ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  We could no longer deny Reality. Reality was colder than the fifth ring of Tibetan Hell. Reality was swirling, smacking branches and mad screams. Reality was dark, hunched shapes clambering and loping all around with glowing clubs and terrible purpose, clubbing villagers like baby seals.

  Outside, AJ and Moth were fighting them off with crowbars. Moth had a hatchet, too. He didn’t have it long, but he got it back fast right through the back of the neck.

  AJ looked like a green ghost in a big Army field jacket with a hood, hanging with rattlesnake rattles and cowrie shells, long black hair in his face, nose sticking out like the cowcatcher of a locomotive. He still held a tallboy of hoarded beer in one hand.

  Behind them were scared bangs and thumps from the two nearest huts. Someone threw a firecracker out the window, but its noise was lost in the wind. Green-black shapes clambered along, across, around the trunks, chittering like chimps. They were yanking on everything, trying to pull it all down.

  “In the old days, in Africa,” I heard Pandora say behind me in a very small voice, “They’d sacrifice one virgin a year to the Monkey God, so that the tree children, the leaf-doctors, would leave them alone for another year. But . . .”

  Out in the clearing, AJ whirled right. I bellowed something. A big black claw that looked like a set of mossy lineman’s spikes whickered down from an overhanging branch. AJ’s tallboy of PBR disappeared. So did his hand at the wrist.

  I got in front of Pandora, making myself into a human shield, and gestured for her to stay behind me. She did, but returned too quickly. “God damn it, I—” The spite in her eyes spoke tomes.

  I waved her off, pulling the Velcro on my Leatherman and popping the big blade out. I was scared sober. Pandora put one hand on my shoulder. “I am perfectly capable of defending myself, you sexist p—”

  My eyes suddenly grew to the size of fear itself. I put a hand over her mouth and gestured at the loop-hole in the door.

  One of them was grinning down at us from the overhanging tree just outside. I could smell him. It didn’t appear to be a social call.

  Pandora reached in one overall pocket for her flute, a pale faery thing, delicate as a collarbone. “Shakespeare, college boy.” she whispered. “For music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

  And right there, behind that door, she started in on a tune of her own composition, a thing of bright summer days and the weird butterflies that only live in the canopy, of wild imaginings and nothing in the way.

  A lump grew in my throat, but died at the loop-hole . . . Pondering common ancestry and abandoned reactors, breathing through my mouth against the savage terrific stink. . .

  Its face was swollen, toothless, mongoloid. The beard began at the eyes, patchy and straggly over pink, puckered radiation burns whose like I’d only ever seen on my father after weeks of visits to the Oncology lab.

  Its hairy body and head were green, wound with symbiant moss. Those horrorshow claws were mirrored where it should have had toes, its legs as thick as young oaks, its eyes . . .

  Human. Flatly, undeniably human.

  “Where’s your co-op?” I whispered to it, feeling insanity lifting me out of myself. The critter remained perfectly still, confused by the sound of the flute, looking like it was trying to remember something.

  “How long you guys been out here? Is . . .” I swallowed. “Is anybody expecting you to come home any time soon?” I suddenly felt two inches tall, needing to back up and learn more, try again . . . And I knew that, even though Man’s scent was planet-wide, the woods were very dark and deep indeed.

  I should never have distracted it.

  The next thing I remember after that was coming out of the blackout. Or whatever it was. When I hove out into the clearing, swaying three hundred and sixty degrees as I walked, a scream started trying to come out as I looked around.

  There were lights, bobbing up and down, everywhere in the woods. Different fire, like fox-fire, like phosphorous. But phosphorous isn’t blue . . .

  Fungus-lights, something mucky gobbed on the ends of long clubs. Moth was standing in front of me, leading a line of slumped shadows that walked mostly on all fours. He looked strangely gray. There was dirt and cowshit on his face and hands, like he’d been digging for something. The seat of his Carhartt overalls was bloody.

