The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I kept making beetles at a ferocious rate, both to protect myself and prove I was still working at the company.

  I no longer had messages from other employees.

  I no longer could get Leer or Scarskirt or even Slumber to acknowledge my presence.

  I began to live in memory. I would see my father's long, white fingers as he sat at the piano in the old house that I remembered only from the few surviving photographs. Or I would see my mother playing chess with him, hunched over the board with intense concentration. Or conversations with Leer from years back that had made me laugh. Or the look on Mord's face when he saw a glimpse of a sparrow, which widened his features and made him seem almost childlike.

  If I just concentrated hard enough on these images, I believe I thought I could survive all of it.

  Another Meeting with My Manager

  One night, after the manta ray had flown off, my Manager entered my office and sat down. She looked so tired and so thin that for the first time I thought she might be dying. Her eyes were so far back in their sockets that I almost couldn't see them except for the slight reflection, the glint from the whites. She smelled like limes, so I knew she had just visited with the rest of the team.

  "I am giving you a raise," my Manager said, but she didn't seem happy about it.

  She took an object from her pocket and placed it on my desk. It was an amorphous ball of clear flesh with a small brown frog inside of it.

  "This will make everything like it was before. Slumber and I made it together. For you. Just eat it tomorrow morning and you will feel much better."

  "Thank you," I said.

  My Manager leaned forward, although it was more like a swaying motion from fatigue, and with her elbows on my desk, she whispered, "Do you love me?"

  It was the first time, in that moment, looking at my Manager so frail and on the edge of some unknowable catastrophe, that I realized she had once been flesh-and-blood. That she might have had a history from before the company. That she might be as much a victim of circumstances as me.

  Because she said it there, in my office, at that moment, and because I was tired and alone and no longer cared, I said, "It's possible," instead of "No."

  My Manager's smile destroyed the worry lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. The smile was so unexpected that I smiled back.

  Then she stumbled to her feet and was gone, leaving my raise on my desk.

  The Nature of My Raise

  The next morning, I came to work in a good mood. I had had uninterrupted sleep for the first time in months. I did not notice anything amiss, although Leer and Scarskirt had changed the color of their exoskeletons to black. For Scarskirt this meant that her pale perfect face shone like death from her mask, her red lips a feast of blood. For Leer, it made it seem as if only the exoskeleton held her up. Neither of them would look at me, but I took this in stride since things had been bad for some time. I knew it would take many months to restore normalcy.

  I ate my raise right away - it tasted like moist chocolate cake - and started working on my beetles with newfound vigor.

  Not twenty minutes later, a member of Human Resources cradling a slug in her arms summoned me to my Manager's office. By then, my stomach was feeling queasy.

  As we neared the elevators, my last thought before the slug kicked in was: Why are all of the offices empty?

  I woke in a chair in the Human Resources office on the seventh floor. The HR representative who had brought me stood to my left, holding the slug. My Manager sat behind Mord's desk. To her left stood Slumber, looking solemn. To her right stood the Mord, large and terrible, holding the rotting remains of my personnel file, from which he scooped entrails into his mouth with a kind of absent-minded hunger.

  My heart began to beat so fast I could feel it thudding. My throat closed a little. My arms became shaky and my legs didn't seem to work. I'm sure they could hear my breathing, shallow and quick.

  Looking very solemn, my Manager leaned forward and said, "We have decided to terminate your employment with this company due to a pattern of unprofessional communication. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

  Shocked, anguished, I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had been poisoned by my raise. For nothing eloquent or even faintly coherent came from between my lips. Instead, frog eggs poured out, falling heavy to the floor, and coating my chin and shirt in green slime. Nothing could be further from the definition of professional.

  My Manager gave me a look of sorrow while the Mord growled in his corner and a thin smile animated Slumber's solemn face. I believe that somewhere in the building Scarskirt smiled at that exact moment as well.

  But as they led me away, attaching the slug as I struggled, I regained my voice long enough to shout at my Manager as the doors began to close on me, "I love you. I've always loved you."

  A sharp intake of breath. The sound of the paper encasing her bursting into flame once more.

  The Results

  Images of Leer, of Mord, of Scarskirt filled my head as Human Resources threw me out of the front door, the place on my spine where they had just ripped off the slug still stinging. It was a bitterly cold day and no one was walking on the plaza in front of the building. I'm sure people had been told to avoid it until I was gone.

  The doors shut on the pragmatic faces of my tormentors. I staggered backwards, looking up at the place that had been my home for so many years - that had, in this incomprehensible world of ours, been all that was left to me of family. Now, I realized, I would have to find my way alone.

  But there was one last surprise.

  As I stared up at the window of Mord's office, so far away, it opened and there my Manager stood: on fire from head to toe, and no extinguishing it this time. She looked down at me, and although I could not read the expression on her face I would like to think she was happy, for a moment.

