Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  On either side loomed low dark buildings with tall windows. Only a few were lighted. Korliss looked at them, waiting for another prickle of memory, and felt nothing.

  “This is a place I come and stay sometimes,” Hippolita said. “It’s not a good neighborhood now and no one wants to buy. Half the houses around here are empty.”

  They rolled to a stop as the bells chimed for evening. The echoes rolled over them and faded into the dusk. She stabled Cinerius at the side of the house, in a low barn that also held a stub-winged car with its nacelle open and its drive shrouded under canvas. Then she took out an antique brass key and went to insert it in the front door.

  Korliss heard the movement before he saw it, and without thinking threw her aside. She cursed, and the key clinked on the step. His blade was just out when the black shape dropping from the roof smashed him to the ground.

  Sprawling, he clenched his fist, and the blade thrummed. There was a howl, and clawed feet pranced back from his face.

  A shot slapped his ears, and the creature spun away.

  Korliss pushed himself to one knee, the outthrust blade shimmering. A sphynx lay on the path, half feline, half simian. Shot through the chest, it hissed between curved fangs as its body changed and it died.

  Hippolita shone a lamp up at the roof, her pistol steady in her other hand. “That was careless of me,” she whispered harshly. “I’m sorry.” She lowered the light, put the pistol away and came to him. “Are you hurt? I was stupid not to check. Stupid.” Her voice trembled.

  “Bruised. Shaken a bit,” he said, getting up slowly and feeling his shoulders. “It’s all right. I should have stayed back and speared it with the long beam as it fell. Only…”

  She looked at him and then at the place where he had fallen, where her key lay by the doorstep.

  “Come in,” she murmured. “Let me look at your bruises.”

  She lit a candle and led him through the house, lighting candles, lanterns, globes, on every wall she passed, in every niche and corner.

  He stopped.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Hippolita.

  “I can hear water.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, “it’s under the street. They built over it long ago.”

  “Ah,” he whispered. “Of course.”

  Their gazes locked. Then both looked away.

  “I don’t think you finished your story,” Korliss said after a pause. “How long did the girl stay there in the sunlight?”

  Hippolita lifted a hand in a warding-off gesture, cut short. “You’re right. I didn’t finish. She steeled herself to return and beg forgiveness, and made her way back to her home by the river. The journey took weeks this time. When she arrived, the house was empty. Later she learned her sister had fallen ill the day after she had left. Perhaps it was shock, perhaps something else. But there was not enough money to pay for proper care. They had sold their tools, their minimind, even some of their clothes, and it was not enough. Her sister had recovered physically but her mind was destroyed. Her betrothed had offered to care for her, but now her father refused anything he could not earn.

  “They were unable to feed themselves; so they were taken to the House of Sharing, where they feed you but take your organs after you die, and when she tried to trace them, their records had ended months earlier.

  “So now,” Hippolita finished, “she sits by the river and sometimes thinks about sunlight. And she wishes to be with her family.”

  She peered at him quickly, then looked down at her hands.

  “That’s a sad story,” he said at last. “Could it have another ending? Will the girl join her family? Or will she learn that the river has nothing to say to her?”

  “Perhaps she’ll learn to behave as though she no longer hears the river,” said Hippolita, “but inside she will still want to join them.”

  Now she was facing him, her eyes wide and unblinking in the candlelight.

  Korliss looked at her and could not speak.

  She took his hand. “I did say there’s only one bed, didn’t I?”

  He nodded his head. “Yes.”

  “We can share a bath first,” she said softly, and rose. “But there’s a price. Everyone who stays here has to tell me something about himself, something secret, something that has shaped him and that he wouldn’t tell a stranger.”

  “Like your story?”

  “Yes. Now you know: I’m a monster with a human face.”

  “Don’t say that!” He stopped and drew her to him. “I don’t care about that. But the price — can it wait until morning?”

  “All right,” she whispered, and pressed her cheek into the base of his neck. “’Til morning.”