  Toward the back of the line, I saw Deuce, his black eyes hellishly alight, muttering to the shadows in low tones. Deuce, in his old green L.L. Bean coverall, with his wavy hair tied back in a ponytail, barking like the shadows, barking, barking with the shadows, egging them on . . .

  Speaking their tongue. Then he looked straight at me, his voice the low, carrying sibilant hiss of a stage magician.

  “My family’s owned this land for a hundred and seventy-five years,” he shrugged. “The Ancestors are like bears. Okay, smarter than the average. You just have to know when to talk to them. And when to feed—”

  At that point, the lower half of him walked away from the upper with a splat/flap/SLAP and the thing that had leaned in leaned back up with the side of meat, the haunch, in its claws, and I just disconnected entirely, until—

  I came out of it again. “Yeah, just like bears, all right,” I agreed. I blinked twice, and found me there on the cold hill’s side overlooking the sauna.

  Across from me, Josh was running a hand through his graying crewcut. He must have just gotten off late shift down on the water front. He always biked the twenty miles back. Josh was a dock-walloper, and tough. You should have seen him bale hay.

  I remember. I do.

  “How did I get here,” I said to Josh. It wasn’t a question. He guffawed, his lined face looking very much like a younger version of the actor William H. Macy. He offered me a hand-blown glass pipe and a black Bic lighter.

  “It’s Alive,” he said in his rolling TV-announcer voice. “What were you drinkin’, dude, that apple-jack you were makin’?”

  I nodded, having forgotten that everyone at Aeolus knew everything about everyone else, most of the time. Like the exuberant dogs he sometimes owned, Josh plowed on ahead with a big dopey smile, “Was it any good?”

  I groaned. “I don’t know. Tonight’s all a blur. You know, this farm’s over a thousand years old? There are parts of it that are really cool. It just needs some love. I heard it used to be a Funhouse. In Dante’s time. It . . .”

  “How long since you got a good night’s sleep?” Josh asked me sagely.

  “That’s a good question.” I had to think on it. “Something usually wakes me up. Either a dream to which I am fleeing, or without strength I come, and need to swim the hell up on out of there no matter what . . .”

  I spun one hand, tired and starting to feel it, searching for words. Josh beat me to it. “Where the hell is everybody? I just got back.”

  I tried to tell him. I did. I can’t remember what I said. Josh’s eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger.

  “We . . . We need to see about this,” was all he said. Then he started rolling a cigarette fast.

  The fire smelled great. There were coyotes yipping somewhere between Alpine and the horizon. The cowboy moon was a bleached, peeled, pickled skull.

  The darkness beyond the lights of the farm looked two-dimensional, flat and featureless as the edge of the Known World in some Arthur C. Clarke nightmare at The End.

  Except Clarke had too much hope to imagine the noises I could hear out past the edge of that darkness, too much faith in Evolution over Propitiation . . .

  I passed him the pipe. Josh stayed my hand. “Finish that. I’m going to . . . see about this. You’re fucked up, man, but . . . I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I waited five hours for Josh to come and reclaim his pipe. I counted the minutes.

  I found I could do that, in the dark, huddled around my smoky peat fire and ancient transistor radio spilling out KUFO heavy-metal and gabble into the night.

  I had a box of old newspapers, and some Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, scrap
s of notebook paper almost too used to use again. The fire kept going out, every couple of minutes.

  I started burning old illusions of the soul, too. Some of them looked like my clothes. Some of them looked like my writings and drawings. Some of those were originals.

  Then the lights were everywhere in the woods again. The lights, and the slouching shadows that you could feel staring at you, though they shuffled and brachiated on the other side of that black-gray 2-D void. Their laughter grew louder still, shaking the canopy. Vibrating the forest floor . . .

  Overhead, the Western stars were a nightmarish acid trip too vast and inhuman to fathom. Out there on the perimeter, there were too many stars, too many things to be careful of wishing for that might fall on you and knock you flat . . .

