When she looks up at Jocelynn some time later, she nods, pleased. “You may call me Jenny, if you like.”
***
Jocelynn floats in a canoe she stole from the campgrounds, hiding it behind the rushes when she’s not here. Whenever there’s an opportunity to sneak away, she paddles into the lake, the canoe a sort of shield between her and the mudmaid.
Jocelynn brings books from the library and peanut butter sandwiches. Jenny turns down the offer of a Coke, but snatches at the chocolate bar like a child, proceeding to stuff it into her pointed mouth with a moan of delight.
Jocelynn laughs and hands her another.
She never attempts to swim.
Not that Jenny can blame her. It’s a tentative thing, this small bit of trust they share. Jocelynn’s dreams blaze bright when she talks, and Jenny doesn’t think she’d be able to stop herself.
So, for now, they content themselves with the thin strip of metal that separates them.
Jocelynn has binoculars today and points out tufted titmice and herons and red-winged blackbirds. Jenny catches snappers and painted turtles, lazy bullfrogs and an unlucky perch, which she swallows nearly whole.
Jocelynn watches curiously as Jenny licks the last of the scales from her fingers. “I thought you only ate children.”
“When they enter the water,” Jenny agrees, rolling onto her back so the sun shimmers on her naked belly. “But no one comes here anymore, so I’m left with fish.” Her face sours. “Fish don’t dream of anything at all.”
“You say that a lot. What do you mean about dreams?”
Jenny dives down to her cave to retrieve a skull. Not the boy’s skull, still ripening on its shelf. Cautiously, she takes the bull dancer’s skull, clutching it tight against her chest. When she emerges from the lake and holds it up for Jocelynn to see, it’s almost with a proud shyness that she offers this favorite possession to another.
Jocelynn stares at the skull with morbid fascination but doesn’t touch it. “So you . . . uh. You really eat people?” Her mouth trembles. “You shouldn’t, you know. It’s not right.”
Jenny jerks the skull away, hurt. “It’s the dreams I want. Not the flesh. This one . . . she was from Crete.” Her voice becomes sing-song, and she flicks herself out of the water so she’s draped partially over the lip of the canoe. “She danced in the arena upon the backs of bulls. Her memories taste the sweetest to me.”
“Crete? Just how old are you?” Jocelynn’s voice is tiny. Scared.
Jenny shifts and avoids looking at the girl. The dreams rippling beneath her skin flutter in such a tempting fashion.
“I don’t know. I didn’t eat this one. She was taken many mothers ago, and the dreams are passed down. The skulls contain the echoes of the lives they held.” Her pointed teeth scrape over her lower lip as she thinks it over. “When we consume enough memories, we spawn. Each memory becomes an egg.”
“But you said you ate your sisters—”
“Yes.” Jenny shrugs. “And then, my mother.” There hadn’t been much of her mother left. A desiccated husk of a creature, with only enough strength to allow Jenny to kiss the last bloodstained breath from her, and with that, the dreams stolen from the memories her mother had herself consumed.
The bull-dancer’s dreams had blazed the brightest.
“I would like to see Crete someday,” Jenny muses, pleasure suffusing her at the thought. “Perhaps you could bring me another of those books? With the pictures?”
“Hey! You’re not allowed out there!” A man’s voice cracks sharply from the tree line, a shadowed silhouette emerging from between the pines.
The two girls startle, and Jenny retreats into the water without leaving a ripple. She darts toward the weeds, watching as Jocelynn mumbles apologetic noises at the intruder and paddles to the shore.
Jenny clutches her skull, wondering why her friend is so afraid.
Jocelynn barely has time to get out the canoe before the man snatches at her. “I told the others you were trouble. And what do you know? Sneaking off again, are we?” he drawls, a slow smile drifting across his face.
Jocelyn shoves him away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Suit yourself—but you’re on the short list for getting kicked out.” A stray finger uncurls from his hand, tracing over her cheek and down her collarbone. “I can change that.”
