Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “Okay?”

  “And we exploded our brains through a number of methods, but the hands down killer app was the discovery of fire, and the cooking of hard to digest foods, particularly meats, with said fire. Now, why Den, why should the one discovery of an animal that would allow it to access better food processing and better nutrition leading to an increase in brain size and processing power have as part of its utilization a measuring metric for fuel gathering that just happens to correspond perfectly to the part of the animal that does the fucking gathering of said fuel?”

  “Damn it, Gregor, it’s just tree parts! It’s branches and sticks! A coincidence. Things are the sizes they are and some things will be the same size as other things.”

  “Not coincidence. Or at least, not as we understand it. It’s the Stonefish, Den. All of this is coded into our reality. Why should this particular instance of similarity feed directly into the way we feed ourselves, prepare and consume our food? Because the First Law, because Everybody Hungry. Chew on that while you get better fuel for the fire, son.”

  GREGOR ON NATURE (3)

  “Can’t say as I ever took you for an environmentalist, Gregor.”

  “What makes you think I am?”

  “Just the way you were talking about the trees earlier. How balanced Stonefish House is. The boiling frog meme. And there’s a certain reverence in your voice when you talk about animals. Nature.”

  “Nature! Jesus. Now there’s a messed up and outdated concept.”

  “I don’t follow. Are you saying you don’t love it?”

  “Love it? No. Respect it? Not even. It fills me with fear, because I know what it is, Den. I know the purpose of Nature and it’s terrifying. Nature is not natural. And it can’t be naturalized.

  “Again, again, I tell you this, Den. This is all theirs. To alter as they like. To play with. To destroy and to remake in whatever image they desire. To harvest from when it comes harvest time. They set down the laws for its function and then set it running. The crystal grew. And we got this. We are in the world but, increasingly, not of the world. And that, I believe, is where we fucked up.

  “I don’t mean that we despoiled the planet. Sure, we did that, obviously, but it goes deeper than the destruction. The fouling of things, creatures, people. It was a failure of imagination, Den. From that failure did spring all manner of fuckery, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, only she’s drooling from a cleft palate and mutated from the thalidomide and heavy metals. I’m talking flippers, Den.

  “We could have gone so many ways. We went the easy way. Broad that highway, son, that leadeth to destruction, and many are the assholes skipping along it without a care in the world, or for the world.

  “No, I respect it. A lot of the time I’m appropriately stunned by it: the complexity of the informational substrate of the thing. But there’s nature, which isn’t what it appears to be though we must treat it as such if we want to live here, and then there’s super-nature, which isn’t even a...goddamn, it’s barely a thing at all and I’ve had a glimpse of Those Who Shit Above in Shadow, Den, and I am not down with it. I’m not down with any of this. Like, at all. At the end of the day, it’s a con, and win or lose, we still lose. Everything here loses, Den. Like the man said, no one here gets out alive.”

  Those Who Shit Above in Shadow. Gregor’s words, loaded as ever. They showed themselves the next day, early, and everything changed. They showed themselves, and the time for panic arrived.

  We never managed to bag that deer.

  It was the smell we noticed first, as we turned into the wind that shook the leaves and needles around us and gently coaxed them into falling. The smell was different by degrees from the scorched sugar and rotting meat stench I had experienced on my second night in the forest, but not by much. An intensification of that olfactory theme, an eye-watering tang of hot metal, ammonia, and spent ozone, electrifying and upsetting. I want to say that it was the odour of something going very wrong close by, something that should be retreated from in a hurry. I buried my face in the crook of my elbow, willing the fabric of my windbreaker to somehow burrow into my sinuses and block the stench. That didn’t work, and nothing would. Gregor lifted his chin into the misty air and inhaled deeply, his wide nostrils flaring wider. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes, sped down his cheeks like shining, eager comets.

  “Now that puts hair on the chest, Den,” he hissed at me. “Breathe that in! That’s the harbinger of true apocalypse, my boy. By their smell shall ye know them, said the man. And the other guy said I love the smell of archons in the morning or something like that.”

