Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “Things are gonna get weird now, boss. Please don’t struggle. You’ll want to. Everything that’s made you you is going to want to fight what’s coming.”

  He was raising his voice to provide cover for the sounds growing around us, I realized. They were back: the spectral, chittering wind, the dead stomping. Fear shone from my face, brightening everything. I could see each crack in Gregor’s skin as if it were a slot canyon, glowing in a desert morning.

  “But this is not the time for panic,” he breathed. “You’ll know when it’s time for panic. Believe me when I say this is not that moment. So handle your shit, please. There, done.” I hadn’t even felt the remaining cords being tied, but I was as securely trussed as possible.

  “Can’t lift you myself, as I’m an old, old man.” He grinned at that. He didn’t look all that old, though if the records were right, he was only in his early sixties. I could almost hear the air quotes around the last part. “Won’t matter if I’ve arranged things right. You ready to go?”

  I groaned something in the negative. There was simply no way I could move myself, I felt, let alone be transported. Where was the litter. The heli lift, or the ATV. I was badly broken, tied up, blood and rain-soaked in the lee of a crumbling forest giant, ass deep in black muck. The morphine was really kicking in, too, so much so that I was perilously close to regarding everything happening as a dream. Everything that had ever happened, anywhere. For a sublime moment I returned to the warmth and gentle paranoia of the crèche; I thought of Duhren and Ceri. Sam. Inga and the kids. I thought of Ky and the job, then Charlie Mack calling a bald eagle mean names. This last brought guilt, and a weak smile.

  Gregor grinned at that. “Oh yeah, you’re ready. All right, sit up, Den. Let’s have a look at you.” He stood up and straddled me, leaned over my head and shoulders and snaked his whip-thin arms down my back. I was staring at his crotch, noting with interest and not a little alarm that he appeared to have an erection. I felt his fingers grip my shoulder blades like handles and he was hauling me into a sitting position. My legs necessarily bent and there was a distant protest from the mangled knee, but I received it as I would an old piece of news from some place that didn’t matter much anymore.

  Then he was behind me, the broad tips of his splayed fingers pressing into my back, palpating my spinal column. I managed a slurred what are you doing which devolved into something guttural and sighing.

  “Once more, you’re going to want to let go of yourself. Feel free to piss in your pants, Den, if you haven’t already. It’s about to get weird. I don’t say this to prepare you. There is no preparation for...”

  He hit me then. A blow from the flat of his hand, I rationalised later, but at the moment it was as if I’d been struck by a rolling boulder. The force of it was a terrible revelation and my vision went immediately white, white, beyond white. I felt propelled outside of myself, vaguely wondering how my body wasn’t somehow boring into the side of the ravine like a bullet. Accompanying this sensation was the shrieking of their wind and the suggestion of voices, whispering, hooting and snarling all at once. A grinding sound, metal on gravel.

  The whiteness dimmed, slowly, and as it did I began to see that I’d fallen on my side. I couldn’t feel anything of my body; the knee, or the clicking of my eyelids open and shut. I couldn’t tell where any part of me was. I was reduced to a floating point of awareness. TFW you in the noönet, only I wasn’t. Light and shadow played over the green and ochre of my immediate view; Gregor moving about. He was singing something, soft and low, in a language I’d never heard before, and punctuating the song with clicks and pops of his tongue, long hissing glissades. None of that mattered at the moment. I only had eyes for what rested on the moss in front of my face.

  It was an acorn cup, or something like it. Forest detritus, no bigger than a thumbnail. The small top piece to a seed, the part fairies in old books would flip over and use as a hat. I recall thinking some little guy lost his hat when it came into focus. And then it was the only thing in my vision. In fact, the only thing in the world.

  The cap was filled with blood. I knew it was mine; who else had been bleeding here? There was blood everywhere, but soaked into the wood, the moss, largely already absorbed by the surroundings. This cap, this small pool of crimson, filled my sight. I’d been struck, Gregor had struck me, probably injured me horribly, paralyzing me, and I’d fallen, tipped over. This cap, this drop or two of blood.

  Something moved in the blood.