  Later, he lay on his back and listened to the insistent murmur of the buried river. Her tears had dried on chest. He tried to imagine himself in a class of children watching the instructor. Tried to imagine parents, a home, with sunlight on the roof tiles. A job, or half a life in the penal mines — anything but the emptiness inside him. He pictured a creature leaping from an opened cage and struggling to remember flight. He was shivering again. Hippolita gave a low moan and rolled away in her sleep, then put her arm across his chest. Her breathing calmed, merged with the whispers of the underground stream.

  The candle burned to a stub and went out. The hollow inside Korliss ached. And the water whispered.

  When he was sure she slept, Korliss slipped her arm from him and gathered his clothes. Dressed, he went to the door, then paused. After a moment he came back and slipped a handful of the gold-edged cards under her pillow and smoothed her hair over it.

  As the morning bells chimed, he was striding through narrow, dim streets. A star shone between high pinkish gray clouds. Their reflections scudded sunward across the lightless windows of second-floor rooms. An old man in shirtsleeves glanced down as Korliss passed, then went back to gazing over the rooftops that hid the sun.

  He headed towards where the Heliodos must be.

  On a main road, a line of wagons creaked through a rutted intersection, hauled by baluchithers and centrosaurids. A group of children scampered across between two of them, while four laden provisioners waited and quietly cursed. A police floater turned from a sidestreet, its fans whining in a cloud of dust and litter. Without thinking, Korliss took two running steps to a wain loaded with water barrels, swung himself up and clung to its hidden side. When the floater passed, he stayed on.

  Towers rose further than he could see and a deep incessant thunder filled the air. He moved through a twilight of purple globes and smoky lanterns.

  Down a cross-street he glimpsed the front of a wide, rounded building faced with transparent panes, many cracked or replaced with faded brown canvas. It tingled with familiarity. He dropped from the wain and strode towards the arched entrance of the building.

  Inside, he hurried up rusted metal steps that once had moved, and fed gold cards into a machine that passed him through a barrier. Then he boarded a maglev train that would take him nightward.

  The air was icy. It stung his cheeks as he left the maglev terminus. Behind him he heard the sparse crowd boarding the train for its return journey. He did not look back. Over the dark streets, a dead stretch of magrail continued nightward. He jogged beneath it, remembering an elongated fleck of bronze soaring between two clouds.

  The street ended in a wooden fence. Korliss climbed over, followed a faint path and peered up at where the bridge had once launched itself in a clean arch across the ravine, and now stopped short in a stump of torn metal.

  Straining his eyes, he made out the other side of the ravine, and the stub of the bridge jutting towards him, looking no more than a handful of crumpled wires.

  The wind from the nightside pulled at his cloak, called in his ears.

  Below him, a couple of black cables curve
d towards the other side. Power and communication links. He wondered if any were still active. Almost at his feet the ground dropped away: stone and earth streaked with ice and patches of snow. And only darkness beneath.

  It would be insane to go on.

  From the sky above the far side of the ravine, a faint auroral flicker showed snow-covered hills like a world of cloud.

  He caught a rocky ledge with one hand to swing him over, and dropped.

  He fell for two seconds, and hit rolling. The shocksilk cloak took most of the impact, but he was barely able to save himself on the two-meter lip of the cable housing. He peered back up the cliff, allowing himself one minute to get his breath.

  Then he gulped air into his chest, rolled and lunged for the cable.

  He hit and slid, grabbed, and squirmed beneath it, clinging with arms and legs. The cable was as thick as his body, and he managed to worm his way on top of it. That was better: he could put his weight on the cable and rest. But now he could see how the cable was angled down, how it curved and rose and shrank to nothing in the dark, and how it swayed, slowly and inexorably, back and forth, against the pattern of grays and blacks on the far wall. The wind ran cold hands over him, slapped him playfully on the back. Knowing it would be a mistake, he peered down.