  “What?” I managed to choke out. “Who said what?”

  “It’s from a film. I think.” Gregor caught me up to him by the shoulder, his meaty paw clenching at the muscle in his excitement. “Come on. We’re close.”

  We scrambled up the jutting rib of a crumbling ridge kept barely intact by the root systems of several softening forest giants, yellow cedar and spruce thoroughly colonized by fungi that burst from their rippled hides in thick, firm-fleshed shelves and discs. At the crest of the rib, we carefully picked our way through a maze of deadfall, bracken, ferns like knives and slim maple plants that, knowing they would never see the sun, sprouted three or four livid green leaves the size of umbrellas. Clouds of gnats formed columns in the warmer air at the top, swirled in currents against the spores drifting skyward from the fungi. Through all this, the wind. Their wind, present and audible, moving against and through the world. It was a wind from another place, the result of a difference in pressure between here and where they came from.

  Sensing my thoughts or thinking aloud for himself, Gregor spoke. “It’s from their laddering. When they fold themselves down here, you get this breeze. Recall how they sucked stuff away when they left? Up in the alcove with my tree? The reverse of that. Feel it?”

  The mention of the Japanese maple threw me briefly.

  “Yeah. Not as much as I should, though?”

  “Right? Loud! Sound. And fury! The archons walk about in the garden during the windy part of the day, you know, but they bring their own, too. There.” Gregor pointed to his right and I followed his finger.

  A shape moved through the trees, and then another. We approached the hollow with them on all sides, sliding, running and weaving through shadow and spears of weak sunlight. That was how I perceived them at first, as form and motion. Patches of vibrating darkness, the wide swing of arms, the steady metronome of legs covering distance at speed. Their smell had not improved, but I was becoming used to it and so imagined it lessening.

  The shapes passed us as we made our careful way to the crest of the little ridge. Unlike my experience of them on the night before my accident, and the awful witnessing of Horvemoan and Anal Andy in the alcove with the Japanese maple, they moved in silence. The subterranean drumbeat of their footsteps that night must have been a deliberate tactic, I concluded. They could make as much or as little sound as they liked.

  “Can they see us?” I wondered aloud.

  “They know we’re here, in any case.”

  We reached the crest. There was a makeshift hide there, a light frame of birch limbs laced with creeper and blades of fern, leaning into the trunks of two larger birch, low to the ground. Gregor got on his belly and motioned for me to do the same. We crawled the rest of the way to the hide, where he parted the flimsy camouflage with one hand while he slipped off his pack with the other.

  “Did you build this?” I asked. “You’ve been here before.”

  “Oh yeah. Yeah, this is a favourite spot of theirs for some goddamn esoteric reason. Fucking ley lines probably.” He nodded at my pack, then his. “Might want to get comfortable, Den. Before you do, though, there’s a pair of ’nocs in there, top compartment. Dig ’em out, if you please.”

  I wriggled out of my pack, then went into his. The binoculars were black and heavy, and obviously antique. I passed them to Gregor, who immediately thrust them through the gap in the leaves. S
econds passed.

  “I count six,” he whispered, then handed me the binoculars. “That’s to start. Take a look.”

  I looked, and could have done with less. Six less.

  They had gathered in the hollow, and now clustered around a small spring that gushed from a cleft in a fused pile of grey glacial till made slick and velvety black with moss. One of them had placed its hand in the flow of water and was moving it around in jerking circles. The others were bent over it, or crouched before it, and they were also moving their hands, making their gestures in the air and occasionally touching each other, patting their shoulders or roughing up each other’s hair. Poking, prodding, nodding their great lumpen heads.

  And they were great. The group inspired awe, and blooms of the nausea I would never quite shake. Great beasts, actual sasquatch, like furred ambulatory boulders. Mobile trees.

  “And there you have it,” Gregor said. “World Hide and Seek Champions, right there.” He shifted in his place and sighed, laced and then flexed his fingers. “Damn. I hate it when they get into the water.”

  “What? Why? What’s going on?”