  Ripples began to fan out from the centre of the pool, and with each ripple the cap grew larger, pushing its own edges out from the centre. Filling with more blood, more ripples. I can’t describe it very well, sadly, but the rippling urged the boundaries outward, and the cap accommodated that urge, growing in size, which welcomed more ripples from below the surface. Something moved, and pulsed. Rising from depths that had not been there before.

  In moments I was gazing across a small pond, a lake. A sea. A sea of blood, thrumming in the green darkness, the ripples on its surface now determined carmine waves that rolled to the golden edges of the shoreline to break in pink foam. At the same time, the cap was still a cap, a fleck of plant tissue. Nothing at all, and yet, this sea. This blood.

  My awareness rose above the waves as the thing below rose to the surface. Nothing but humming dark redness before me, stretching in all directions, and the waves now rolling so rapidly that they began to merge into tall crests of red foam and the smell, honey and iron atomized in the air, and like that the inhabitant of the sea broke through the surface in a gout of blood and shadows, the pale bulk of it forming hills and deep, creased valleys that ran with blood cascading from the heights of this new island birthed from below. I was lost in wonder and fear, pinned to the sky. What could live there, I recall thinking. Strange thoughts, as in a dream. What would choose to? What could make a life in such a place.

  With the thought came a kind of refinement of my vision. The hills and their crests resolved themselves into the curve of a hip, the muscled planes of a shoulder. The valleys, still flowing with slowly congealing blood going black in the light, revealed themselves as the spaces between arms and legs, tucked tight to a heaving torso. The head rolled and foamed, blood pouring from the mouth and eyes, bubbling from the ear that wasn’t submerged, for the whole being was folded into the fetal position, on its side, and bound, I saw now. Bound with black ropes that pulsed and glistened with a kind of lunar sheen, speckled with mineral flecks. Like stars. A titan, new born and screaming, its flesh glowing with a translucent whiteness, bones shifting like the shadows of machines deep within. Rolling, sloppy gears; gushing pipes and channels; phantom lightnings crackling over the surfaces of tortured cables.

  I watched as the being reached out a trembling hand to something that lay before it on the surface of the now calming sea, and immediately felt a paroxysm of discontinuity as my own hand appeared before my face, reaching out for the little cap, tipping it slightly, lifting the finger that now held a dark drop of blood at the tip.

  If there was anything that came after that moment, I was no longer there to experience it.

  TWO

  STONEFISH HOUSE

  I awoke to a cool, dark, windowless room and the sharp tang of some astringent chemical in the air. I was out of my clothes, dressed instead in some kind of long shirt of thin linen. A hospital gown, I realized. There was a half-tube of some stiff, fibrous material over the lower half of my body, and over that a thick beige blanket covered in abstract Xaayda-Kil designs in white and grey. I moved to scratch at my face and immediately noted the dull tug of tubes in my right arm. The itch was thanks to similar tubes in my nostrils, and there were patches adhered to my neck and scalp as well.

  These didn’t last long in the face of a mild panic. The machines tastefully recessed in the wall to my right registered their protest as I tore the sensors away.

  The room was open to whatever lay beyond; no door in the entryway. Over the shrill digital yelping of the
machines, I could hear laughter. Not in the next room, or in a hall if there was one, but from further away. A ghost of laughter, distant but happy.

  Gregor, of course.

  He told me later that I’d slept for three days, post-surgery. “Gotta love that New Testament resonance,” he said, and when I expressed ignorance of what he could be talking about, he seemed put out. Most of that downtime was thanks to the drugs, and the necessary purge of the nanomaterial in my system, which, with the kind of load I was carrying (for work, for life, really), well, it put my bios into some shock.

  “Yeah, we don’t really do that here?” he drawled in answer to my sleepy indignation at the news. “Noönet stuff. Consider yourself out of the pool, Den. And besides, for the surgery protocols to function properly, all that nano junk from outside in the world had to go. Shit, son, it’s in the food, the grooming products. Tiny cameras in your intestinal tract and no mistake.”

  I was to learn that all things gastro were a theme with Gregor Makarios, but at the moment I had deeper concerns.

