not hallucinations. It probably started happening because of my skateboard accident. With me, skateboarding is pretty much all accident. I come back from skating with my friends all covered with bruises and scrapes, with chipped bones and stuff. It’s not that I’m not good at it—it’s just that I push out the envelope a lot. My right front incisor is shaped like a guillotine now because of a skateboard fall.

This time, my worst accident, was at the skatepark in Berkeley, one of those chilly days in late November—chilly but never really cold. The sky’s the same color as the skatepark concrete, days like that. That day, me and DickWad were skating—

I should tell you that DickWad (Richard Wadley, okay?) is a tall skinny white guy (I’m a short skinny one) who dropped out of school and became a skateboard pro but barely makes any kind of living at it and sleeps on his girlfriend’s couch and drinks beer pretty much 24/7.

We were doing kick flips when we saw the turfies were coming into the park, at the other side, doing pocket checks. Pocket checks are a way of life in the East Bay. These were NBP turfies—their tats say N.B.P., means No Body’s Prisoner though a lot of them are in jail—and they’re all young, skinny black dudes with big floppy shirts and big floppy pants and they do these “pocket checks” which somehow sounds better to people than “strong-arm robbery”. They don’t get that much from any one guy, it’s like five bucks here and ten there and two there, but after doing it all across town for a couple hours they’ve harvested a few hundred bucks, enough to get some grapes to smoke—

What? Oh. Grapes is weed that has some purple on it. Pot. Tree.

No. No I wasn’t smoking it. I already told the cops that what I saw wasn’t drug stuff. I wasn’t smoking pot or drinking angel’s trumpet tea or doing shrooms or none of that stuff.

Anyway, last time these turfies were here, I had ten dollars in my pocket my dad gave me, so that time I skated away when they tried to do the pocket check on me, said, “Fuck off, no fucking way dude,” and managed to get out of there before the gang caught me.

This time, I didn’t want them to see me and remember that other occasion, so now I said, “Hey whoa, DickWad, we gotta cut right fucking now!” And I turned and skated up the bowl onto the rim of the skatepark real quick. Or tried to—I was never any good at that halfpipe, vert skating stuff, not much hesh, I do mostly curb tricks, street skating, tech shit like that—

And the board went out from under me.

I fell back against the concrete rim of the bowl and went CRACK! on the back of my head. Went dark. Just like that, like somebody flicking off a computer monitor.

Next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital room. Curtains on both sides. Monitors on me. Mom and Dad, saying they told me to use a helmet, spending time, patting my arm, going home because my aunt was looking after my little sister and they had to relieve her because you don’t want to leave anyone unsuspecting with my sister Wilmy for long.

DickWad came to see me, and said, “Yeah dude it was sick, you were, all, lying in this puddle of blood and all the turfies left so they wouldn’t be blamed. They’re all, ‘They gone say we did that shit.’”

We laughed at that, in the hospital, but the cops did have a tendency to blame the turfies for everything. They were so poor, anyway, we don’t really blame the turfies for the pocket checks. We resent it, it’s fucked up, but we’d probably do the same, in their place.

I remember laughing about the turfies running off—though it hurt my bandaged head to laugh—and then I stopped in mid-laugh, because that’s when I saw the…I think you call it a silhouette. It was, like, a living shadow, standing behind DickWad. At first I thought it was his shadow. But it moved around on its own, when he didn’t move. It was all restless, prowling around the room. It was literally the silhouette of a man that just walked around on its own. It didn’t have a face. It did have some kind of three-dimensional shape happening. It had depth and it had body-ness. But it was like its body was made out of space—the space between stars. So far between stars you can’t see any.

It was shaped like a man—but it wasn’t a man. And it scared me.

I asked DickWad if he saw it but he didn’t hear me because he was listening on my iPod Video to a Flaming Lips song, and watching the video on the tiny screen, and then he walked out with my iPod, saying he wanted to show it to his girlfriend, who was smoking a cigarette outside, and he’d be right back. But I haven’t got it back yet. I don’t think he was trying to steal it though; he smokes tree and forgets what he’s doing a lot.

He walked out and left me there with that living shadow. Not even knowing he was leaving me with this thing. And it was looking right at me—I could feel its curiosity.

Another one came in, another space demon—that’s what I think I’ll call them, space demons. That sounds so much tighter than silhouette and they look like they’re made out of space.

This one can see us, said the first one to the second one.

It wasn’t exactly in words but that’s what it was saying. When these space demons speak you hear something that your brain turns into words. I don’t know how, exactly, but then I don’t know why I can see them and you can’t.

No, there’s not one in here with us. Something happened so that—I’ll come to that in a minute, dude.

So these things were talking about me.

If he can see us, we can’t hurt him, that’s the rule, said the second one.

It’s a stupid rule, said the first one.

It’s not our rule. It is the rule of those who will destroy us if we break it. We must submit. Perhaps we can persuade him…We could whisper to him…

Now it is you who does not know the rules. If he can see us he cannot be persuaded by us. That is the rule.

We could destroy those around him and create an existential mousetrap, the first one pointed out. An existential mouse-trap will neutralize him.

(Sure I know what existential means—I’m almost nineteen, a freshman in community college already. I had to read The Stranger for a class and the teacher explained.)

“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck you want?” I asked them. They glanced at me but they didn’t answer.

They turned and walked into the corner, then: it was like the lines near the corner where the floor met the walls were the perspective of a street, in the distance—where the two sides of a street come together and you watched someone walk down the street till they’re gone. That’s what it looked like, but really fast, in a few seconds, blip, they vanished into the point where the lines of the corner came together.

“Nurrrrrrrse!” I yelled.

They gave me some Xanax for anxiety and some more tests, and tried to get me to take some Haldol, because I was “hallucinating”—I didn’t take it—and kept me another couple of days. I saw the space demons again when the nurse was wheeling me out to meet my mom for checkout, in my wheelchair. I didn’t really need the wheelchair, it was something about insurance. The Filipino nurse forgot some papers and we had to stop next to one of the other patients in the room, while she went to get them. The beds in most of the rooms are just separated with curtains, in this hospital, and there I was, in my chair, sitting and waiting for her next to this old man’s hospital bed—his final bed, from the look of him—and I saw one of the space demons whispering to him. I could hear its voice in my head. It was telling him to change his will, to cut out his children and give the money to “Lisa”. I had the feeling the old guy didn’t know someone was whispering to him but he was hearing it anyway. I tried to tell him not to listen but he seemed to hear the space demon better than me.

What? Oh—no, I didn’t tell anyone about the space demon talking to the old man. I wanted out of the hospital. I was afraid they’d put me in the “mental hygiene” ward like that guy I used to know in school, Squiddy, who got all tweaked on crystal. Started seeing stuff too—people get paranoid on crystal.

No, I told you, I don’t do that shit. I didn’t do any crystal. No, not even X. Christ.

My dad picked me up and we drove in the minivan back to the cul-de-sac where I live with my parents—just while I go to community college, you understand. We live in El Sobrante, in the East Bay, across from San Francisco. My dad says it’s a typical “satellite community”—he works in some kind of urban planning department for the East Bay so he talks that way.

My dad likes to lecture me in the car because I’m stuck with hearing it there, and all the way home he was talking about how he respected my interest in “extreme sports” and “alternative sports” and all—I didn’t bother to tell him yet again that skateboarding wasn’t alternative or extreme. “All that’s cool, but,” he said, I had to do something else now because I’d been injured and the doctor said I could give myself a blood clot and die if I got a knock like that on the head again. I just shrugged.

When I was, like, 16, I’d have said, No way I’m going to give it up, even if I die! Because—this part I’d have kept back—it’s the only thing I was ever good at. That was before I decided I might learn to be a writer. But now I don’t know if I’ll be anything because of what happened at the cul-de-sac.

When we got there my mom was rushing out the door with Wilmy (it’s short for Willamina), they were on their way to some Middle School soccer game. Wilmy gave me the finger and grinned behind mom’s back. She’s a 12 year old girl but she’s a total jock, and she can do all that stuff I couldn’t do. She’s good at remembering school facts, too. I never was.

“Oooh, there’s my poor honey-honna-bug,” my mom said, as we met them on the front porch. She’s almost as short as Wilmy. That’s where I got what she calls my compactness. She was squinting through her thick glasses at me and wrinkling her nose in that nerdy way she has when she’s looking at you close. “How’s your head? You okay?”

“Better, mom.”

I didn’t say, Better except for the space demons. I was trying to convince myself they’d been hallucinations and they’d go away when my head got better. Even though, as I said, “Better, mom,” I saw a space demon sitting on the eaves of our split level house, with the clouds churning way too fast behind it. Just sitting there, looking down at me: dark space in the shape of a sitting man. Its looking at me felt like once when I walked through a big spiderweb that had been trimmed in cold dew-drops. I felt the dew drops and the web together.

I’m glad my mom and sister were gone when it started happening…

I should tell you that the cul-de-sac, Shady Top Circle, is at the top of a hill, and ringed in by eucalyptus. There are nine houses in the circle, five of them four-bedroom split-levels like ours, the rest ranch style. I’ve seen the street on one of those websites where you can see your neighborhood from way up in the air, and the development looks like bicycle chains all looped next to each other, each house and yard another link in the chain. Our house is right in the middle of the cul-de-sac. Behind the houses there’s a back yard, and then a fence, and a steep drop-off. Not exactly a cliff, just a really high, steep hill.

I still had a bandage on my head, and still felt the throb, but I decided I had to try to see this space demon closer. No, man, I didn’t try and get someone else to look. No one could see him but me. And I know why you’re asking me that, trying to get me to wonder if I’m hallucinating. Reality check, right? Uh uh. Not going to work. I know what happened. It was probably something to do with the head injury. It was like whatever normally blocked off a psychic perception had gotten damaged; the filter was broken, and more was coming through than usual.

My dad told me to go lay down in my bedroom, “as per doctors orders” and I said I would, just as soon as I got a soda in the kitchen. He went into his den to call into work—and I knew that work would suck his attention up and he wouldn’t really notice what I was doing so long as I didn’t make a lot of noise.

I went out back, circled the house, and looked up at the roof—the space demon was gone. Then I saw it’d just moved—it was on the lawn of the house next door, talking to Mrs. Hasslet. One of those old ladies that make their hair blue.

It was telling her that it could open a window into Heaven. It was going to show her paradise.