Jocelynn freezes, her jaw clenching as though she might bite off her tongue. Jenny sees her nostrils flare, the dreams rippling beneath her skin growing dark. Defeated.
The girl’s head jerks when he steps closer, eyes darting. “No,” she says hoarsely. “Never again.”
He clutches her shirt, the cloth ripping as Jocelynn spins and dives into the murky waters of the lake. Jenny’s fingers clench into the mud, the skull of the bull dancer all but forgotten in the shallows. As though the water is a conduit, Jocelynn’s dreams thrum over Jenny’s skin, her panicked limbs flailing like a wounded fish.
Jenny’s pupils dilate, and she slithers from her hiding place, hypnotized by the motion. It calls to her, a melodic song of blood and fear.
Jocelynn’s head pops up, her hair littered with duckweed, but she isn’t looking at Jenny. She’s not focused on anything but the man who’s followed her into the lake. A rolling indignation fills the mudmaid and she submerges, darting between her prey and the man.
He’s humming soothing sounds, but Jenny tastes the lies. His dreams are shadows, the sort that spin into infinite webs and tangles, a maze of untruths he’ll walk the rest of his days, convinced only of their veracity. Echoes of them pulse past, make her lips wrinkle in distaste.
Doing it for your own good. It’s only because I love you so much. Have to kill you after. Shame. Those tits are fabulous. You made me do it . . .
Jocelynn moves like a puppet, disjointed sobs and crooked bones. Her heart is a drum, rattling, rattling and Jenny pauses to listen to it. So familiar. So . . . warm.
But this heart doesn’t beat for her, and that she cannot allow.
The man outweighs her, a target far larger than her usual wont. But he isn’t paying attention. Jocelyn lets out a startled yelp when Jenny’s fins brush against her legs; it’s quickly cut off when the mudmaid torpedoes out of the water to slam into the man’s chest, knocking him off balance.
Her lips pull back to expose a smile of jagged teeth as he flounders, a high-pitched gurgle the last sound he makes.
***
When it’s over, all that’s left is some tattered bits of flesh hanging from a tangle of bones. Fish nibble the remains, coldblooded and careless.
Jenny wipes at her mouth, working a bit of something from her teeth.
Jocelynn sits on the sand, shivering. Mud plasters her cheek. “Did you . . . eat him?” Her voice is a half sob, fragile like a songbird.
The mudmaid shakes her head. “Not his dreams. I was . . . protecting my claim,” she says finally, not sure if Jocelynn will understand. She’s not entirely sure she understands it. In all her memories, there has never been a mudmaid who fought a human for prey.
And that’s what Jocelynn is, isn’t she?
“I’ve never seen anyone killed before,” Jocelynn says softly. “So much blood.” The words seem to echo from inside her, aching and hollow. “Oh, God. What am I going to tell the camp? They’ll come looking for me. For . . . him.”
Jenny says nothing to this. After all, she kills children to keep herself alive. What words of comfort can she offer? “There is nothing for them to find,” she insists, her eyes narrowing. “Trust that, if you cannot trust anything else.”
Jocelynn doesn’t look at her, her fingers digging into the wet sand.
In the end Jenny leaves the girl alone, retrieving her skull and disappearing into the depths of the lake.
***
The song of the cicadas is deafening, a desperate insect roar as they blindly claim their mates in the moonlight.
Jenny thinks of the boy’s skull. Perhaps his memories can tell her why they a
ct as they do. It’s a futile thought, and she glumly looks at the grinning little face, his empty eye sockets seeming to stare right through her.
“You shouldn’t eat children. It’s not right.” Jocelynn’s voice ripples through her mind, and Jenny grows agitated.
“But it’s what I am,” she mumbles bitterly, unsure of this new feeling threading its way into her belly.
A cautious whistle breaks her thoughts, pulls her from the inky black depths and into the silver-frosted gleaming of the moon. It’s Jocelynn, standing on the shore with her head down, her hair frizzy and curled in the humidity.