  The laughter drew closer and then he was there, in the doorway. “Oh hey, it’s awake. Again!” He stepped over to the machines and toggled a switch somewhere, the room fell into silence. “Didn’t really need those, but I suffer from a particular condition they used to call commitment to the bit and it just seemed right for the moment. Machines that go ping. Soothing for some. You?”

  I couldn’t say anything in reply, the question was so outside of my experience. I’d never been in a hospital before. Ripping the sensors and tubes out might have been an incredibly stupid mistake on my part, but Gregor seemed unconcerned.

  “Blank, huh? That’s fine. How are you feeling, Den?”

  “Muddy. My head’s thick.”

  “It’ll pass. And your knee?”

  “My knee?”

  “You don’t recall? Huh. Well, let’s have a look anyway.”

  As Gregor moved to pull the blanket away, I felt a sudden terror. “No! Don’t!” My hands shot forward to clutch at the edge of the blanket, gripped the half-shell at the edge of it so firmly I could feel it cut into my palms. Gregor backed up, hands in the air.

  “Whoa! Hey now.”

  “Sorry, I just...I’d rather not look at it.”

  Gregor sat at the edge of the bed, ran a gnarled hand through his hair. He presented as a lot cleaner than what I recalled of him at our first meeting in the woods: crisp tangzhuang suit of some dark green, matte material, cream V-neck T-shirt, bare feet in a pair of rustically styled but clearly expensive sandals. Gregor closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, spoke.

  “Den. I’m glad to see you remember.”

  “I do.” I did, but the injury was not the core of the memory. Their sound, and the rushing of their winds as they tracked me, that was the memory. The nauseous gut feeling of being hunted, surrounded, surveilled. Examined and scanned and being brought to the edge of terror again and again, and again. The wretched state of my knee seemed slight in comparison, but I allowed myself to focus on it all the same. For whose benefit I couldn’t know. “I’d just rather not see how fucked I am just now.”

  “What a very human thing to say. But yeah, no, okay, I get it. I do. You’ve no reason to trust me, and you’ve just been through a...a thing, Den. Man. I’ll give you that. So, let’s start here, with this.

  “You’re fine. Your leg is healed. A place for everything and everything back in its place, all the little disks and strings and chewy bits. You’ll see in a moment. I need you to see, to look at it, but let’s work up to that. Let me tell you about this place first. Oh, and welcome, by the way.

  “You’re in one of two medical pods in an abandoned Eidolon R&D facility. Home sweet home. Just me and the critters and a manufactured destiny. There are outbuildings as well, all up and down the ravine, and sweet tunnels joining them all. Tusk loved his secret tunnels. Abandoned, oh, these many years.

  “Some of the really interesting AI work was done here, noönet applications, and not a few generations of really nasty nano weaponry. Sentient goo! Malevolent muck with an agenda! Tusk’s greatest hits, you know. I was even here for a few months back in oh, when was that? 2030? Ish? Thereabouts. Strictly for my sins. You know how that is, Den? You’re young, idealistic. I mean, about the work, at least. And you end up under some, and not to put too fine a point on it, Den, but you’re under some fucking monster that sweats and roars and shits all over you? Not just you, though, it’s their whole mode of interaction with the world. You got someone like that over you?”

  “Not really? My boss likes to pretend he’s an asshole, sure, but he’s just an old media person.”

  “Lucky you. Well, that was Aldo Tusk for me. That was Eidolon. And this place was an Eidolon place. Once you’re up, I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

  “The what?”

  Gregor pinched the bridge of his nose again, then patted the bed with both hands, palms flat. “Don’t worry about it, Den. I’m old, too. What I mean is I’ll show you around. Not everything, but enough to give you the run of the place. And you will run, if you want to, because, as mentioned, your knee is fine. I got you here in good time, and I had staff on hand to fix you up.”

  Staff seemed an odd choice of words and my unease at its use must have shown in my face.

  “Doctors, Den. If you like. The finest.”