Mrs. Hasslet, see, was, like, late seventies, and her husband had died six months before—he was in his eighties, a world war two veteran—and she told my mom that since he was gone, life for her was “just a dry husk”. My mom tried to take her to church and get her into volunteering, to cheer her up, but Mrs. Hasslet said that she’d lived to take care of Harvey and now that he was gone she had no meaning. Her kids just acted like she was a pain in the neck when she called, and here was this spinning window into another world opening up, in the center of the circle and it was like it was offering a way out…That’s how it looked, like it was itself some kind of invitation…

All the shapes that should be back of the window, the shapes of houses and posts and mailboxes and trees, were warping, twisting around in a circle, knotting, like there was a navel in space, only the knot kept twisting and twisting, faster and faster, and then things were losing definition in it, pinwheeling and blurring and turning into a circle of light and then inside the circle of light was, just, another place completely. So it was like a window onto this other world. Only it was sort of our world—it was a beautiful ideal version of our cul-de-sac. I could see it the way Mrs. Hasslet saw it. How it looked for her. It was our street but it wasn’t. I mean, like, there were tropical birds in it—Mrs. Hasslet kept a cockatoo, so that’s not surprising. And somebody was walking in from the side, showing themselves in that window. Walking into view through a garden of giant roses. At first I didn’t recognize him because he looked so much younger than when he died—then I realized it was Mr. Hasslet, Harvey Hasslet, standing there waving at his wife. Beckoning to her. She started toward the window—and it receded. When she stopped going toward it, it stopped receding.

No, the space demon said. You must go there the way he did. Through death. He doesn’t want to wait for you any longer. You must go now or lose him!

She stopped for a moment in the street, looking all glazed and puzzled—maybe still trying to figure out who was talking to her and why she was seeing this. Then a Fed Ex truck drove through the window into paradise…

It had really driven into that illusion-window from behind it. As if it had driven through a movie screen from backstage. The truck driver wasn’t seeing this thing, just me and Mrs. Hasslet. The space demons didn’t show themselves to normal people but they could affect what you see with your mind. Only, pretty much one at a time, I guess. So the Fed Ex delivery guy was swinging around Shady Draw Circle, kind of fast, really, faster than he was supposed to, and he came right through that thing looking like he was going to pull up in a moment in front of the house next door…And as he drove through the window into paradise Mrs. Hasslet ran forward and just kind of tipped herself over in front of his wheels. And no, no, I didn’t push her in front of it—I told the cops that and I’m telling you that. She just threw herself under the big white Fed Ex truck. I could hear the CRUNCH when it went over her neck

And the window into paradise vanished. And I yelled…I yelled for awhile…

Then I ran around the house, still yelling, I don’t know what I was yelling, I was really upset. I banged on the window of the den, and yelled for him to call 911. He looked up at me through the window with his mouth open. Then he got the phone. I went back to the street and the truck driver was standing there, crying, this chunky Hispanic dude, sobbing, “But she just came from her yard and she…she…I didn’t…” Ask him if you still think I pushed her. He said it himself: she jumped in front of the truck.

My dad came out of the house and was putting his coat under Mrs. Hasslet’s head, but she was pretty much gone already. I was feeling sick. I told the driver I saw her throw herself under there, it wasn’t his fault, and I thought about telling them about the space demon. My dad was checking her pulse and I was trying to comfort this hysterical driver, and pretty soon the ambulance came—and just as the ambulance was loading the dying old lady, Mrs. Hasslet’s daughter Milly drove up. She had just spontaneously decided to visit her mother. Milly said she had been feeling like she was neglecting her mom and she came over right then and said, “Oh my God, this is all my fault… I didn’t know she was going to commit suicide oh my God, Oh my God, if I’d been more…” Like that, on and on, crying.

My dad went to high school with Milly, he knew her pretty well and he told her it wasn’t her fault. He told me to go to bed, and then he drove Milly to the hospital where they were taking her mom—she was all hysterical, she couldn’t drive—and they followed the ambulance out…The truck driver went with the police, to make his statement and all that…

And I was alone there with the space demons.

Then the space demons went through the walls of Doug Bench’s house—he’s this guy who makes his living selling mostly bullshit on eBay, stuff that looks like it’s valuable but it’s not, and he spends the rest of the time playing World of Warcraft online. He’s this big sloppy guy with bad teeth and matted hair. I looked through the window into his little living room where he’s set up his laptops, he’s got three of them. Two for eBay one for World of Warcraft. He inherited this little ranch-style house from his parents and they’d be pretty upset to see how it’s never ever been clean in there since he moved in—most of it’s taken up by those plastic see-through tubes that his pet white rats run through, like sixty of them, running around in there, stinking the place up. Once he asked my sister to come in and look at his rats and she did and then he put his hand on her butt so she went home. I told her to tell dad but she just said, “For that?!”

Now I could see the rats running through the plastic pipes and around on treadmills and through a plastic cage filled with rat poop and torn newspapers… and I saw the two space demons talking to Bench. They turned and looked at me, through the window. I could feel the look on my skin, again.

Then they pointed at his computer. And his computer monitors all started showing that window into Heaven. Another heaven, though. I couldn’t see what it looked like exactly except I made out pink girl shapes, so I guessed.

He looked sort of glazed and then he went into the garage and he came back with a gas can and started splashing it around—making sure he got the rats, like he couldn’t stand for them to live longer than him—and I was yelling, “Don’t do that, Bench!” And I had my cell out, was calling 911, then I remembered that 911 didn’t work for cells around here, I was trying to remember the emergency number for cell phones—and then WHOOSH and BOOM and I got a face full of glass and smoke and I was sitting on my ass, watching the house burn…

I heard him screaming, in there. And the rats screaming, too. So much more high pitched, like lots of little piccolos played backwards by a crazy piccolo soloist.

I picked bits of glass from my face—no serious damage, just little cuts—and walked over to my house, feeling kind of zombie-like from all I’d seen, just glad my mom and sister weren’t there. There were neighbors outside, and someone was saying they’d called 9 11 and someone else was asking was I okay, and offering to put antiseptic on my cuts and saying I should go to the hospital and then, blip blip, blip, the space demons were among them—five people: three housewives, two retired men—and they all looked over at the interdimensional window into the other place, opening, again, in the middle of the street.

I looked into it too and since there were so many of them looking at it there was no one point of view for me to share on it, so then it was all snowy…and then after a moment I saw it my way. My own paradise. I saw something that looked kind of like the land where Donkey Kong goes—a videogame I played with my dad a lot when I was little, haven’t played it in years—and I saw me and my friends and my family there dancing around and, like, cavorting and shit, in a videogame paradise with Donkey Kong. How were we cavorting? Well—skateboarding down waterfalls, in this kinda perfected digital Hawaii. Dancing and skateboarding and swimming. And I did long to go there, but I knew better, and since I’d seen the space demons they didn’t have any strong power over me. But for the others it was different, the space demons had dipped into their brains, in some way; they’d really gotten into their wiring. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It was persuasion, yeah, but it was a kind of deep-in-your-brain persuasion. It was like jacking an Ethernet cable into them. But right into their souls.

There were three space demons now. And then a fourth one, climbing down the smoke from Bench’s burning house like someone climbing down a ladder. Then sliding down a plume of flame to drop to the street…

This is a marvelous experiment, this new space demon said to the other two. I’ve always wanted to do this. To use their theological illusions in a sociobiological setting…The irony is delightful, the data indubitable…

I’m not sure it follows the rules, said the fourth.

But we are not in violation with certitude. If we concentrate our influence…The protocols of this methodology…

They sounded like scientists, to me. I started wondering, then, about this experiment I heard about where these really old scientists were trying to be immortal through some kind of downloading of their minds, copying themselves onto some computer program, and I remember someone asking them, “But what happens to their souls if you put their identities on that machine, won’t their souls get lost when they die?”

And the scientists said, “Ha! There are no souls!”

And the other guy said, “But what if there are souls? What happens if you’re copying yourself in some way—but not the souls?”

But I heard, on the internet, that a bunch of them had done the experiment and…something had gone wrong but no one could find out what, it was all hushed up. So maybe this was what. These guys talked like lost scientists. Like sick, lost scientists. But they acted like you think demons are going to act, too. Setting people up that way. Because what else are demons, but lost souls? And what happens to them, they get sucked into some bigger thing’s agenda, when they’re lost. Doing work for some other, like, entity…

I didn’t hear what was said after that, because I was trying to tell the neighbors not to listen to the space demons, I was really upset and crying and they were saying I was crazy or else plain not listening to me and then they were staring at that little Puerto Rican lady, Mrs. DeSanto—she was climbing the tree. A really high eucalyptus tree behind Bench’s—and it had caught on fire from the explosion in his house. She climbed almost to the top of this tree, around the burning parts, but it was catching her dress on fire anyway. I had heard from her daughter she was on some kind of antidepressants and then she had gone off them and gotten kind of weird so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when she was the next one. She was ignoring the flames going up her housedress, and everyone yelling at her—and then she just jumped, from near the top, coming down like a roaring lady comet, WHUMP onto the street. Thinking she was getting a short cut into paradise that way, see. Someone started listening to me, finally, with that one: Danny Brewster, the Reverend Brewster’s bucktoothed son. Senior at El Sobrante high. “Three suicides, something is happening, for sure, dude,” he said.

“It’s the paradise window,” I said. “The space demons make ‘em see that and they kill themselves to get there.”

“Okay, you’re all fucked up too,” he said. Took a step back from me like I had a disease he didn’t want to catch. “You dose these people? You on something, dude?”

I told him, Oh never mind. I tried to talk to the adults there—but they weren’t listening. Especially the older ones—they were staring at the paradise window, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, each seeing something different. Hearing how they had to get there…how a quick death would be the sure way…

Mr. Baolaban—this gangly black guy immigrated from somewhere around Australia—he was chanting something in some native language and climbing a power pole. He clipped into a wire there. I yelled at him to stop—but he broke the wire and grabbed it and fell off the pole, hit the ground hard, clutching the live broken end, spasming as the electricity went through him, his body rippling on the sidewalk.