Three days have passed since the mudmaid devoured the man. Others have come and gone, following footsteps upon the sand and shaking their heads, flashlights and dogs and puzzled brows. Familiar words and troubled faces. Jenny has known them all and kept herself well hidden, enshrouded in the weeds and shadows.
Jocelynn lifts a tear-streaked face when Jenny approaches the shoreline. “Don’t. I’m not supposed to be here. I have to go home tomorrow.” Her mouth curves into a rueful half-smile. “But what else can they do to me now? I just wanted to say goodbye.”
Jenny frowns. “Will you come back?”
“I don’t know if I can.” Jocelynn looks behind her. “I overheard them yesterday. The counselors. The camp owner is closing this place down. There’ve been too many accidents. Roger—the guy who came after me. He had a history, a police record. I don’t know.” Snot runs from her nose and she wipes it away noisily, her fingers dirty. “The world is different today. Monsters aren’t supposed to exist.”
Jenny pokes at her teeth with her tongue until they draw blood. “I don’t know how else to be.”
“I know.” Jocelynn wraps her arms about her shoulders, hugging herself against a sudden chill. “Where I come from, children are taken by monsters all the time and no one blinks an eye. At least you’re honest about it.”
Her voice grows hoarse, and she draws a ragged breath, asking the question that hangs between them. “Would you eat me, if you had the chance?”
Yes.
No.
“Yes,” says Jenny, webbed fingers digging into the muck. Friendship or not, she wouldn’t lie to the girl against her own nature.
Jocelynn smirks, and then her face sobers. “Promise me something, Jenny. Don’t kill any more children.”
Jenny’s nostrils flare, her frog-gold eyes narrowing. “Why?”
“Because . . . because I think you’re better than that.” Jocelynn’s mouth trembles. “I’ll let you eat me, if you stop.”
“Now?” Jenny frowns, confused. Better than what?
“Not yet. You saved my life—if this were some sort of fairy tale, I’d owe you a debt. There’s something I need to do first, but I don’t know how long it will take,” she warns. “Can you wait for me?”
The two girls stare at each other, fear and regret pulsing between them, tainted by an inevitable sorrow that this too, would end.
“I will wait,” Jenny Greenteeth says finally, sinking into the depths as Jocelynn turns to go. An odd tightness burns in her chest that quells out the hunger until it’s nothing more than a flicker.
I will wait.
***
Jenny Greenteeth grows older in the depths of her lake. Snow and rain and drought. She knows them well, the seasons passing with all the carelessness of the wind.
There are no children.
There have not been children for a very long time.
And Jocelynn does not return.
Jenny dreams of the bull gods with their horns and masks and the dancers in the sun.
Waiting.
***
An old woman stands on the beach in a pea-green coat and wool hat. The late fall sun does nothing to take the chill from the air, but she thinks it makes the leaves look pretty, the way they ripple in the current.
She squats in her practical, orthopedic shoes with their Velcro fasteners, her bunions aching when they rub against the sides.
“Jenny?” she calls softly. “I’m keeping my promise now.”
And then she collapses as the last strength of her heart beats too loud in her ears.
***
The mudmaid drifts below in a blanket of leaves. The ice will come soon, encapsulating her in a frozen sleep until the sun chooses to wake her up.
When the sound of the old woman’s words wash over her, she knows.
She knows.
The woman who was once the girl lies upon the sand, her life pumping away.
Jenny hauls herself out of the mud and through the sluggish depths up to the beach to take Jocelynn’s cold hand in hers. She’s startled at the brittle fingers, bird-bone thin and hollow.
“Jocelynn?”
The old woman’s chest heaves rapidly. “Knew’d you come,” she says raggedly. “No more time. Doctors told me . . . ticker’s gone bad . . . sorry took so long, but I wanted . . . ”
Jenny can only stare for a moment, but the woman’s dreams are fading with her pulse.
She drags Jocelynn into the water to her cave and presses a kiss upon her brow, holding her tenderly through the final shudders, wrinkled legs kicking feebly. The dreams assault her vision as she begins to eat, thicker and richer than any child’s dreams have ever been.