  A gray ribbon of ice snaked below. On either side of it ranged black skeletons of trees taller than those beside the Heliodos; the dead growth-points at their tops glimmered below him like pale stars.

  He shut his eyes and crawled.

  What was he doing? What ran hidden through the depths of his mind?

  Stars in a black sky, with the dayside a thin red glow along the horizon.

  Absurd. Insane.

  The cable writhed beneath him in the wind. He shut down his mind and crawled.

  The cold clamped icy palms about his body, began to squeeze. He felt his flesh becoming thin and brittle, and could not tell if the cable was still under his hands, or he had slipped and was falling through kilometers of emptiness.

  Perhaps he was flying, swimming through the air. Perhaps his shoulder blades had sprouted pinions, his forearms were fletched with filigreed horn. Or was he chest-deep in snow, heaving himself through it with forelimbs like white-furred sweeps?

  His sight returned with the clarity of a dream. And in the dream, his hands were human hands. They gripped the cable, reached forward, gripped again. Beyond them a crumpled metal structure jutted towards him.

  An age later, he dropped from the cable to the floor of a tunnel, crawled to an access shaft and climbed a rickety ladder to the open air. He began running nightward.

  He passed places he knew: a bridge over a frozen stream (whose crimson-edged waves had lapped the central pillar), the skeleton of a dome, where leafless black boughs leaned over an ice-choked fountain. In obedience to the dream, he turned to the right and lengthened his stride.

  Once, an arachnocryoid sprang from the shadows, and his senses were so dulled it was almost on him before he struck it. He severed two of its legs, then pierced its thorax, which hissed and flared blue as the alcohol in its blood ignited. He kept the shimmering blade before him as he ran on.

  And finally he came to an icy slope he knew he must climb. All the way up, his feet skidded on ice; the wind cuffed him, tore the breath from his throat. But at the top, with his lungs full of a fire that smoked from his mouth, he could see, through a river of cloud and a pulsating aurora, the stars of nightside.

  He pressed against the side of a tor, and a slab shifted, opening a cleft that he slipped through. The darkness was welcoming. He descended into it down steep uneven, familiar steps. The lap of running water sounded, grew louder. Home, he thought: he was coming home. A formless blue glow softened the darkness. The very rock walls offered him light. Soon now.

  Finally, in the dimness something stirred.

  A ponderous, white-furred creature faced him, bearing a complex metal shield. “Wait,” she said.

  “I am—”

  “I know you. Wait.”

  Memories began to well up in him.

  “I’ve come back to see my family, my parents. Let me go to them.” A more recent memory suddenly made his heart pound, and he stammered. “Are they still—? Are they well?”

  “They pray you have lost your obsessions with the sun and its creatures.”

  Korliss let his breath pour out. “Please take me to them.”

  “There is movement in this sector,” said the guardian. “Have you betrayed us?”

  “No,” he shook his head wildly. “No one cares enough to follow me this far.” He reached towards her. “I’ve come back. I want to come in now.”

  “Wait,” she stared at him wide-eyed for a count of five. “I am required to ask if you are ready to return permanently.”

  “I have seen the sun.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  “I lived among them, lived as one of them. I let innocent creatures be crucified in front of me because I dare not reveal myself. Because I wanted the sun. But then I tried to atone, I — let me in.”

  “You must answer clearly: do you want to return permanently?”

  “Where else — where can I go? Take me back.”

  “In that form, the cold will kill you,” said the guardian finally. “We will admit you, in your proper shape.”

  Korliss gasped and fell to his knees. “Thank you. Yes. Yes, of course.” He bowed his head and breathed deeply until his pulse was steady again, then closed his eyes. He waited for his limbs to thicken, his jaw to swell, his back to bow, and gray hair to mat his body. He tried to will his mind to clear.

  He did not change.

  He moaned and reached toward her.