The cops and fire trucks and ambulances were just getting there when that Chinese lady whose name I don’t know, and a heavy set blond woman I don’t know either, both of them grabbed onto Mr. Baolaban and started to go all spastic too, with their hair standing up and sparks jumping out of their mouths and their shoes flying off, all three electrocuted, and the fire trucks were rumbling in there pretty fucking fast, man, and two more people came out of their houses, Mr. Gimbelowski the alcoholic and that young guy from Pakistan who always seems so homesick, and they threw themselves under the fire truck’s tires before the trucks had quite come to a stop and then Reverend Brewster drove up, looking for his son, but the space demons crowded around him and said in paradise he would be forgiven for being a homosexual if he went now and took his son, and he tried to drag Danny over to the power lines but the cops pulled him away and then Reverend Brewster grabbed a cop’s gun and shot Danny and himself in the head and one of the cops pulled his own gun and started waving it around hysterically and Mrs. Galworthy rushed at the cop waving the gun, jabbing at his eyes with a nail file, forcing him to shoot and he blew her brains out, and he screamed, himself, as if he’d been the one shot, and then an old lady from the corner house, at the opening of the cul-de-sac, was trying to get away from two firemen, and she bit one on the wrist and he lost his grip on her and I saw why they’d been holding her: she bolted into Bench’s house, which was all flames, and threw herself into it, saying something about going through Hell to Heaven—she didn’t scream for long, only about ten seconds—and then someone fell face down WHOOSH SPLAT right next to me on the pavement, jumped from the top of the highest house in the street and to my left that pale guy with the beard who talks to himself and throws his mail down, I never did know his name, he knocked down an ambulance driver and then he was driving the ambulance real fast through a fence, knocking down the slats, WHAP-CRUNCH, WHAP-CRUNCH WHAP-CRUNCH, following the fence back, knocking the boards down one after another, with splinters flying, all the way into the back yard and right off that near-cliff, down the steep hill, the ambulance turning over and over—we could hear it crunching and bouncing—and that Mrs. Klepsky whose husband had left her, who used to come to Mom’s book club coffee klatch and then started avoiding her, the one whose face was so tight from all those operations—she was sticking a burning rag in her SUV’s gas tank and then climbing into it and the cops were yelling at her but then BOOM! it went off and she was in a fireball and then WHOOSH SPLAT someone jumped out of a tree and hit the ground next to that previous WHOOSH SPLAT and…

And the cops were dragging me away, asking me what I knew about this, hadn’t this started with me somehow, what was going on, was I on drugs, had I dosed those people? Comparing it to Columbine, in some shady-ass way. And then I saw the space demons were talking to those cops and the cops were glaring at me, and the space demons were talking and talking to them, and two of the space demons seemed to be rolling joyously around on the ground and quivering in a kind of ecstasy, as the sirens screamed and the burning houses crackled—because the fire was spreading around the cul-de-sac now—and people screamed in pain and somebody else went WHOOSH SPLAT onto the street from above…

Man it was fucked up.

I was really glad when the cops shoved me in the back of a cruiser. Officer Blume, whom I know—he’s actually the older brother of a friend of mine—was telling the others not to hit me, he didn’t see how I could be responsible, it was like he was fighting that space demon influence, and he was the one who drove me to the police station…

Well. That’s most of what happened. Nobody believes me. I shouldn’t have told anyone about the space demons because they think that if I’m making up something like that—they just assume I’m making it up—well then, I must be covering up something. And why, they want to know, was I the only one not affected back there?

I’ve tried to explain that—and that the only reason they don’t believe me is because the space demons did all that suggestion, all that brain washing. On them.

They just shake their heads.

So, now I’m telling you, Mr. Court Appointed Psychiatrist, and you can believe what you want.

I’ve stopped seeing the space demons. Because at the police station, the space demons started talking about rules again, and said they were going to have to report somewhere, and then they just went. Blip, and blip, blip, blip right into the corners.

I can still see things you can’t, though. If I want, if I sort of squint, I can see a window into another place. Only, I see what it really is, in the next world. What that other place really is. It has a kind of screen over it, and on that screen we project what we think we want to see. But I can see past that, into the real afterlife. Into bardos, they call them. My Aunt Gilliam gave me that TibetanBook of the Dead about bardos. And I can see right into them…

I see Reverend Brewster and Mrs. DeSanto and Danny and Mrs. Klepsky and Bench and Mrs. Hasslet and the others over there. They’re going around and around, bumping into one another, weeping, in a thing that is an endless drain that never finishes draining, a spiritual cul-de-sac without an exit; they’re stuck there from looking, from looking, from looking-looking-looking for what they were told would be there, and looking for it is keeping them there, in something that’s not Heaven, or Hell. Not really hell exactly. Those people are stuck, just endlessly hungry and wandering in circles inside circles, right Outside Time; they’re caught up in a place where certain kinds of lost souls go. And where they stay, for thousands of years, and sometimes longer…and maybe forever.

And the scientists, the space demons are there too, doing experiments on them. Experimenting and testing and conjecturing. Around and around.

It’s all they know how to do.

-end-


03
Feb 10

**THOSE WHO COME TO DAGON**

This is a Lovecraftian story I wrote for “High Seas Cthulhu” – hopefully this will promote that anthology, and High Seas Cthulhu 2 which is now in the works. And now:

THOSE WHO COME TO DAGON
John Shirley

The Journal of Caleb Ward

June 21 (?) 1806

Leseur, the Bosun of a lost ship, declares me foolish to expend strength dashing off these lines, for all of us in the launch of the late HMS Feveringale feel the weakness of eleven days at sea without food and little more than a mouthful of fresh water for two days running. I hope that though we perish in the launch, my papers might be preserved and found with my body, if inclement weather does not consign it to the deeps. How I could wish for a rainstorm to bestow drinking water on us, if the storm did not blow overhard; one such gale, rendering but little rainwater, took our launch’s only mast. O for fresh water! The equatorial heat is relentless, and I feel my throat chafe against itself, and burn with salt. Sometimes Tantalus has his way with us, when we scent the greenness of the West African coast, and espy a bit of palm or liana floating in the sea, but the current never carries us close enough to bring hope of a landfall.

The Reverend Mothe, though his voice sounds like a rusty pump, continues to spout of Providence, to be of good cheer, for God will not forget us. I have not succumbed to the temptation to ask him why God should remember us and not the scores of men (and the cook’s wife) who died in the fire, or in the consequent sinking of the Feveringale.

I have long been one of “The Lord’s Stray Lambs”: My regard for His creation was blackened by the knowledge of my inherited fate, even before we few survivors of the catastrophe were cast adrift, for as a young man I watched as my father died of a cancer; his going was slow and terrible. He had not seen forty summers. I know that my grandfather, and his father, died in the same way. The disease is in our blood and I fancy I feel it working its malignity upon me already. So it was that at close to the age my father was when he was stricken, I gave off clerking at the bank and took to poetry and the penning of Observations for the Weekly Journals reckoning that at least I might live out my greatest hopes for myself, for a few months…

And then this! Cast adrift in an open boat! Yet it may be that this death by drowning or thirst is preferable to death by the slow inner consuming of cancer. It may be that this is a mercy after all. I could only wish I had died quickly on the Feveringale.

Any who chance to find this hasty journal will remark that the edges of the paper are scorched. I did manage to snatch a few necessaries from my trunk, even as the flames that engulfed the ship seared the trunk’s right side—I burnt my fingers lightly doing so—and to one whose hope is to write for the Boston Gazette, quill, ink and paper are more necessary than the dueling pistol and compass I snatched up as an afterthought. (I do hope my handwriting is legible, there being more than enough swell and pitch and salty spray to make writing difficult. I fear my ink may dry out and sometimes I am tempted to drink it).

We had survived an encounter with privateers, Captain O’Brian having outrun them when they lost a mizzen, and we had triumphed over a breached gun-room which flooded because a drunken sailor forgot to close a port—we weathered these vicissitudes only to have the ship burn down around us for the misplacing of a candle! Dr Bessemen insists it was not he who left the candle too close to a case of spirits, but the fire commenced in his quarters. His loblolly boy, not having survived the fire, cannot protest his innocence.

In truth, so far as we know, only those of us in the launch survive–dour old Bessemen, Gaddle the squint-eyed first mate, sallow, glowering Leseur (whose presence has always made me uneasy), the sailors Brackin and Milford, Sargeant Sparks of the Marines, and myself. We are all quite burnt and bearded now, looking like people any one of us would have avoided on the street in Boston—or perhaps London, for I am the only American, on a voyage that should have taken us to the Canary Islands, and though our nations are at peace, I have been more than once the object of a fully unjustified suspicion. Would I be so absurd as to sabotage a ship in which I myself am sailing?

There is a strange smell in the air, a foul reek carried on the rising breeze from the south: a dead whale nearby, perhaps. O and this is cruel, the ink is quite drying out. It does not mix well with seawater but I shall att

#

June 25, 1806

I was unable to finish my sentence, at the conclusion of the previous entry, for want of serviceable ink, but I recommence my journal aboard the ship which has picked us up, for here ink is plentiful, thanks to the generosity of Captain Hoek, the stout, bluff Dutchman who is the chief Argonaut of the Burdened Pelican: a brig of two masts, a ship neither big nor small. Only the peeling paint on the bow declares the ship’s true name; her captain and crew call her “the dratted ol’ Pelican.”

Three days I’ve been on this leaky old vessel, recovering strength, as the ship works its way north to Holland. Yet it makes scarcely any headway; “’tis all leeway”, says the bushy-browed Captain—he speaks always around the ancient curved pipe clutched in his teeth, a pipe usually turned upside down and empty of tobacco. “The winds, the winds rush agin’ us and agin’ all natural blowin’, for the should northerin’ this time of year, do ye hear? But they blow southwest and we must tack, and beat and tack again and more, and scarcely any progress do we make. We must find an island to stop for water and meat, soon, if the wind do not change…” And so the time wears away, with little progress in our journey—but at least we are rescued!

The other survivors of the Feveringale, perhaps surfeited with the sight of one another, have largely kept to themselves. I have a cabin to myself, once belonging to an officer now lost at sea. The officer was lost along with the ship’s doctor and several other men during an “unnatural blow”, as Hoek has it, not long before we were picked up. (They were pleased to have a new doctor, in our Bessemen, but when they discover his drunkenness and absence of real parts, they will be less sanguine.) Yet the First Mate, Van Murnk, a heavy-cheeked man with hair so blond it is almost white and a face so sun burned he sometimes resembles a Red Indian—a man, indeed, perpetually sodden with drink—claims that those who went missing, including “even Monsieur Galange…took it on their own to hie to the sea, and have not yet left us, mein herr, but follow in our wake.” He would say no more and I had no wish to pursue his meaning and encourage the fallacies and fancies so common to sailors.

