Within an hour of docking at New Masset, I’d been hospitalized and treated some more. They put me on a slow drip of god knows what. The rescue had been early in the day; between the treatments and the small amount of food I managed to choke down, I had close to a full load of nanomaterial back in my system by nightfall. Any medical staff consulting my chart wondered aloud as to how I’d lost it in the first place. I didn’t bother to enlighten them. I slept.
Starting awake in the middle of the night, I felt the riptide of the noönet on my mind. A very definite tugging, and answering it, a rising and distinct terror. It was our natural habitat, that slow-boiling pot, and I knew I’d slip in to that current before too long, but who to speak to first? The thought of waking the crèche was a physical hurt somewhere in my brain, like a spike or a hot needle. Wilder was out; I needed sympathy, not calculation. No, not sympathy, either. A lack of history. Tentatively, I put a toe in and did a search for Charlie Mack. There were a number of machines I’d been hooked up to, none of which I guessed measured actual panic, but a few of them went ping in the next moment, all the same.
Charlie hadn’t been resident in New Masset since 2069. Currently, she was teaching at the UAA, with letters behind her name and everything. Linguistics. Charlie was in Anchorage, and had been for a long while.
Of course. I laughed for a long while in response, until someone arrived to administer a sedative.
Still, they let me go the next day, and I caught the noon airship to YVR while in what could charitably be called a fugue state. The pilots kept us low and visibility was practically zero due to the wildfire smoke; trying to catch a glimpse of anything outside the portholes was too much like straining to experience anything in the Numpty. I closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep.
Things moved quickly, as they tend to do when one is on their rails, once I touched down in YVR. I ached to not access the noönet but accessed it anyway, giving in to the warm currents in rebellious fits and starts. Den Secord: Not Wired That Way. But I am, and a fool to ever have thought otherwise. Each reluctant dip soaked me in the felt knowledge and automatic curation of awful things.
Ky Wilder, for instance, was surprised when I contacted him. Along with his streams of near-apoplectic verbal abuse, I learned that there were now nine major Numpty locations and a scattering of smaller nodes across the planet. Hot takes a plenty, according to Wilder. Scientists, celebrities, presidents and proles, the species had something to say, and it was all Certified Fresh across the board. Not that I’d be delivering any of those takes, I was informed, considering the circumstances under which I’d apparently quit my job at New Heretic. I was called a maniac, among other things. About a minute of that was all I needed.
The call in to the crèche was much longer, and far worse. I can’t go into details without running the knife edge of despair and risking a total and unaffordable breakdown. Suffice it to say the crèche had never heard of Ceri.
After that call, the shitbox beckoned. This room awaited me, and took me in like a morsel. Here the stain on the wall, the black mould in the corners, the balcony and the flooded street, vandals for life and the grumble and whine of a culture running down hanging in the very air like ash. And of course, the choice.
Do I keep eating. Or do I shit in their collective mouth.
The cable. Or the other thing.
***
In the Numpty, somewhere between that garbage-choked peninsula and Stonefish House, I crossed a stream, perhaps the very stream I had crossed when I found those initial tracks in the shifting sand of its bed. Those were long gone. I had the footage of their vanishing in my pack. In their place, strange new marks, anomalous remains: matts of waterlogged fibre dark with blood and an oily substance, the scattered parenthetical bones of small birds, globular milky clusters of what might have been orphaned eyes. Something had happened here. The gore of it was all around, strewn over the lichen-crusted and windthrown trees that bridged the stream, bunched up in frothing mounds in the meander bends. I found a line of large, flat teeth impacted in a chunk of sandstone, seeming to mimic the fruiting body of some unknown fungal mass.
There was evidence there, too, of a profound disruption of the surrounding environment. Trees twisted like matchsticks. A boulder calved in two, the exposed interior of the stone glistening in the waning light of day. The broad leaves of some deciduous ground-covering plant slowly fading to the transparency of glass. A rough cube of something that might have been compressed feces slowly crumbling to fragrant dust. The bark of a yellow cedar charred black and smelling of sulphur. Other, even less explicable things. Ensconced in my bubble as I was, I came upon these profane relics one by one, each one adding to a picture of events that, even had I all the pieces, I would never make sense of.
A little further on, with the stream behind me, I found the splintered stock of a rifle, a species of black mould already colonizing the cracks in the wood. I watched it for some time, expecting something. He had said he would cover me; would he jump from behind a bush now, dissolve the Numpty with a flourish, saying you’re welcome? I couldn’t wait, so I moved on.
I moved on and the Tree moved with me; both my shoulders so numb with the pain and exhaustion of carrying the Tree that it was as if it floated over my back, like a spirit. By this point, we were both badly damaged, and the protective sphere of perception it granted me was shrinking with each step. I was all fugue. My steps mechanical, my vision minimal, breathing ragged and automatic.