  He didn’t answer me right away. “That one with its hands in the stream, that’s The Laird. He’s the easiest to recognize. Recall the footage from the compound, Den. The twisty fucker behind him is As You Know Bob, and he’s flanked by Horvemoan, who you’ve met, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Jesus. You can see the stink lines coming off that one. Excuse me.” Gregor turned away from me and made a retching sound; I heard something splash on the ground beyond him.

  “Doesn’t matter how many times I see them in numbers like these. One or two at a time, for a short period, a body can handle that. This many?” he said as he turned back to me. “I’m frankly surprised you’re not ill yet. Well, the sick will come.”

  “Yeah, a little. Already. I mean, it’s not bad but...”

  “Wait for it. It will get worse before it gets better, and then only when your erection kicks in. And then it...I lied. It never really gets better. Anyway.”

  “Wait, what? Erection?”

  Ignoring the question, Gregor pointed through the hole in the blind. “See the one just a little downstream? You can’t tell, but that’s a female, or what passes for one where they come from. Babayoko, I call her. The Barbed Wire Mother. Babs, if I’m feeling sassy! And you’ve met the idiot watching the ridge line opposite and tugging at itself already.”

  “Anal Andy? Is that what it’s doing?”

  The creatures continued their obscure business around the spring. I was stunned. The weight of their presence, solid and uncompromising, finally began to set in. My hands were claws on the binoculars, and the flesh around my eyes began to throb where I pressed the viewing lenses into them. Gregor noticed this, and reached across to gently pry them out of my grasp.

  “You won’t see what you need to see any better with these. I just needed them to make my IDs.”

  “But what are they doing? What’s going on there with, what did you call that one?”

  “The Laird. Just watch, Den.” Gregor turned onto his back and crossed his arms behind his head. “Let me know when you see something weird start happening. I’m gonna rest my eyes for a bit, see if I can’t get my guts in a better state.”

  “You’re kidding, right. Something weird.”

  “Well. Weirder.”

  Gregor’s rest was brief, or at least so it seemed to me. I watched, eyes straining to discern the beast’s bizarre activity around the water. My mind thrummed with wonder and a rising unease, swarmed with questions, buzzing and biting. I also noticed, almost as an aside, that I’d generated a timid erection. Nothing more than a chub, really, but there it was, just as Gregor had predicted. The one called The Laird stood up in a long uncoiling motion, its legs like pistons slowly sliding to their full extension. The Laird rose, and kept rising. The size of the thing. Too big, too big, too goddamn big went the auto-generated mantra in my head. Animals, bipeds, weren’t supposed to be this size, at least not on land. The Laird was easily sixteen feet tall, and the other sasquatch, landotters, wood apes, whatever they were called, they weren’t much smaller. The archons. As You Know Bob. Babayoko. Horvemoan. I soon replaced the mantra with their names, whispered under my breath in a low tone, over and over. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Anal Andy. The Laird.

  The Laird. It had something in its hands, I thought for a moment. Or something was dripping from its fingers. I grabbed at the binoculars where they lay between Gregor and me, brought them to my eyes, and focused them.

  Nothing dripped from The Laird’s fingers. It, he, had the stream in his hands. He had picked it up, the flow of water. Picked it up like a rope or a length of thick, pulsing cable. The water coursed from the rock and left the streambed in a casual arc to flow over The Laird’s palms before sliding back to its place on the ground.

  My brain on fire, I hissed wordlessly at Gregor. He stirred and mumbled something I didn’t catch. Finally, I found my voice.

  “Damnit, Gregor! Something weirder!”

  Quickly he rolled over and hunched up close to the hide, peered through, groaned at the sight. “That’s about right. Wait for it now, Den.”

  In The Laird’s massive hands, the flow of water began to churn and buck and writhe. His fingers wrapped around the stream as if he were grappling with a suddenly active and hostile constrictor. The Laird braced himself somehow; though there was nothing to hold onto and no way to do so if there were, I sensed that the creature was anchoring himself there on the rock. Digging in with the feet, tensing obscure muscles, deepening a hold on the world in a way I couldn’t parse. The others began to hoot softly, an eerie whistling that slid up and down the scale at random. The water grew dark and began to froth with unpleasant matter. Something was growing in the stream. The hooting became more pronounced; Horvemoan and As You Know Bob, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, they began to squat violently and then hop. Squat, hop, squat, hop. Babayoko raised her arms in the air and swayed like a submerged plant in a current.