Van Murnk is not alone in his oddity; it must be said that it is, withal, a strange ship. The crew seem sullen and fearful except for discrete occasions when they are caught up in an inexplicable and outlandish glee, their eyes feverish, their mien giddy; they have a proclivity for gathering in groups far aft, whereupon they take up tittering and whispering…

Today is Sunday. Captain Hoek rigged church, this morning, and read from Proverbs, a certain desperation in his voice; but most of the crew remained well apart from the ceremony, staring with hollow eyes in the dull light of the overcast morning; with a cast of face both unreceptive and obscurely ashamed.

#

June 26, 1806

It called for some persuading—they were strangely uninclined—but I have taken a meal with Dr Bessemen, Rufe Gaddle, and Reverend Mothe. The Doctor and Gaddle seemed to share an unvoiced mutual understanding–something dire, judging by their expressions, and the dark glances they exchanged, their resonant silences. The pastor seems to be at odds with them over some matter he does not wish to evince in my presence.

“Have you not heard a sort of droning from below decks and aft?” I prompted, as we sat over our watered-down after dinner porto. “And other sounds I could not identify, a kind of squawking, a squeaking sound that almost seemed to form words? I went to investigate and found the way blocked by Leseur. He turned me back and refused to explain. The fellow was more forbidding than ever—the only one of us not to avail of the ship’s razors since our rescue. A bit of beard is quite natural but he is as shaggy as an old bear. And the look in his eyes! Like a bear indeed—but a bear with a toothache!” Thus I tried to disarm them with levity, to ease the taut atmosphere and perhaps provoke confidences. But my attempts at humor at Leseur’s expense were met with sullen stares from Gaddle and the doctor—who was quite noddingly drunk—and a long sigh from the Reverend.

At last the Reverend said, “Indeed I have heard the noises of which you speak.” He gave the other two a vinegary look of accusation. “Perhaps someone else might share their knowledge of these…sounds.”

“Why,” said the doctor, after a pull at his porto, “they are but sea chantys. And you heard a cat, the ship’s cat. How they do like to tease the poor brute.”

Sea chantys! I most certainly had heard nothing of the sort. But I could draw them out no further, and after some grudging speculation about the weather and hope for a landfall, we adjourned.

I then went to the deck for some air, and met a man there I must describe. I find myself bemused by this most peculiar individual, a man the hue of coal who has only just emerged after several days in his cabin, and who now strides the deck as freely as any of the whites: one Louis Nukanga, an “associate in business” of the Captain.

Nukanga wears a fine suit of clothing, and his head is shaved bald. His only departure from European dress is the copper on his wrists, bracelets that one only sees when he lifts his arms to some task or gesture, and the sleeves fall back. I found myself staring at them as he approached the rail close by me and raised a spy glass to scan the western horizon, just at sunset.

“The island, I feel its loom,” he said (to himself, though I stood close beside him at the rail). “The island…” So he muttered as he peered through the spyglass. He said something more in his own language—I know not what, precisely, but it had the sound of frustrated longing.

It was then that I saw the bracelets, and made out the figures carved upon them. On the underside of the wide bracelet clasping his left wrist was a graven image of a creature I at first supposed some cephalopod of the deep, until I beheld its lower body that was almost like a man’s; the other bracelet showed the image of a thing like a great scaled worm, with the face of a man, and tentacles bristling here and there—rude spirits of the African continent, I’m sure. The images seemed to spring out at me from the bracelets. I seemed to see both too easily, as if they drifted from their metal hosts and floated upon the air. Under each image was writing in a script I could not read; I have seen samples of ancient Sumerian, and while it was not Sumerian perhaps it was not so different. Strange, for that land was far north of the equatorial Africa from whence Nukanga sprang.

I pressed him for an account of his provenance. He hails from the jungles two days march inland of the Gulf of Guinea, a place “not so far south of the Niger River”, so he told me, where he had struck a deal with a Frenchman named Galange who was in partnership with Captain Hoek. A freed slave, educated by his Master in England, Nukanga had returned to a place called, “to freely translate, the Uneasy Mountain.” Here was the home of his youth, but he found the entire village in bondage to M. Galange, who was searching for treasure, commanding a small but well-armed cadre of Dutch and French brigands to force labor upon the natives. At gunpoint, Nukanga’s people dug shafts into the mountain, fruitlessly searching for rumored wealth.

“The search was wont to kill my people,” said Nukanga grinning, “So I showed Galange where he and Hoek could get what they desired, in exchange for a special arrangement for myself…Of course, I have promised them another treasure, in another place, on their return. If I did not, they would have cut my throat as I slept, so that I would not trouble them for my share…but Galange will do no more harm—he has gone from the ship…In a sense.”

I registered his words but distantly; it was his grin that transfixed my attention. His teeth were covered in copper, and each one, I saw in the ruddy gleam of the setting sun, was inscribed with one of the unknown letters of the sort etched into his bracelet. What did his grin spell out?

“You try to read my teeth, eh?” he said, chuckling, lowering his spyglass. “These names you cannot read; their alphabet you are not likely to know. They are names you may yet wish to call out! You may wish to call them… and implore, yes implore for their mercy!” His eyes were glittering with a contained, cruel mirth as he spoke. “But you do not know how to cry out to them, to call for mercy, mercy!”

Stung by his contempt, which he hardly troubled to conceal, I felt constrained to reply, somehow. “I call on no deities, sir, neither yours nor those of my own land,” I declared. “I am a man of the new era, a man who values Reason, and such men, the hope of the world, deny all superstitions—meaning no disrespect to your beliefs.”

“Superstitions? If you meet a god, will you then believe?”

“Yes, if I recognize his godliness! But there are those who claim to bear gods within them—I have heard of such things, in the West Indies, a practice called voudoun—and to meet this ‘god’ is to meet a man deluded!”

“I do not speak of such,” he said, snorting dismissively, collapsing the spyglass with a sharp report of metal on metal. “I speak of…but soon enough, soon enough…” And with that he turned away, muttering in quite another language, and went below. So ended my interlocution with Mr Nukanga!

Only a few heartbeats later I was joined by the captain, who had been drinking with Dr Bessemen. “Your Bessemen cannot hold his liquor—one bottle, or mebbe it was two, and he babbles without sense, and then falls to snore!” He clutched the rail and in his drunkenness seemed to sway in exact counterpoise to the swaying of the westering ship, his upright body like the inverted working of a pendulum. “My friend,” he said, breathing a gust of spirits upon me, the unlit pipe wagging in a corner of his mouth, “what think ye of Nukanga?”

“He seems a strange mix of the learned and the superstitious! And he spoke obscurely of an island…”

“An island? Did he now?” He turned and peered into the gathering gloom, and sniffed the air. “I believe I can smell it. Land.” He removed the pipe and called up to the lookout in the crow’s nest. “Ho! You there! Do you see land to the west? An island?”

“I do not, captain!” came the reply.

“Well watch close! We need the water, damn you!”

He then addressed me, while swaying in place and packing the pipe with tobacco he kept loose in a weskit pocket. “I do not trust Nukanga…he is a Jonah! Since he came on board the winds blow us always west, no matter how we beat and tack, tack and beat. Always west and even south! And our route is north and east!”

“For my part, I am glad the wind has taken you out of your way, for I’d have perished on the sea otherwise. But perhaps you are concerned to protect your cargo, captain? We are driven into the sea-lanes of privateers by these winds…”

“My cargo?” He looked at me suspiciously. “What do ye know of that?”

“Nukanga says he helped you find a treasure, but he did not say what treasure…”

“Aye, if he said so much, it can’t matter if ye know—and you seem an honest man. I would trust you, for I have need of someone to tell my mind. There are few enough—perhaps there is no one—I can trust…Come!”

He staggered away and I followed. We made our way below decks, the captain swearing when he nearly fell going down the ladder. The captain catching up a lantern along the way, we wended a narrow, malodorous corridor, descended two more ladders, each deck’s passageway more noisome than the last, until we came to a locked room. Here a sailor leaning on the bulkhead nodded in sleep, musket clutched against him, keeping some sort of watch.

“Idiot pig!” The captain bellowed, snatching the musket and slapping the hapless fellow so that he stumbled sputtering away. “Ye sleep when I pay you to guard my cargo? Ach, I should hang you!”

Some time a-fumbling later, the captain found his key and unlocked the heavy padlock and bade me come in. Within the low-ceilinged hold were a row of five goodly chests. “In the other hold, below, there is crude tin, copper, and other ores, but here is the real treasure! Now let your eyes feast, Mr Caleb Ward!”

He unlocked the nearest of the chests and flung its lid back. At first I thought it filled with rough rocks of quartz, but when he lifted the lantern over the chest I saw the blue glimmerings, as if from a multiplicity of eyes, shining back from the pure hearts of the gems. “Diamonds!” I cried.

“Quiet! Never so loud, ye hear?” he hissed. “Rough they are, but diamonds right enough. Five chests full! All mine, and Nukanga’s—Galange has gone missing from the ship, I do not like to guess at how it happened. So he will not share the diamonds—so sad! And Nukanga offers four times as many in another place—but only when he is paid, he says, in Amsterdam! It was in Galange’s mind, before we left the village, to make Nukanga tell of this other place—to use ropes and fire to make him tell. But I have no belly for torture, and who knows what friends the man might have, for he has cozened to some in civilized places! So I bear Nukanga, though he sneers and speaks in dark cupboards to the men, speaks things I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “Things…I don’t know.”

He tried to light his pipe on the lantern, and repeatedly failed. In the end I held the lantern for him while he puffed the pipe alight—I was fearful of fire on the wooden ship, after what had happened to the Feveringale. Another kind of fire, a blue fire, glimmered in the chest of rough gems. The diamonds, I confess, made my heart pound. So many! And I was so poor! But I had been raised austerely and was unable to think of larceny, but for a fitful moment.

“Captain,” I said, “I am indeed awed. You will be a rich man! But surely there are mysteries on this ship—there is murmuring, there is something like a chant, late at night, heard in the deep aft…Seeing this treasure, perhaps the mystery is solved. Could not the sounds I heard be a crew in conspiratorial colloquy? Could they not be thinking of making this treasure their own?”

“Eh?” He turned and looked at the door, then hastened to close the chest. “Ye think I would trust them? They don’t know! They think it’s all tin and copper ore. Ye have seen, and Nukanga, and none other! For this crew are not the men we took with us to the interior. Those men wait for us at the village of the Uneasy Mountain.”

“What then, is the trouble with the crew, captain? Is it my imagination?”