  “Either you have lived with them too long,” said the guardian, “or some experience has fixed you in this form. Or fundamentally you do not wish to return. We will try to maintain contact and support you, but if you return here often you will threaten our secrecy. I am sorry, but I must return to aestivation soon.”

  Korliss stumbled forward. “Help me! Take me back!”

  The guardian stood and raised her shield. Knowing what would happen, Korliss triggered his blade and swung.

  A flash hurled him against the wall. Steam swirled about the guardian, who was unmarked. The blade was dead in Korliss’ hand.

  Shivering he backed to the stairs and climbed to the waste of snow. He snarled and flung the blackened hilt into the shadows, then sank to his knees and put his head in his hands.

  “A cheat!” he whispered. “Everything. All of it.”

  He slumped sideways and drew his knees to his chest.

  The cold sank icy teeth into the joints and extremities of the body he wore. The body hurt, forced him to his feet. Made him walk.

  He wished he had not destroyed the blade. But it would not matter much longer. If not the nightside creatures, then the cold. He had gone without food and sleep, and he would obtain release soon enough. After a while, he found he was following his own tracks, and his mouth twitched at the irony.

  The tracks passed the frozen fountain, but he did not. His knees buckled. He lay down in the lee of the stone plinth and pulled his cloak about him and did not care what found him in the dark.

  He thought he would dream of clinging to threads stretched over black abysses, but instead he drifted in a darkness filled with the rush of water, and once he watched a face, picked out by a single light, drown in a river of tears.

  Later, he thought that he heard the water roaring through subterranean tunnels, that he was falling towards it, and he was caught by surprise when his cloak was jerked away.

  Hippolita flung half a dozen gold cards at his chest. “That’s all I had left after I fixed the car,” she snapped. “You can have them back.” Behind her, a small stub-winged car stood on
a steaming patch of roadway. “Gold cards weren’t what I asked for,” she said, her jaw quivering. The aurora shimmered above her head. “Korliss, you owe me a story.”

  He stared at her, at the car, at nothing.

  From far away, across the ravine, the bells of the city tolled through the icy air, bringing morning. He looked at the fountain and imagined it as it was meant to be, the water leaping from its underground courses high into the long, golden light. “Yes,” he said finally, and reached for her hand. “I do.”

  Hydden

  Catherine MacLeod

  I toss the core of Luke’s apple out for the blackbirds, and, bent over as I most always am these days, don’t see the Hydes until I sit on the doorstep.

  There are five of them, twenty feet away, standing in the long grass between the house and the stony beach. They’re dark, silent, silken-furred, horribly human. I don’t want to look at them, but do — it seems only polite to acknowledge the angels of my death. I was hoping for another day, but they always know. They’re never wrong.

  I spread my fingers over my swollen stomach and feel the rippling, like small waves ahead of the tide. I might have another hour.

  Luke didn’t come down this morning. Maybe he finally wised up and got scared. Maybe his father found out he’s been sneaking out to see me. Either way, it’s about time. I don’t want him here for this.

  I don’t want to be here for this.

  He brought me food yesterday. He’d polished the apple until it glowed. He shrugged away my thanks and said it was no big deal. But it was; you can go hungry here in the birth house. Meals are provided by your loved ones, if you have any left — and if they can stand to be near you. I know that by helping me Luke was rebelling against his father; and no doubt there was some morbid curiosity over my pregnancy. But it was also an act of compassion. There are no small kindnesses anymore.

  (Three acts of generosity: Susan Bennett gave me her lasagna recipe; Winnie Martell gave me a drive home when my car broke down; Calvin Zanberger gave me his name.)

  The sea is calm this morning, a chilly blue-green. The wind is sharp; you can smell winter coming. It’s beautiful here, but the location wasn’t chosen for the view. The house was built past the edge of town so the Hydes wouldn’t come near the other dwellings. My husband, Cal, wondered if anyone remembered that, in olden times, women in labor were sent away to protect their village from the demons that hovered around them. Then he went and helped them shingle the roof.