When the massive hand came to rest on my neck, supporting me and lifting me up, I registered only that a hand rested on my neck, that it smelled faintly of wood smoke and forest loam, and that I was being helped along. When the voice spoke, urging me on, filling me with their alien glee and madness, I heard it in my guts but made no sign that I heard, and my pants stayed clean.
After that, I can recall nothing until the moment of rescue.
***
My second night in the shitbox, when I was still intent on building my strength back up, eating and getting enough water, really committing to the bit, I dreamed of you, Gregor. My exhaustion was eroding quickly with each sleep session, and I was eager to see it gone entire, so slept at every opportunity, no matter the time of day. I slept, and stayed off the noönet as well, preferring my own silent company. I had long since lost track of where my shows were at and couldn’t bring myself to care, anyway. The dream came during a late afternoon nap.
In it, I stood at the balcony overlooking the street outside the shitbox, my nostrils puckering as I inhaled deeply of whatever I’d left in the bucket recently. So grounding. Dusk was gathering behind the building and the western sky before me resisted the darkness in serried ranks of blushing pink and angry ochre. The last glass and steel towers of shattered Vancouver caught the light and sent it shuddering into hidden alcoves and awakening alleyways.
A figure appeared on the roof of a building that was maybe two, three blocks to the west. Silhouetted there, it seemed larger than a man. Tall and broad, hanging arms like girders. I strained and squinted my eyes in the dream, put the flats of both hands to my brow to block out some of the imaginary light. The figure held a skein of ropes or threads in its left hand and suspended from this there swung an oval shape, pale and furred and lumpen. Somehow, in the manner of dreams (which I should know something about, after all, Gregor! My work sees an emotional response uptick of three point seven percent on the oneiric feeds, ask Wilder) I knew when the figure noticed me. That moment, you’ll recall, when you feel the eyes from across the room on the back of your head. That dread certainty, a hot liquid pouring down the spine. Hello, doctor, what’s the prognosis, but you don’t have to ask because you already know the shape of it. All that’s left are the fine details.
It noticed me, and slowly lifted its left hand, still clutching the tangle of threads. The pale mass hanging there swayed a little, forward and back, with the movement. Then, with a strong flex of the wrist, the figure tossed the object into the darkening street
below, where it disappeared.
I remained there, at the balcony, in the dream, downwind from a bucket of my own ripening waste, watching that figure on the distant rooftop, until the sun finally dropped below the horizon and the purple shadows rushed to fill the spaces vacated by light. The figure vanished in the gloom and as I waited in vain for it to return, the empty stars came out and danced about, your pinholes in the screen of night, Gregor. I did not wake, though the dream eventually ended. Instead, I slept on through that night and straight on to a timid dawn, with no further dreams to trouble me.
In the morning, I left the shitbox and went into the city. Though I had to travel in the direction of the street in the dream, where the figure had tossed that object, I managed to avoid it. The street, I mean. At a makeshift market, beneath a dripping tarpaulin, I found someone who could help me. I returned before noon, with the Gauss pistol weighing down a coat pocket. I placed the pistol on the terminal here, right next to the unattached cable. Lined them both up so that I could stare down the barrels of each as I worked.
I wrote, then. I don’t know how long for. I’ve eaten, but I can’t recall the last time. It’s been days, easily; hunger came and stayed a while before wandering off to torment some more invested entity. I don’t miss it. Hunger feels very distant and quaint to me now.
I wrote, and suffered. And now I’m done with the writing part. Nothing like dismantling a transfigured bear, but maybe a worse thing, given the consequences.
The time for panic has long passed.
Gregor, I’ve made my choice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank Ross E. Lockhart, who has been a mentor, a listening ear, a savvy adviser, and an early booster of my writing; Stonefish would not have come into being without him. Thanks, too, to Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula Guran, who were the first to buy a story I wrote if you want to point the finger of blame; Brian Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass, Ranylt Richildis, Nick Mamatas, each skilled with the red pen, to my writing’s great benefit. Deep gratitude to Ramsey Campbell, Helen Marshall, Cody Goodfellow, Gemma Files, Jordan Stratford, Matthew M. Bartlett, Jeffrey Thomas, Mike Griffin, Orrin Grey, Molly Tanzer, Nathan Ballingrud, s. j. bagley, Anya Martin, and Scott Nicolay for their inspiration, encouragement and unfailing support. There is an original GM out there, too, a graduate of the Invisible College, and the man who taught me that you could be as weird as you needed to be, so long as you never lost your heart to the abyss; thank you, Mr. Morrison. Finally, all my love and thanks to Sasha, for pretty much everything else.
Scott R. Jones is a Canadian writer living in Victoria BC with his wife and two frighteningly intelligent spawn. Stonefish is his first novel. He was once kicked out of England for some very good reasons.
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