  In the clearing, the shadows come and go. The Ancestors tie down their wriggling sacrifice, and take their good old time. I see it again. Again. Again. Until the day I die. And then I see it again. It happens again. I dream it Again.

  The way I saw them last. Over my shoulder. When I fired the gun empty, threw the machete and ran through the jungle, with a twisted ankle and irretrievable pride, running, running, running like a little bitch. Again. They all do it again.

  In the heat of the night, I heard Pandora scream, once. Then there was silence. The kind I didn’t like . . .

  And when I turned around again, that was the last time I drew breath as anything but a pillar of desiccated salt.

  That was now for me, and this is then. There are gray streaks in my hair. I startle easily, and look so much like my Dad around the crow-tracked eyes that I forget I’m only 34.

  I live on North Hollywood Boulevard now, in LA. It doesn’t rain much here, or storm and blow and whack. I have to smoke hash to get to sleep. Sometimes I have to take stronger measures.

  But by gods, I have central heating. And no trees anywhere. No places to hide. No . . . got to say it, no loop-holes.

  I write hard speculative Science Fiction about far-flung worlds millions of years in the future. My books are the size of cinderblocks. Many trees die for me. Hopefully, one of them had the critter in it, the one that was leering at me and Pandora outside my door on the night I lost my mind, and at least one other vital organ.

  It growled and puffed up like a baboon when I spoke, swung down on its strong back legs from the tree and punched right through my front door. Pandora was still screaming when he punched out the back wall with her slung over his shoulder.

  They picked me up on the street in downtown Portland four days later, babbling. By then, I’d hurt myself quite badly, they said, and would have died.

  The Forest Service never found my heart.

  AUNTS

  Karin Tidbeck

  Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish writer whose fiction has appeared in Weird Tales and Shimmer Magazine, among others. Her first English-language collection will appear from Cheeky Frawg in 2012.

  In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles.

  The orangery is one such place. It is located in an apple orchard, which lies at the outskirts of a garden. The air is damp and laden with the yeasty sweetness of overripe fruit. Gnarled apple trees with bright yellow leaves flame against the cold and purpling sky. Red globes hang heavy on their branches. The orangery gets no visitors. The orchard belongs to a particular regent whose gardens are mostly populated by turgid nobles completely uninterested in the orchard. It has no servants, no entertainment. It requires walking, and the fruit is mealy.

  But in the event someone did walk in among the trees, they would find them marching on for a very long time, every tree almost identical to the other. (Should that someone try to count the fruit, they would also find that each tree has the exact same number of apples.) If this visitor did not turn around and flee for the safety of the more cultivated parts of the gardens, they would eventually see the trees disperse and the silver and glass bubble of an orangery rise out of the ground. Drawing closer, they would have seen this:

  The inside of the glass walls were covered by a thin brown film of fat vapour and breath. Inside, fifteen orange trees stood along the curve of the cupola; fifteen smaller, potted trees made a circle inside the first. Marble covered the centre, where three bolstered divans sat surrounded by low round tables. The divans sagged under the weight of three gigantic women.

  The Aunts had one single holy task: to expand. They infinitely, slowly accumulated layers of fat. A thigh bisected would reveal a pattern of concentric rings, the fat coloured different hues. On the middle couch reclined Great-Aunt, who was the largest of the three. Her body flowed down from her head like waves of whipped cream, arms and legs mere nubs protruding from her magnificent mass.

  Great-Aunt’s sisters lay on either side. Middle Sister, her stomach cascading over her knees like a blanket, was eating little link sausages one by one, like a string of pearls. Little Sister, not noticeably smaller than the others, peeled the lid off a meat pie. Great-Aunt extended an arm, letting her fingers slowly sink into the pie’s naked interior. She scooped up a fistful of dark filling and buried her face in it with a sigh. Little Sister licked the inside clean of the rest of the filling, then carefully folded it four times and slowly pushed it into her mouth. She snatched up a new link of sausages. She opened and scraped the filling from the skin with her teeth, then threw the empty skins aside. Great-Aunt sucked at the mouthpiece of a thin tube snaking up from a samovar on the table. The salty mist of melted butter rose up from the lid on the pot. She occasionally paused to twist her head and accept small marrow biscuits from one of the three girls hovering near the couches.