“As to that ye have heard— they do something aft, and below, in the orlop! O, aye, there is a sickness on this ship, a slow, infectious madness, like a man crying out in fever…while there is no fever! And something has taken our own doctor, and four of my best hands!”

“But with respect, Captain Hoek, are you not master of your ship? Surely you can penetrate this mystery by demanding an explanation; by entering the orlop where these rites are held, and seeing for yourself!”

“Had I courage… Something about the business affrighted me, so I sent the doctor, that night, as the storm rose…and where is he now? It was that very night he went missing, with them others! The crew say those five was swept o’er board. Myself, I think something…something other.”
“What other, Captain?”

“Ach, my head hurts, I speak strange things when the drink begins to wear off. Have ye not noticed how many crew are hiding below, saying they are sick? How few remain to work the ship? I have almost no one left to turn to–and I say this: if you would find out what goes on below, you would find me grateful.”

He would say no more. But I determined to do as he requested. I shall write a great story for the newspaper—I sense it coming!

#

I wrote out the previous entry two hours ago. It seems an age.

After I spoke to the captain, I went, on deck to stand brooding by the aft rail. A strong wind blew from the east, filling the sails, driving us west, ever west, at about seven knots. I had heard one of the hands say that it seemed if the captain tried to tack, the wind shifted, to continue pushing the vessel west, as if actively, deliberately frustrating his efforts!

The wind in my face, I watched as the failing light seemed to soak into the glimmering white tips of waves, to re-emerge in the luminescence of the Pelican’s wake. Like diamonds!

I beheld something, then, disporting in the seam the ship cut in the sea. Dolphins? Seals? Sometimes I thought so, other times I thought they were more disturbing shapes; I thought I saw a buckle here, upon one, a strip of cloth trailing from another. There were at least three of them, sometimes I thought there were more. Whenever I supposed I had distinguished their shape, it would seem to change, skirled and washed in the dark sea, and I was again unsure of the creature’s form. The thought came that they might be sharks, with bits of human victims trailing from their jaws…

Then a light opened on the stern of the ship, close to the waterline. It was as if a hatch—something I’ve never seen so low on a ship before—had been opened. Lamplight shone on the water and I looked eagerly to try to see what creatures followed in our wake, but as if aware of my scrutiny, they dropped back into shadow…I thought I saw something, before they went—a human face, staring up at me from the water. Perhaps a dead man, caught in some old fishing line…

I thought to tell the captain—but then the chanting began, the sound coming from that same square of light, the anomalous hatch on the stern. I could not make out what was said. Sometimes I thought I heard, repeated amidst the gibberish, “Dagon…thool-hew…dagon…thool-hew…”

And the inchoate shapes in the wake of the ship seem to hiss and thrash in response. I heard a sibilant squeaking from them—like a dolphin trying to form words, and failing.

A chill spread out from the back of my head, to seep corrosively down my spine, seeming to drain all firmness from it, and I clutched the rail that I might remain standing.

“Come, this is foolishness!” I told myself. “Go now and see what is below and do not let your imagination play upon you! You wish a story to tell—here is one waiting to be found out!”

So I made myself go below, in search of the orlop…stopping momentarily at my cabin for that dueling pistol. I once more had to summon strength of will to continue my undertaking, for I had a sudden persuasive desire to lock the door of my cabin from within and sit on my hammock with that pistol in my hand, my eyes fixed on the door, the gun at ready…

No sir, I told myself. You will not hide from adventure. It is what you came to sea to find.
Thence I set out, making my way, lantern in hand, down two ladders and along the passage toward the stern—toward the orlop.

Just a few paces outside the door to the orlop I found my way blocked, once more, by Leseur, who seemed to huddle into the dim shadows of the narrow passage like a tunnel spider in its den. The light from my lantern seemed to shy from him; to quail just short of him. I was determined, this time, that he would not deter me—and a feverish curiosity was beginning to replace the fear that had crawled from that primeval cranny at the back of my brain, my inquisitiveness tugged by the droning chant from beyond the closed orlop door.

“Leseur—move aside, if you please!” I said, trying to keep the quavering in my hands from reaching my voice. “I have this night entered into Captain Hoek’s service and he has sent me to make certain inquiries in the orlop.”

When Leseur spoke, the sound seemed to come, muffled, from the base of his throat, and a sickly reek came with it, something more alien than a man’s foul breath—and it was a smell I thought I recognized. I had caught it once before…

“You may not pass unless Nukanga says aye.”

“Move aside I say! I have a pistol, as you see—and I will make use of it!”

He turned and put a hand on the door—and there seemed a splaying in the spread of his fingers, as if each was melting into the next. I felt a shivering ring out from his contact with that door; it resonated through the damp timbers of the old ship, so that its seams worked in response, oozing with seawater; I was obscurely aware that water was pooling, very slowly, at my feet. Then the door opened; a glutinous yellow light silhouetted Nukanga from behind: a dark figure but for his teeth shining copper-red in the feebler light of the lantern I held. I leaned to peer around him, but could scarcely make out the room beyond; I glimpsed a great coil of rope, the outlines of a group of men seated on it, their backs to me, facing that anomalous hatch in the stern. The hatch, hastily built, had been of recent devising. And there was the smell of compressed seawater and decayed fish and living muck, that distinctive reek from the bottom-most trench of the sea…
I knew then where I had smelled it before—that day in the launch, just before we were sighted by the Pelican.

“So — you have come to us? I thought you would,” said Nukanga. “Come a little closer and look, Caleb Ward…”

Leseur grudgingly pressed aside—there was just enough room to squeeze past him, an inexpressibly disgusting process, to slip into the orlop after Nukanga. I looked scrutinized the semicircle of crew. There were Brackin and Sparks and Gaddle and Milford and Van Murnk and two others, Hoek’s crewmen, I had seen when I first came…and Bessemen.

But Bessemen was lying upon the deck, curled on his side, within the circle of rope on which the others sat, and he was not alone. He was clutched against a being not quite twice his bulk, a thing green-black and wetly slick; a creature with the proportions of a human woman but at its throat were gills, and in place of human eyes were round yellow orbs on the two sides of its oblate head; in place of hair on its head were tresses of slender fins; its mouth…

O it’s hard to write it; for that means I must again invoke the picture; I must once more see that lamprey mouth, that great round fibrous, membranous sucker clapped over Bessemen’s eyes and forehead, sucking, and pulsing; taking and replacing…and Bessemen squirmed in the thing’s grip, struggled to escape, his hands clawing, his bare feet scrabbling at the deck, finding no purchase, no escape. He was like a feeble child trying hopelessly to wrest free even as it was strangled by a brutish overpowering mother.

And Bessemen’s nether parts, too, were entangled with the thing, were penetrated and penetrating, but of this I cannot bear to speak. I stared and choked and turned away, covering my eyes, even as the men seated on the coil of rope persisted in their chant, gurgling and squeaking syllables no human mouth was made to express, invocations interspersed with the litany, Thool-hew eck dagon, thool-hew eck dagon!

“Ho ho, my little friend,” chortled Nukanga as I tried to claw my way from the orlop. “What is the matter? Hm? Do you suppose this man is the victim of a bestial predation?” He locked powerful hands on my shoulders and held me back with little apparent effort. “Not at all! He begged for this! He is but in the throes of transfiguration! And my friend—” He spun me about and looked me in the eye. “He will never die!”

The words struck to the aching quick of me. He will never die!

I wanted to run—but it was as if those words spiked me to the spot. “What?” I rasped. “What do you mean?”

“All men crave immortality–but immortality in this world comes with a price! But wait—what is this I see? For I am a magus of my people, and I see a man’s fate written in his eyes…”

He took the wrist of my left hand, and drew it close between us so that the lantern which I still held shone into my eyes. I blinked and tried to turn away. But with his other hand he took my chin in his big hand and turned my face to him. “Hold! I would look into your eyes…some gaze into a crystal ball to see a man’s living fate but I would look into these soft orbs and see…your death! I see you lying on a hammock of a ship, and I see blood streaming from your mouth! You clutch at your chest and you groan but there is no doctor to attend you! You die the death of your father and his father and his father before him! A cancer eats at you and will take you before this year is worn away! Look—see for yourself!”

And then he struck my forehead with the heel of his hand, and it was as if the vision he had of my death was carried in the blow, from his hand into my flesh and bone and into my brain where it rippled mockingly before my mind’s eye. I saw it clearly, more clearly than I see the paper on which I now scribble this account. I saw myself dying in a hammock, in a small, mold-splashed room; dying as my father had–all the signs of his death upon me. And I saw that it would be soon. And I knew the truth of this vision, as I would know the face of my own father, were I to behold him again. It was the truth of recognition. This was my death.

“But wait!” Nukanga said, as the image dissolved into his coppery grin, his exultant eyes. “That is your death as a man! And there is no escaping your death as a man! But if you were to become other than a man—then the curse of your destiny is lifted, and you will not die that death, you will not die at all…not if you become as those who come to Dagon!”

“No…” My heart shriveled with in me as I began to comprehend.

“Choose! Only choose! Dagon has seen you, from the wake of the ship! Dagon has looked into you from the depths of the sea and Dagon desires you! You are choice, something quite choice to Dagon! Come to Dagon, and live forever…or die alone, spitting blood in that damp, forgotten ship’s cabin…with no one to attend you, no one to pity you, no one to care!”

Then he let go of my shoulders and I staggered away, past Leseur, who was emitting a high pitched bark and a terrible stench—the sound, the smell, of his laughter.

#

June 27, 1806

It is morning and yet it is not morning.

Somewhere in this ashen mist, the sun has arisen. An etiolated light has diffused the mist. But it is scarcely like real day. We stalk the deck, looking to the West. Our eyes are burning and we can scarce see through the murk, but we sense the loom of the land; we smell stone and beach and fire and jungle.

“This is a volcano island,” said Hoek, beside me on the quarterdeck, peering through the mist, wiping his eyes, peering again. “The kind that gives out smoke but never erupts. Just smoke and smoke and it churns with the fog and this soup we have, to choke in, ye hear? So little wind. Hardly a breath! Would I could turn away from this—but we have need water, we have need supplies…” He looked at me as if he wanted to ask what I had learned in my foray the night before. But I shook my head and turned away and he grunted as if in some personal confirmation.
I could not bear to think about it, let alone talk of it. Only with an inner struggle was I able to force myself to make this written account.

One phrase keeps returning to my mind, this morning…

He will never die!