Mature and ripe and full of the smoky satisfaction of seeing one’s life come to fruition. They’re dark at first, painful and red and filled with fear. A man who hits her, hungry days and uncertain nights, wrapped in a tiny fierceness that refuses to bow to circumstance. Foster homes and camps for troubled children.
But then Jenny sees flashes of a first kiss and another woman who makes Jocelynn cry out in pleasure, books and paintings and a garden of sunflowers, children with tiny dreams enkindled like their mother’s. A home and travel and Crete . . .
She is standing in an old arena with Jocelynn, turning about so that the shadows of the past mingle with the memory of her only friend. She sees the white stones and the blue sky and sand the color of old ivory . . .
And then she dreams of herself alone.
And she weeps.
MALIGN AND CHRONIC RECREATION
BRUCE BOSTON
On the boulevard of cyberdreams,
in the quick of quickening culture,
pixeled thighs writhe and shimmer
with a blank hairless sensuality
spawned from a RAM extension.
The corporal hustlers arrive
in a storm of flesh and leather,
their drab scales illuminated
by a rain of burning ejecta.
“Give us your hordes,” they hiss,
“your wired libidinous masses
for our programmable factories
of malign and chronic recreation,
and we will spin you a future,
more thrilling than a gross
of excessive Xmas morns,
more user friendly than
chateaubriand and cabernet,
more breathless-cum-colorful
than the smoke-churned aerial
debris of carcinogenic dawn.”
GUARDIAN
PAUL MICHAEL ANDERSON
The World
His name for now was Brad Pfeiffer, and he walked along the avenue with his head down, carrying a paper bag full of groceries. Around him, city life bustled—groups moving through intersections, cabbies honking and trucks braking in the multi-lanes—as the day’s light drew down into twilight.
Brad watched his feet, the bristles of his shaved head standing out. His shoulders were rounded, his clothes darker than the panorama of colors around him, his ethnicity a question under the urine-yellow streetlamps. He turned down a residential street. The houses, squeezed-together brownstones, loomed over him. He reached into his chinos for his key ring, and his fingers brushed a serrated triangle.
He stopped, holding the triangle, his thumb running across the smooth surface.
With a sigh, Brad grabbed his keys. He took his
building’s concrete steps two at a time and slotted his key into the bolt—
—and then the smell hit him.
He recoiled. His first thought was of wet trash left simmering under the sun, but that was just part of the stench. Threaded through and around the smell of decay was ozone, bleach, a hundred other smells, creating an odor that was both repulsive and confusing. It gripped his throat and his gut, squeezed with slick fingers.
His heart kicked into high gear. A hum rose, the kind of sound you heard as airliners cut across the sky—thin but deep, obliterating the ambient noise of the city.
A single thought shot across his mind: They found me quick.
A voice spoke in the center of his head, male only in the vaguest sense, the words formed as if the creator had to try very hard to articulate human sounds:
And Brad knew that voice.
He spun. In the mouth of a narrow alley across the street, the air shimmered in a large, squat shape. The voice spoke again:
Brad glared at the shimmering shape. He felt the triangle in his pocket, like evidence of a broken promise. He thought a single thing, knowing it would be heard: You betrayed me.
He dropped his groceries and ran, down the steps, down the street, getting lost in the evening crowds.
The shimmering shape waited, and then, slowly, the air resolved itself solid once more.
***
Much later and away from city crowds, the man known as Brad Pfeiffer reached into the darkness and a Doorway of early-morning autumn sunshine opened in the air. The man known as Brad Pfeiffer stepped Sideways and was Brad Pfeiffer no longer.
*****
The Center
How wondrous is a carnival when the lights go out?
How educational is a museum after the day’s last tour?
The room we’re talking about is both of those things, a room in that you can sense a ceiling and four walls, but only see the aisle before you, marked by small circles of blue light, stretching into the distance. The rest is an inky black.
Walk the aisle. The floor is not tiled or detailed, just a clear, ruler-straight expanse. There is no sound here, not even your own breathing or heartbeat (alarmingly).
Tales from The Lake 5 Page 6