  Anal Andy didn’t seem to notice any of this. It still stared off at the ridgeline opposite, still pawed between its legs. I turned the ’nocs back to the others.

  The dark materials in the water took on bulk and shape and, to a chorus of sharp-edged, metallic screams, it finally burst forth. There was no helping it; I screamed myself, a short, declarative yawp.

  Insects. The black, shining cord that split from the rope of water was composed of insects. Beetles and centipedes, annelids, things with no legs and not enough legs and way too many, snips and snails and clumps of flesh with malformed wings like discarded plastic wrap. A jumping, twisting rope of things that crept and flew, a rope that chittered and scraped and hummed. The noise of it filled the hollow like a liquid, living thing, rising toward us as a tide and punctuated by the vocalizations of the beasts. The Laird’s voice was a buzzsaw working its way through flesh, sharp and sloppy, while the others sang with the voices of angels, if angels were built of knives and mallets and spinning chain drives. A nightmare industrial sound.

  The bug rope coursed from the stream and descended in a spastic arc to the ground, where it splashed its myriad hard, shining bodies against a large rock. As You Know Bob stepped forward and brought a massive hand down on the writhing cable where it touched the rock. Muscles bulged across its shoulders as it knelt there, bringing pressure on the rope, which resisted, somehow. The insects bunched together, entangling themselves, and countered the downward force As You Know Bob was applying to their massed forms. Something that might have passed for amused laughter circulated through the company then, followed by a kind of taunting. As You Know Bob grimaced in response and increased its efforts.

  A clean, sharp report punctuated the cacophony of the hollow. The rock the bug rope flowed over had cracked, split. As You Know Bob grinned, showing row upon row of teeth in a cavernous mouth. Beneath his hand, the torrent of life bucked and changed.

  “Evolution on the fly,” Gregor breathed.

  Th
e insect horde became millipede, became lobster, snail, starfish, lamprey. Parts of the stream that couldn’t breathe air flopped and shimmied as they died, to be snapped at and fed upon by what followed. Lamprey became lungfish, eel, salamander, frog. Frogs, finally, became more frogs, of a thousand sizes, shapes, and colors. Hideous horned things from the dawn of life; great sloppy masses of moist protoplasm with only the suggestion of form; firm, lean leapers describing neon arcs in the air. The stream of life squirmed and croaked, hopped and splashed against that stone; a great flood of soft bodies and liquid eyes, webbed feet and lolling tongues, went spilling out into the hollow. Waves of frog flesh moved and rolled against the calves of the assembled archons and passed like insistent ooze between their legs, between the massed, still twitching carcasses of previous forms. The sound was deafening.

  As You Know Bob lifted its palm from the impossible rope and gazed upon its handiwork. It spoke to the others, a sliding atonal vocalization that moved up and down the scale at random and seemed to pierce the croaking din like a needle through flesh. A type of conversation ensued, many nails on multiple chalkboards, mercifully brief.

  It was The Laird that ended it, with a sharp declarative statement. It spoke, and the amphibian throng ceased their noise, the assembled archons fell suddenly silent. In that space of relative quiet, the only sound that of soft, wet bodies slipping over each other and churning the ground to mud, As You Know Bob shook its great head and bore down on the stone again, and on the miraculous cord it had pinned there.

  With that pressure came another change. Streaks of pale white began to appear in the writhing creatures, and with a start I realized what I was seeing. Bone. The frogs were turning inside out, their skeletons ripping free of muscle and burrowing to the borders of their skins, breaking through. Bone dragged flesh with it, to the outside, and the things still lived, somehow. Still moved and clawed forward, away from their foul birthplace, to slither and limp into the forest, away down the ravine. Ravens began to gather, and grew bold at the promise of an easy feed. Gregor grunted, once.