  “And do they know who you are? That you’re here?” I asked. Thinking about Ky Wilder back in his office, even for a moment, reminded me of my reason for being there in the first place. “Wait. How could they not? Can I meet them? Hold up. How do you keep them quiet? You’ve been missing for thirteen years. No one knows what happened to you.” Conspiracies bloomed in my mind, secret cabals of weary tech magnates disappearing from the world but keeping all the benefits, for a price. Suddenly my garbage assignment was transmuting into gold.

  Gregor stood up, pressed clenched fists into the small of his back and bent backwards. There were audible pops as he arched his spine. He sighed, and there was a kind of mournfulness to the sound. He moved toward the door, craned his neck out into the space beyond, looking left and right. Then up, gazing intently at the ceiling.

  “And you’re here to remedy that, I take it.”

  There was something in his tone. I felt briefly ashamed. Here was a man who had gone to incredible lengths to fade from the mind of the world, and the unknown editor of a fringe SoCal magazine had sent a plucky young writer to track him down, invade his privacy, bring him back into the light. I wasn’t convinced it would destroy him in the process but at the moment, I felt that just being there, in his place, was coming close to doing that. An act of destruction. Gregor watched my face closely as these feelings passed through me.

  “There’s a story,” I started. “My editor thought...”

  “Your editor! Oh, I like that. That’s fun.”

  “Okay? Sure. He sent me after you. Thinks you might have some insight into an anomaly that’s cropping up in—”

  “Let me stop you right there, Den. He didn’t send you.”

  “But he did?”

  “I know it may seem like that. On your level of understanding, of being. But he didn’t. You’ll level up soon enough. I’m curious, so let me ask you. What was your editor going on? For this story of yours?”

  I started to tell him about the Numpty, which he remembered, and then the briefly fatal appearance of Li’l Numpty, and Ky’s hunches, the scrap of Gregor’s old poetry that he felt was somehow prophetic. By the time I got to the boiling frog meme, Gregor was smiling and clapping his hands lightly before his heart, like a child about to receive a treat. The sight stopped me short.

  “What?” I said.

  “You don’t find those clues completely sketchy?”

  “What do you mean? Like, the article I dredged up about you and your sasquatch hunting days?”

  “Ooh! Do tell.” I sensed that he had no idea what I was talking about or was playing stupid. This would prove to be a hazy bo
rderline state that Makarios felt most at home in. Fine for him, rough for me.

  “Did you leave that there on purpose? Hard to believe you’d forget it was out there. I mean, even improperly tagged as it was.”

  Gregor pressed the tips of his fingers to his temples, made the universal sign of a mind being blown. “Bwoosh! Gone. You’d be surprised how much a person can forget in a life as long as mine. And I missed one! Neat. What did you end up learning from it?”

  “Not much? Enough. I figured, maybe, that you disappeared in order to get back to your teenage obsession.” I told him how I’d searched out the last known sasquatch sighting, about the trip to Haida Gwaii, and Charlie’s help with the ancestral recall session. The moment I’d seen him in the memory shoals of the New Masset elder collective. He pulled up a chair as I did so and sat next to my bed, listening intently. His eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed. When I was done he sighed, then chuckled happily into his chest, his head bowed.

  “So. A loose collection of hunches. Long shots. Leaps of faith. Really reaching there, son. And each and every one of these, these gems of improbable guesswork, each one incredibly, impossibly, each one rewarded. And then—” and here he whistled long and low “—each one leads you, almost by the hand, to the next little miracle. Den. Den! No detective is that lucky. And certainly no wet behind the ears SoCal ganzfeld tank guppy journalist. No offense.”

  I said I was a little offended, even so.

  “You’ll get over it. Time and wounds, right? Speaking of which...”

  My head was still thick, my thoughts sludgy, and the conversation thus far had done nothing to ameliorate that feeling. Before I knew his intention, Makarios reached for the blanket and whipped it off in one swift motion. The worst injury I’d ever suffered up to then had been a sprained wrist when I was still in single digits, so I’m not ashamed to say I cringed and shut my eyes.

  The half-tube was transparent with a kind of opalescent sheen to it. The hospital gown I was wearing was necessarily short. My legs leapt into focus.