No. I will not listen to that voice. I would rather die than lose my humanity.

I attempted to seek counsel from the Reverend Mothe. But the pastor will not heed me; he kneels, praying—coughing and supplicating—beside the mainmast. He will respond to no one. He prays with the desperate ardor of one who begins to doubt that he is heard.

I feel safer in my cabin, now, scribbling away, though the candle gutters as if it might go out—but it is even harder to breathe here, somehow. I will go on deck, and see if, perhaps, the wind has changed.

#

I have been on deck, and I wish I had not gone. The sky was a little clearer—the wind blows from the east again, and has broomed some of the ashen sky; the island broods nigh, dominated by a dark cone nestled in jungle so green it is almost black; streams that emerge from the hills about the volcano running dark down to the sea, like streaks of blood.

We are still almost a mile out from the rocky cove. And we are moving in, despite all the Captain can do.

For after the voice that came from the sea, the Captain wanted to move away from the island.

It was a feeble voice, a squeak and a hoarseness, but Hoek claimed he recognized it. “That is…that is Galange! One of those who was lost overboard! Ach–do ye hear it?”

“In name of God, arête! Turn back, Hoek.” Came the voice, a French tinge to it. Nom de Dieu! Do not surrender. Do not listen. All here is poisoned! Go back, j’implorer! In name of God…kill me! Fetch a musket and kill me!”

I thought to see a man writhing in the dark waves, about a cable ahead of us, but then again not a man, for he had round yellow lidless eyes, and hands that were not hands. And then there was a great splashing about him, and the man gave a cry of despair as other hands, webbed and clawed—hands so dark-green they were almost black, like the jungle about the volcano—clutched at him from all sides, and dragged him under.

Then he was gone. But we seem to hear him still crying, Fetch a musket and kill me!

The captain, his face gone whiter than his vessel’s sails, turned and shouted orders at the affrighted crew. “You there, wheel her about! We will tack, and turn about! We will lower a boat and pull the ship if we must…but we will not go to that island!”

So the few crewmen still willing to respond tried to turn about—and we had not gotten but a few strakes turned before there was a splashing and crackling from the rudder, and the Captain made haste to the stern. I followed him and looked over the rail…and saw that the rudder had snapped away. Or perhaps I should say, it had been snapped away. Something had torn it off. The ship was now drifting rudderless. And the wind was shifting, as if of its own accord…and driving us in toward the island.

Hoek went about the ship, trying to steer the ship by adjusting the sails—but nothing availed us. There was another force pushing us in: swimmers, many swimmers, not quite seen in the murk and dark water; we saw the splashing of their legs, their finny limbs, as they put shoulders to the hull of the ship and directed it into the dark stone arms of the cove.

“Do you fear this consummation?” Nukanga asked me, as he joined me at the bow of the ship…as the island loomed near. “Do not fear it. You do not wish to die young, alone, coughing blood like your father. Surrender to the god whom my people once knew—who many worshipped, in many places, and knew by many names! Once we were a seafaring people, who lived on the shores. But seeking to end the surrender of certain our children to the dark gods of the sea, the village elders took us inland to the Uneasy Mountain. Yet even in the shadow of the mountain were rivers, and upwellings from the stone. And here Dagon called to us, and said, Where you go, I follow! And so it will be with you, Caleb Ward—with Captain Hoek, and with this ship. Why do you think I brought them here? Do you suppose we were ever truly bound for Amsterdam? No, my friend. I have no interest in diamonds. My mother, my sisters, my only brother—all died in Galange’s mines before I arrived! I swore revenge! And to kill Galange and his men was not enough! Galange has already gone to serve Dagon!”

As he went on, I was aware of a struggle behind us—Captain Hoek and a few others shouting, ordering muskets to be used, weapons to be fired, and then someone sobbing that the muskets would not fire for the ash in the air; I heard the slipping wet sound of slick limbs and flippers on the deck as something crawled onto the ship from the sea; I smelled that unholy reek; heard the sounds of struggle, and claws on wood; I heard Reverend Mothe shrieking as he was dragged to the side…A sudden cessation of the shrieking, with the sound of two large objects splashing into the waves…

I did not turn to look. I simply gazed at the great black cone of the volcano and listened to Nukanga: “But you—you shall have an honored place at Dagon’s side!” declared Nukanga eagerly. “Hai! You amuse the god! And it is your only hope…of life! Choose, Caleb Ward…Choose! For those who do not submit to the transfiguration…will become food! And Dagon, and his minions, they eat slowly, my friend—so slowly! They take many months to consume a man…months of sleepless agony! Choose, Caleb Ward! Transfiguration and immortality—or the slow awful revenge of the people of the Uneasy Mountain! Choose!”

#

June 28 (?) 1806

Can scarcely write. Not sure how long ship aground. Others all taken. Scream in night. Some make other sounds. Soon, myself.

She changed me. Change almost complete. Words come hard. Forgetting old language. H’Beth K’hrauh-sug-uth! New words—yet very old. They come instead. Cthhulu Yog S’hruth Dagon!

Fingers changing. Hard to hold quill. The webbing between fingers; the new claws. My eyes do not focus well, out of water. The sea calls. Must answer.

The horror that is myself, new self—beyond expression. Cannot tell. Cannot say it.

Will seal journal in box with wax. Place this account in boat, set to drift. Perhaps warn others. Tell them: If choice given, choose well. Not as I chose. Choose carefully.

Choose death.

[end}


20
Jan 10

**ANVIL ROCK: Another Lost Story**

By John Shirley

He stood at the window, looking out at the gray afternoon; the chill sea stretched out, waiting  with vast, cold assurance below his cliffside house.

Grigsby had managed not to go to the locked closet for three weeks. He did drugs, he got drunk, he gambled, he chased women. It kept him away from the closet. He knew full well these things were vices; he knew it wasn’t good for him to distract himself that way. But he reasoned that it was better than opening the closet.

Now, standing by the window, his back to the closet—but feeling its pull, which was surely, oh most definitely just in his imagination—he thought about destroying the machine locked within it. But he didn’t move; he didn’t go to the tool shed for the sledge hammer. He simply stood looking out the window. It was winter in British Columbia, and the sea, constrained by the rocky islands of the Sound, shrugged its chill gray body restlessly, thrashing to white spume against the rocks. Very cold, that water would be. Very cold.

Perhaps…he could go somewhere else. Somewhere earlier. But it always happened that he merged with his earlier self, remembering where he’d come from—remembering the future—but able to make only minor changes in the past. So he’d be drawn as if through a sluice to that  Spring day overlooking Anvil Rock, though it took years to get there.

Perhaps he might perfect the machine, to go elsewhere…before his birth. Or to go somewhere after his death. But…

But it called to him now.

Try again. This time you can save her. This time…

Strange phrase, that, ‘this time’. In view of…what he’d learned. “‘This time,’” Grigsby murmured. “This time. This time.”

The phone rang. Stopped ringing. Rang again. Stopped ringing. Rang again. Again, again.

It was Sanguelo, of course. He was always very insistent. He would want clarity on the new mine in Santo Miguel. He would want to know if the proper Brazilian authorities had been bribed. Ring. He would want to know if Grigsby were going to supervise the open-pit mine himself. Ring, ring. If the gold assay was indeed confirmed. Ring, ring, ring. If their legal problems had been dealt with…

“Go the hell away!” Grigsby shouted, never turning from the window; his voice rattling the glass.

As if chastened, the phone stopped ringing.

Grigsby snorted. “First time he’s…” His voice trailed off. He gazed out the window.

The key in his pocket seemed to press against his hip. The key to the closet.

Grigsby felt the shift inside him that meant he was going to give in. He wasn’t going to go to Vancouver to find women, to take drugs, to throw money at a card table; to feel himself slowly burning away, like a slow fuse. No. He was going to do something worse. It was worse because it seemed hopeless. Maddeningly hopeless. Because it meant reliving that day.

He was sorry he’d ever funded Kosinksi’s research. “I can take your consciousness back in time. It remains to be seen if your body can go…”

Anybody else would have sent him packing, after mad-sounding remarks of that kind. Many had, in fact—Kosinsky had already tried over a hundred possible funders. Grigsby had been a long-shot—he was interested in funding research into mine engineering, not quantum theory, not time travel. But Kosinski was his wife’s nephew, and he was sentimental about her memory, so…he’d given him some money to work with. And then, a year later, it had happened and he’d gone desperately to Kosinski and then…

Who knew?

He should have shot the bastard, not paid him. But maybe this time…

He sighed, and turned away from the window, walked across the empty room to the closet, and unlocked it. Inside was…

#

“Hey Dad! Are we going or not!”

Grigsby looked up from his PC to see his daughter,  Maria, smiling nervously at him from the doorway. She was an earnest, deeply tanned graduate student—very nearly always, as now, in jeans and work-shirt — with her mother’s long wavy black hair and her father’s blue eyes; and now she had that “There’s something I want to talk to you about” look. She liked to have these talks, always about something she regarded as deeply serious and epochal, in fine restaurants, on the beach, in the back of a cathedral, someplace that seemed to impart drama to the discussion. Today it was a walk along the cliffs near his sprawling house.

It would be her house, one day, he thought. She was his only child and her mother was five years in the grave. If she would just wait for her time—let him be himself while she waited—

“Coming, dad?”

“You bet. We taking a lunch?”

“No, I’m going to make lunch for you on the deck, after. It’s a beautiful day…”

He looked wistfully at his email. Jose Sanguelo had a very urgent tone—was quite disturbed about the bad publicity, the sudden judicial interference in Grigsby Gold Mines Ltd, when all had been so sweetly copasetic with the Brazilian authorities for so many years. Still, it would keep an hour or so.

He stood and looked for his coat—and then saw that she was holding it out to him, smiling.

#

Yellow crocuses were blooming along the cliff path, waving in the wind amidst  new grass. The grass had a fresh greenness, that seemed the very color of innocence. The breakers below were cottony white, in the Spring sunshine, almost the same color as the few wispy clouds in the turquoise sky. A brisk wind whipped their hair, it was true, but there was nearly always a wind here.

“You still seeing that lawyer kid?” he asked her.

His daughter laughed and shook his head. “Oh my God, if he could hear you call him a lawyer kid. He’s thirty one.”

“Just seems boyish to me, I guess. More like just out of college.”

“Because he’s an idealist?”

“There’s being an idealist and then there’s being silly. He always pushes everything too far.”