  Then the Mord rose behind her, roaring as he rose and rose and rose, as if he might never stop growing, to fill the entire window. A slap of a paw and my Manager jerked back out of sight.

  The fire spread from window to window, room to room, while the Mord raged, thrashing and fighting. Once, he stopped to stare down at me, paws against the glass. Once, he looked out into the gray sky as if searching for something.

  A shadow, tiny and on fire, began to drift down from the burning windows.

  Was it a leaf? Who could tell? By the time it reached the ground, it would have fallen away into nothing.

  This, then, was the situation at the time I left the company.

  PREDECESSOR

  The great man's home lay within thick woods, beyond a churning river crossed only by a bridge that looked like it had been falling apart for many years. The woods were dark and loamy and took the sound of our transport like a wolf taking a rabbit. The leaves passed above us in patterns of deep green shot through with glints of old light. There was the smell of something rich yet suspect in the chilled air.

  The house rose out of the forest like a cathedral out of a city: unmistakable. It had an antique feel. Two levels, although the second story was gutted and unusable to us, the off-white color stained with the amber-and-green dustings of pollen and pine needles. A steeple of a roof that contained nothing but rotted timbers, descending to a screened-in porch, beyond which lay the horseshoe construction of the interior passageways. The house might have been a hundred years old. It might have been two hundred years old. It might have always been there.

  Our tread on the gravel driveway startled me; it was the first true sound I'd heard for many miles.

  The screen door was broken - someone had slashed through it, and the two pieces had curled back. We walked onto the porch and found, beside two large wicker chairs like decaying thrones, the mummified remains of two animals the size of dogs but with skulls more like apes. They looked as if they'd fallen asleep attempting to embrace. They looked, in the way their paws had crossed, as if they had been attempting to cross the divide between animal and human. />
  My partner looked at them with revulsion.

  "Corruption," she said.

  "Peace," I said.

  In answer she took out her keys and moved toward the door that led into the house.

  The door had been hacked at with some kind of axe or other crude weapon. The gouges and cuts had turned black against the weathered white. The knob dangled from the door as if it belonged somewhere else.

  "Nothing did that," I said. "Nothing that lives here now. Remember that."

  "I'll remember," she said, and turned the key in the lock. It made a sound like metal scraping, but also of something released.

  She glanced at me before she opened the door. "We don't know what he left."

  The iron-gray of her eyes wanted something from me, but all I had was: "The power's gone from it. He hasn't slept for a long time."

  I had no weapon. She had no weapon.

  Beyond the door, a long, straight corridor waited for us, badly lit by glimmering lamps set into walls that seemed to both jut outward and recede into shadow. It was like the throat of a beast, except at the far end we could see where it curved to enter into the second half of the "U." Where did it come out? There had been no other door on the porch.

  From where we stood, the corridor clearly changed as it progressed. What was near to us had a weathered opulence - rosewood panels and graying chandeliers long since gone dark. The burgundy carpet lay flat under our feet, and something had been dragged so violently down its length that the fibers had been flattened in a swerving pattern. But farther down we could see plants or little trees, and there came from the far end a suggestion of an underlying funk, the smell of unnatural decay. There came also a throaty murmur, as of a fading congregation or something ursine.

  "Vestiges," I said.

  "Of what?"

  "Of the man himself."

  I walked forward. Her boots scuffed the carpet behind me as if compelled to follow against her will.

  Nothing happened for several minutes. We did not investigate the rooms we passed, which lay behind closed doors. We did not stop to look at the paintings. Side tables, lamps, and the like did not interest us. Instead, it was as if we followed the swerving pattern in the carpet to see where it led. I began to think of it now less as the imprint of a body being pulled as the trail of something that had no legs, like a giant slug. There was a suggestion, at the edges of the swerve, of a curious mixture of a deeper red and an amber resin.

  We had no specific brief. She knew this, and still she asked, "What are we looking for?"

  "Everything," I said, and it was true. Nothing angered him more than the wrong focus. But she was nervous. I could tell.

  The corridor seemed to collapse into forest, even though I knew this could not be true. It was simply the overgrowth of potted plants and trees run amok, aided by the bulge of a domed skylight mottled dark green with debris. The trees were almost bony, but tall, and their leaves spread out like emerald daggers. What once were regimented bushes had become feral explosions of branches. Between them lichen and vine had taken hold in cracks in the floor where the carpet had been cut away. The trail of the thing without legs led over the underbrush. Recent.

  "What's that? In there - beneath?" she asked. I felt rather than heard a tremor in her voice.

  "Something dead," I said. It did not seem important to say more.

  "Spectacularly dead," she said, and I thought perhaps I had not felt a tremor after all.

  We moved on, farther into the great man's house. Now there were glass cages set into the inner wall and no doors at all, but the cages held only mold and things that had expired a long time ago. Some of them lay close to the glass as if trying to burrow through it. Others had died with their forearms banging against it. We did not examine them closely.