  The grey-clad girls quietly moving through the orangery were Nieces. In the kitchens under the orangery, they baked sumptuous pastries and cakes; they fed and cleaned their Aunts. They had no individual names and were indistinguishable from each other, often even to themselves. The Nieces lived on leftovers from the Aunts: licking up crumbs mopped from Great-Aunt’s chin, drinking the dregs of the butter samovar. The Aunts did not leave much, but the Nieces did not need much either.

  Great-Aunt could no longer expand, which was as it should be. Her skin, which had previously lain in soft folds around her, was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright. As she lay back, Great-Aunt began to shudder. She closed her eyes and her mouth became slack. A dark line appeared along her abdomen. As it reached her groin, she became still. With a soft sigh, the skin split along the line. Layer after layer of skin, fat, muscle and membrane broke open until the breastbone was exposed and fell open with a wet crack. Golden blood washed out of the wound, splashing onto the couch and onto the floor, where it was caught in a shallow trough. The Nieces went to work, carefully scooping out organs and entrails. Deep in the cradle of her ribs lay a wrinkled pink shape, arms and legs wrapped around Great-Aunt’s heart. It opened its eyes and squealed as the Nieces lifted away the last of the surrounding tissue. They cut away the heart with the new Aunt still clinging to it, and put her down on a small pillow where she settled down and began to chew on the heart with tiny teeth.

  The Nieces sorted intestines, liver, lungs, kidneys, bladder, uterus and stomach; they were each put in separate bowls. Next they removed Aunt’s skin. It came off easily in great sheets, ready to be cured and tanned and made into one of three new dresses. Then it was time for removing the fat: first the wealth of Aunt’s enormous breasts, then her voluminous belly, her thighs; last, her flattened buttocks. The Nieces teased muscle loose from the bones; it needed not much force, but almost fell into their hands. Finally, the bones themselves, soft and translucent, were chopped up into manageable bits. When all this was done, the Nieces turned to Middle and Little Sister who were waiting on their couches, still and wide open.
Everything neatly divided into pots and tubs, the Nieces scrubbed the couches and on them laid the new Aunts, each still busy chewing on the remains of a heart.

  The Nieces retreated to the kitchens under the orangery. They melted and clarified the fat, ground the bones into fine flour, chopped and baked the organ meats, soaked the sweetbreads in vinegar, simmered the muscle until the meat fell apart in flakes, cleaned out and hung the intestines to dry. Nothing was wasted. The Aunts were baked into cake and paté and pastries and little savoury sausages and dumplings and crackling. The new Aunts would be very hungry and very pleased.

  Neither the Nieces nor the Aunts saw it happen, but someone made their way through the apple trees and reached the orangery. The Aunts were getting a bath. The Nieces sponged the expanses of skin with lukewarm rose water. The quiet of the orangery was replaced by the drip and splash of water, the clunk of copper buckets, the grunts of Nieces straining to move flesh out of the way. They didn’t see the curious face pressed against the glass, greasy corkscrew locks drawing filigree traces; a hand landing next to the staring face, cradling a round metal object. Nor did they at first hear the quiet, irregular ticking noise the object made. It wasn’t until the ticking noise, first slow, then faster, amplified and filled the air, that an Aunt opened her eyes and listened. The Nieces turned toward the orangery wall. There was nothing there, save for a handprint and a smudge of white.

  Great-Aunt could no longer expand. Her skin was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters, who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright.

  The Aunts gasped and wheezed. Their abdomens were a smooth, unbroken expanse: there was no trace of the tell-tale dark line. Great-Aunt’s face turned a reddish blue as her own weight pressed down on her throat. Her shivers turned into convulsions. Then, suddenly, her breathing ceased altogether and her eyes stilled. On either side, her sisters rattled out their final breaths in concert.