“Well…he doesn’t, dad. I mean…I met him when he was working with Amnesty International, in Sao Paulo—they’re very established and serious. They’re not some flaky organization. The UN respects them.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t respect the UN either. What was it you wanted to talk to me about? You had that earnest carrying-the-world-on-your-shoulders look.”

She scowled. That face-transfiguring scowl she inherited from her mom. From pretty to ridiculous in a split second. “It’s pretty serious, dad.” She dropped the scowl and stopped at the peak of the cliff, turning to gaze at him, hair whipping around her face. She brushed a few strands from her eyes, squinting in the bright sunlight. “What I carry on my shoulders is my karma—you’ve paid for everything I have with blood money.”

He stared at her. She’d tasked him about his mines before but never so self righteously, so bluntly. “So—would you like to repay me the college funds? Like me to take away the annuity?”

“I won’t be taking the annuity anymore, actually. And you may need the money, for your own lawyers. Dad—” Maria made a sound that was something close to a moan. “I had to help Joel when he—he’s representing the Santos family.”

He felt like he’d been struck by a baseball bat. “Your fiancé is representing the people who’re suing me?”

“The Santos brothers have moved to Vancouver. And…” She licked her lips. “I think I’m getting chapped up here. Maybe we should go in the house.”

“No! Just stay right there and tell me exactly what you mean by you had to ‘help’ him!”

“I…copied some of your files. The money transfers to Colonel Vega. Dad, you paid those soldiers to murder those people so they’d stop talking about the cyanide from the mine—so they’d keep quiet about your company poisoning the village. What was I going to do? I…look, you’re my dad and I love you. I didn’t want to just…screw you over, even for a good cause, from a…like, from a distance. I wanted to tell you face to face what I’d done. I think you should own up to it and…pay restitution. I mean, up here, you’re not likely to be prosecuted for hiring—”

“I didn’t hire anybody to kill anyone anywhere!”

Of course it was a lie. But he had learned that lies work best when you’re deeply insistent, over and over. And he was never going to cop to having anyone killed—especially not to Maria.

“Dad—I know what you did. You were sloppy about the emails. We have the money trail. You paid to kill those people to keep them quiet. And…it has to end. I mean, Joel told me about it and I…couldn’t believe it. I thought of you as tough and conservative and even ruthless but –not without human feelings. I figure you managed to…to forget they were people too, for awhile. I know you have human feelings, dad. You were good to me and mom. Mostly. But…”

“So Joel poisoned your mind!” (Why was he saying that, again? This time…he must remember. The closet. The closet. The future. He must…but it was so hard to believe it, so hard to…)

“Dad—should we go over the paperwork? You made me an officer in the company and I…on that authority I gave it to the prosecutor. Now like I said he won’t be able to—”

“You gave…you let that boy tell you what to think and you turned your own father in…you….” (No! This time he…but he felt so caught up, so angry, so…) “You treacherous little bitch! I ‘m already under investigation for taxes—” All the blue had sucked out of the sky—it seemed white now, with veins of red. The sea seemed to roar in fury—in demand. The wind whined in pity for him—stabbed in the back by his own child…a child he had given everything to!

“I didn’t know that you were under—”

“And now you’re going to help them destroy me! You already have!” (This time, remember—the closet—but the feeling was so strong, so…)

“Dad—it has to stop! It’s a matter of conscience! Someone has to—to stop people like you! I’m so ashamed of our family, of the way we live of—”

That was what did it. Ashamed of our family.

He lashed out, backhanded her, and she staggered for a moment, teetered, and there was a second when he might have, might have, might have caught her. (Now! Remember! The closet, you–)

But then Maria was falling backwards over the cliff, screaming. Falling, falling. Striking Anvil Rock below…And he was looking over the edge, wanting to throw himself after her, but not having the courage.

Seeing the dark red splash around her head, below, diluting to pink when the wave of high tide  washed over her…

Then the machine in the closet detected the ‘moment of return’ setting and he was caught up in a vortex, screaming, twisting…stopping.

Swaying in the dusty closet. Sobbing in the darkness.

He fumbled for the door, opened it, stepped blinking out into the room, with only moments having passed from the time he’d entered the closet. The winter light came pale through the window of the barren room; the room that had been Maria’s bedroom.

He closed the closet door behind him and went to the window.

How many times is that? he asked himself. He thought about it. How many times have I gone back?

At least three hundred.

Next time. Next time, the three hundred and first time.

Next time he wouldn’t kill her.

[end]


18
Jan 10

*THE CLOUD OF UNSEEING: A Lost Story*

By John Shirley

“No one may leave here,” said the Leader. “We must commune with the great Cosmic Eye. And after–”

“And after,” interrupted Smythe, who had  catalyzed this rebellion against the Leader  of the Sect of the Cosmic Eye, “there will be  more of the same. You will interpret the Eye’s signals in a way convenient to you–as ever!”

There was a murmur of agreement from the sect’s assemblage in the great hall they’d built in the forest. “Wait!” called Luella Fiske, known for her flares of inspiration. “Yes, our leader got lost in vanity and fell into darkness! Let us pray to the Eye and ask if the leader gives us light—or darkness!”

Even as she said it the Eye at the Center of the Cosmos sent its reply: Though bright with noon light, in the next moment the room was plunged into unbroken darkness; an obscurity deeper than eclipse enwrapped them. The Leader yelped in fear,  ran gibbering out of the building—and was blinded by the sunshine when he passed out of the pool of black the Eye had imposed.

The others chose to stay in complete darkness, until the Eye should lift the shadow on its own. As the days and nights passed, their other senses became more acute, as if the darkness forced them to subtler feelings, an exquisite sensitivity that slowly allowed them to see again using a light conducted from within, so that the pool of darkness slowly dissolved, and they saw the world once more. Then they went their own way, none of them ever needing a Leader to tell them about the great Eye again, since they each  looked on the world with the eye of the Eye…

[end]


15
Jan 10

** THE LOVELY BONES**

Movie review by John Shirley
The Lovely Bones
The man who managed to film Lord Of The Rings has chosen to adapt the introspective afterlife novel The Lovely Bones, and once again he’s taken some liberties. But the result is a surprisingly seamless fusion of Hitchcock and Salvador Dali.

As with LOTR, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s Bones is the sum of its aesthetic choices, times the auteur’s vision. Jackson brings a vibrant surrealism and suspense to the adaptation, and it says a lot that he chose Brian Eno to do the music for it. Spoilers below.

The Lovely Bones is the story of young Susie Salmon, who’s murdered by a serial killer, and who then observes the aftermath as a ghost. A girl in her early teens, Susie is compellingly played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan. She observes the grief of her family, and their floundering responses as the police consider every possible suspect but the right one; she experiences an afterlife that seems a strangely logical mix of its own rules and her internal world. (In places it’s a little like a subtler version of What Dreams May Come, without the philosophy-and without a Cuba Gooding, Jr). She resists complete absorption into the next world, drawn back to psychically finger the residue of her own uncompleted life.

The novel’s story is told by the murdered girl. In the book, Susie says: “My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my dad talked to him once about fertilizer.” This voice, as voice-over, usually simple, sometimes penetrating, neatly interlaces and tightens the film’s narration. The use of voiceover is famously a cinematic bugaboo, a chain holding many films back – it mars Kubrick’s otherwise brilliant film noir, The Killing – but occasionally it can work, and here’s the occasion. Saoirse Ronan’s voiceover brings the first-person voice of the novel into the film, so that we feel haunted by her as we watch events unfold. Jackson uses the voiceover just enough, and in just the right places.

We know early on – as in the novel – that Susie Salmon will be murdered, because she tells us so. But somehow Jackson makes us afraid for her anyway, though her doom is a kind of fait accompli from the first. Jackson stretches out the suspense about who does it for awhile, but by the end of the first act you know it’s “Mr. Harvey.” The psychopathic Mr Harvey, a predator who can be just charming enough to be well camouflaged, is played with creepy brilliance by Stanley Tucci – you absolutely know that this character is a guy from your neighborhood who’s very fussy about his flowers, very punctual, lives alone. You accept that he builds dollhouses – perhaps miniature houses is a better description – as a hobby. And somehow his little quirks quite logically dovetail with the fact that he likes to rape, murder, and dismember young girls. We infer we shouldn’t trust people who are too neat, wound too tight, and too charming. Good advice. The scenes where Mr. Harvey stalks Susie, and entraps her in the little pre-adolescent play-chamber he builds, like a dollhouse, under the cornfield – a resonantly symbolic setting – are quite frightening. One knows what will happen, and it doesn’t help. Jackson’s skills at suspense and the elucidation of fear – the bringing of background fear cracklingly into the foreground, at precisely the right moment – are powerfully in evidence.

The afterlife of The Lovely Bones has its various facets, like the Bible’s “many mansions”; there is a kind of dark afterlife bardo feel to part of it, but there’s also the freedom of living one’s dreams, in a light-hearted way, as a fourteen year old girl. Never forget, when Jackson shows you her afterlife, that it’s her afterlife. It’s the afterlife of a girl in her early teens. In one segment that might strike some as a bit airyfairy, there is a Little Prince style planet; there are butterflies and teen-fantasy outfits. She even sees herself fleetingly on the cover of a teen magazine. But this isn’t your afterlife. It’s the afterlife of a girl who had teen heartthrob photos on her bedroom wall. That sequence is not overlong, and it makes sense. And it’s just a portion of her life-after-death – other parts are almost Mordor-like; are certainly fraught with symbol and infused with a living presence, so that we’re never surprised when it responds to psychological impulses from Susie or the mortal world. The scenes in the Next World are often spectacular – and yet they meld potently with the drama of the mortal world.

Susie’s relationship with her father, likably played by Mark Wahlberg, is more powerful than her relationship with her mother – Rachel Weisz—whom we know largely from her grief. Her father is obsessed with finding her killer, and is thoroughly unsuited for it – eventually, spiritually guided by Susie in an understated way, he intuits the killer’s identity. When he tries to do something about it, his fury bears bitter fruit, in keeping with the film’s theme of acceptance over hatred.

It may be that the second act, at times, doesn’t quite cohere, doesn’t always lead immaculately into the third. Occasionally it seems episodic. But the film’s imagery and characters exert a pull that draws us relentlessly along, and the third act plays out compellingly.

Susie’s sister is the one who finds the evidence the blind, flailing adults overlook while Susan Sarandon, as the alcoholic, bohemian grandmother — holds the family together. Chainsmoking, endearingly incompetent , the character is wonderful, completely convincing, and sometimes quite funny. Sarandon may get a best-supporting-actress nomination for this – she simply becomes this woman.