  Then we began to encounter the living. The inner wall pulled into itself and left room for more than just glass cages. A muttering rose from the displays that had been left there, behind a torn, bloodied, sometimes shredded crosshatching wire. What lay behind was squirming flesh mottled with fur, an eye or two glancing out from the mess with an odd acknowledgment of fate. A spasming claw. A quivering snout. There was no great seriousness, nor order, to this exhibit. These creatures, neglected and left without food or water, had half-devoured each other, and by their nervous natures had consigned themselves to an ever-contracting existence. They would not leave the ledge on which they'd lived their lives to that point. Now they were deranged, and lay on the border between life and death without knowing the difference.

  "Survivors," she said.

  "No," I said. "Not yet."

  We walked further. By now, we were almost two-thirds of the way to the curve of the "U." The stain trail on the carpet had resumed, seemed again to lead us.

  Now came the parrotlike birds that had the mange and stumbled across the floor, too weak to fly. Now came cats and dogs that had been combined in peculiar ways and left to stagger, something wrong with their brains that made them lose their balance. Now came the fish tanks full of slop and mewling and naked, shivering tissue. Now came things living inside of other things, gone so completely wild that they were innocent of us.

  The vines had crawled up the sides of the walls.

  The vines were hiding other things, which peered out at us. Or had they become part of the vines?

  She was looking around as if for a weapon, but we had decided against weapons.

  "It will be over soon," I said. For some, it was already over.

  She nodded. I knew she trusted me. We were not without weapons now that we had abandoned them.

  What had looked like ornamentation ahead, at the join of the "U," was actually a row of faces jutting out of the wall, set slightly above what appeared to be a long love seat with thin crimson cushions. These faces - twenty or thirty of them - ranged from that of a boar to that of a kind of thick lizard to a thing very much like a woman. They were all undergoing a slow transmutation of expressions, as if sedated. None looked peaceful. None could speak, and where you could see their throats it was clear some surgery had been required of them. This was to be expected. But what were they supposed to be looking at?

  My partner knelt and stared into the face of the woman-thing. There was not so much distance between them. Not really.

  "These cushions were once white," she said, staring into the open, gray eyes of the woman-thing. Its lank hair fell straight. It gave off a smell of corruption.

  "There has been spillage," I said. "And slippage."

  "Can we free them?"

  She, like me, had understood that these were not just faces. The bodies behind them must descend in living coffins behind the love seat. Did their feet touch the edge of some surface? Or did they hang, torsos held in harnesses? And if so, what lay beneath them?

  I couldn't put my hand on her shoulder. When you let some things in you never get them out.

  "Don't you see that they are already free?" I asked.

  It was in the eyes. While the muscles in their cheeks, their jowls, their snouts, their muzzles, winced and pulled back in soundless rage or sadness, those eyes stared straight ahead, as dead as anything dead we'd yet seen.

  "This is the work of a great man," she said, but I could hear the question.

  "We should continue," I said.

  For the row of faces led to a doorway, and the doorway led to the second corridor - the one that should lead back even though there had only been one entrance on the porch.

  She rose, and on a whim peered back down the corridor we had just traveled through. "The lights are out," she said. "The lights are going out."

  And they were. One by one, each lamp, each dim-glowing chandelier, was blinking out, leaving more and more shadow. More and more darkness. Into that space shapes moved where no shapes had been.

  Was the shiver I felt one of anticipation? I don't know. Soon there would be an ending.

  "We should continue," I repeated. Perhaps there was a tremor in my voice this time. I d
o not know.

  Beyond the doorway lay the second corridor. Gone the rosewood. Gone the carpet. Gone the paintings on the wall. The walls were as off-white as the outside of the house. The stench of blood came from everywhere, and the lights here were bare bulbs and flickering fluorescent strips. The floor was linoleum and the stain of whatever had come through formed a long snarl of red disappearing into the distance. Now, though, it trailed up the walls, onto the ceiling, not just the floor. Spun crazily. Did not take a straight line.

  We could not see the end of the corridor. We could see no trees or bushes. Now the lights went out one by one as we passed, and when I looked back there appeared to be a long shadow with one arm against the doorway staring at us. Then it was gone.

  "Is he here?" she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  She took a step, then another, and I followed for a time and let her lead.

  We came to a place where the wall gave way to a huge glass cage that held a wet, flickering, shifting mass of blackish-brown broken only by shimmers of red.

  "What is it?" This time I asked.

  She was quiet for a moment. "Starlings. So many starlings, so close together that they cannot move, held up by each other's bodies."

  Now I could see the wings and beaks and feathered heads. The eyes bright, feverish, anguished.

  "What purpose could this serve to him?" I asked.

  She only laughed harshly, took my arm, tried to pull me away. I would not go.

  "What purpose could this serve to him?" I asked again, and still she had no answer.

  There was a way into the cage. A small chamber at the bottom that would allow a man to crawl in, shut the door, and then open another, translucent door into the space with the birds. The red trail led inside and then back out again.