Susie’s murder has been with us from the first, in a way, but chronologically it comes right after she meets a stunningly Byronic young immigrant from Britain (reminiscent of the young man the girls love from the Twilight pictures), who might have been her soul-mate… had she not been murdered; had her life, with all its drama and joy, its highs and troughs not been brutally, maddeningly, senselessly and oh-so-pointlessly interrupted. This is one of the film’s most poignant throughlines, and provides some of its emotional resolution, in time. Just in time – to rescue an ending that some might find a little unsatisfying.

The film strays in some places from Sebold’s narrative, but the end belongs to the novel, a resolution as much emotional as plot-driven. It’s a denouement written by an artist, not by a Hollywood screenwriter. There must have been some Suits feeling angst over that ending, when the studio distributors saw it. (I notice they aren’t spending a lot of money promoting The Lovely Bones.) Not that it’s a bad ending – it’s just deep. And they don’t like deep. Will they recognize the cunning symbolism of the faces in the dollhouse windows? The little ships suddenly taking shape in the bottles?

I found the ending to be just frustrating enough — about as frustrating as our world is. And it is another example of choices defining an adaptation. Some fans of the book may carp about certain freedoms Jackson took, but most will hopefully see that in this very creative, authoritative film Peter Jackson preserves the characters, the theme, the dread, the delight found in the novel – and has added just enough of his own.


15
Jan 10

Sample of a fantasy novel I wasnt sure I should continue with…

It was called NORTHMEN…here’s the opening I wrote…

PART ONE

A BLADE DIVERTED MAY FIND ANOTHER MARK

CHAPTER THE FIRST

“If you do not prove yourself in this battle, young Wulfgar,” said Saemunder, his face flickering in the campfire light, “then the Chieftain will find another use for you. You will become a hide-scraper or a scullery boy–and there is no shame in those occupations.” After a moment, using both dirty age-mottled hands to stroke the two forks of his long yellow and white beard, the cadaverous old man added, “If, that is, you are not smote crushingly on the head, or otherwise killed, as for example being spitted by a pike.” Saemunder had an unfortunate penchant for gruesome details, in imagining how others might find their ending—he could make many a grizzled combat veteran wince.

“I will not be a hide scraper, nor especially a scullery boy,” declared Wulfgar the Younger, choosing not to take offense. “My father offered to buy me out of this battle,” he went on, dreamily watching the sparks rise from the campfire. It was one of some five hundred Northmen campfires flickering red across the dark plain of Baltis, and marking the bivuouac of Squorri’s army: there were almost as many red campfires as red sparks at this one.  “I could have accepted a postponement for a year or two,” the boy went on. “I am only fourteen summers—and fifteen is the usual calling-time for warriors. But…” And as always when he boasted, he was aware that he was Stepping Wrong, as his fighting mentor, the warrior Bolle put it, but was unable to stop himself. “…I would not have it that way. I have had my manhood wetted, and I would have my sword wetted as well.” In that comparison, he was quoting the popular Boy Skaldlets, who sniggeringly exchanged such glib, fashionable turns of phrase in song, usually something to do with taking women.

“Yes I heard that you took advantage of that addle-pated Hilga with the Red Patch, and I regretted it,” said Saemunder.

“Took advantage! She tackled me in the furze!”

“And how? You were wandering about woolen-headed as usual, thinking on things not at hand. You were not alert, and so did not elude her! You should have waited for a god-sanctioned coupling!”

“My father says no one waits for that.”

Saemunder snorted. “Your father…” He thought better of finishing the remark, and veered its beginning to another course. “… gave you some wine for the battle?”

“Yes but it is four hours to dawn. You may drink it—it is not the wine of  berserking. I tried that once, when I was blooded, and I could not bear the headache. I am quite capable of finding my own spirit rage. If you want to drink it, then by all means do so if it will stop your mouth.” The boy—called Wulf more often than Wulfgar– was accustomed to speaking to the old man with this disrespect, since in fact Saemunder, though a skald, was just a family retainer, a servant—a freed slave—who could scarce see anymore, could hear well only in one ear, and was a carrier of more fleas than good advice.

Wulf tossed the wine gourd to the old man,  and huddled deeper into his wolfskin, one hand on the sword lying across his knees. The old dented steel broadsword  was too heavy for him, really. He was tall for his age, but lean, his wrists were thin; his arms slender. Even grasping the sword hilt with two hands, the only way he could accurately swing it, he became tired in a few minutes of hewing. (Not that he’d hewed at anything but leathern dummies with it.) And battles could go on and on.

Saemunder drank, Wulf watched the sparks, blinked in the smoke, listened to the murmur of voices, mingled with snores, from the other campfires. The fire was dying down and they had no more of the branches Saemunder had carried from the Western Wood, on the edge of the plain, scavenged when they’d first come ashore and foraged. The wood had been near picked clean—and there was no going far to the East. There were the settlements of the Russ and beyond them, the Baltis fortress of the Elnahere, with its pale, wraithlike inhabitants, its sorcerers and diabolical war machines.

Now, musing, wondering if this were really the last night of his life—it was hard to believe!–Wulf tried to see if, as Bolle had told him, each individual campfire spark went to an individual star, overhead, and added its fire to the star’s. He could smell the sea, the Sea of Baltessa, on the breeze that snapped the flames, coming from just a few leagues away. The plains of Baltis ended, to the south, at stony, foot-bruising beaches and the cold gray sea where the longships of Sqorri’s Northmen were anchored.

The Russ knew they were here, knew they were more than a-viking; knew they were an invasion of conquest, and by now the Russ armies were massing to meet them, to the North, at dawn. How many men in that army? The Russ were said to be able to raise at least a thousand, and one of them, perhaps dozing at a fire like this one, somewhere to the southeast, might be the one who would shatter a boy’s head, as in Saemunder’s dolorous foreseeing; might be sharpening the ax he would use even now. Or he might be the one who—perhaps clumsy with drink, for the Russ without exception drank heavily before battle—might find first Wulf’s blade in his throat. Wulf had killed bear and deer, with great excitement, in the course of a chase. Once, too, he had killed a half-animal, one of the beetle-brows, the Hemf: fur-backed men.  of the mountains. The Hemf he had killed with an arrow, almost by chance. That was scarcely killing a man, though the beast had worn an animal skin about his groin, and a liontooth on a thong about his neck.

Could Wulf kill a man? Bolle had said it was surprising how many strong men—brave men too—quailed when it came to killing other men, face to face. Killing from afar with a spear or an arrow, this was more palatable, easier than seeing the light of life in a man’s eyes and knowing you must snuff it out forever. Krincl, who had clashed with Wulf so often, had always seemed eager and ready to kill men and had done so already, having helped in the reaving of a family who resisted being taken slave when Krincl and his father went a-viking.

Bolle had said: “You must first be willing to kill, and then you must know for a certain that you will kill that man, and if you believe it more than he believes it, then even if he is a better fighter, you will likely be the victor.”

Wulf wished Bolle were here now. But the clanleader was likely asleep—he was proud to say he always slept deeply before a battle—at the tents of the men protecting Sqorri.

Saemunder was halfway into the wineskin, the decanting leading to incanting, a recitation of The Villainy of Gorevulfe, and Wulf was nodding, half in and out of sleep…seeing, in the embers of the fire, the red patch of fur between Hilga’s thick thighs, in the furze…Actually, she’d tackled him twice. He’d tried to leave after the first release, overcome by his own sensations and reeling with the reek of her. But she’d dragged him back for one more.

If he couldn’t out wrestle a stocky girl, could he survive battle? Wulf tried to remember the chant of  invulnerability taught him by Broon, the sorcerer—at the cost of a piece of silver and two coppers– although Bolle did not approve. If you are going to use sorcery, Bolle would say, then use true sorcery. Do not put your confidence in the prattling of old wives even if their prattle is heard in the mouths of old men. Find a true sorcerer—a Seer of the Inner Stone

But a Seer of the Inner Stone, if not mythical, was at least not at hand—was not known in the Northlands apart from rumor. The title Seer of the Inner Stone made Wulf shiver to contemplate. Was the man’s heart turned to stone? How cold he must be! Who could trust such a man? A man’s heart must be stony in battle—but to live that way…

Wulf yawned, deciding to let the Fate Spinners decide if he would live through the morrow, and had just stretched out on the ground to sleep when a multitude gave vent to war cries, on the dark plain to the  Northeast–and he knew it was not the war shout of Northmen.

“The Russ!” Saemunder cried, standing, swaying—actually dropping the wineskin in surprise. “There was no thought that they would come in the night! This is not done! This is not permitted! This is not—”

The rest of his commentary was caught up in the pandemonium, the general shouting and clashing of arms, the thumping of boots, the swish and roar of torches as men rushed by, swords in one hand and blazing sticks in the other. Most of them were rushing toward the fight, to their credit–but not all.

Then he was running, sword in his two hands, wolf cloak flapping at his back,           boots hammering the ground, toward the fight, following the lights of converging torches, the shouting, the war cries, the screams of men. He was distantly aware that Saemunder was coming along behind, calling for him to run away from the battle.

I am running to my death, he thought. Does that make me a fool or a hero?

But he noticed a strange thing then, that more Northmen were coming toward him, their mouths open–their eyes hollow places in their skulls, with the flaring shadows, their beards whipping—than were going toward the fight. What shame was this? Were these normally fearless warriors running from battle?

A few strides more and the moon broke through the clouds, shedding more light on the chaotic scene, the desperate men streaming by. He came to a low rise, a ripple in the plain, and he saw the reason for their panic:

A vast army , many on horseback, was  limned in steel and moonlight. He saw the advancing shield wall of the Russ, notable for the bull’s head, a snorting beast painted on each oval shield, black against yellow. Beyond the shield wall was another, and a third, and a great mass of men behind; in advance of the shield wall horsemen in bright armor were skirmishing, pursuing the fragments of the broken, hastily improvised Northmen line.

And he beheld a strange thing: the horsemen were pale figures with long black hair and dark eyes, their lean faces shorn of beards—at first glance like children in the armor of men, to one of Wulf’s tribe, who were always bearded—and they carried long narrow triangular shields of polished steel, with no emblem at all on them. Their horses, too, were armored, and  many of the horsemen carried lances that spat a blood-red lightning, striking men down before the lancepoints found their hearts…