ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The Nieces stared at the quiet bodies. They stared at each other. One of them raised her knife.

  As the Nieces worked, the more they removed from Great-Aunt, the more clear it became that something was wrong. The flesh wouldn’t give willingly, but had to be forced apart. They resorted to using shears to open the ribcage. Finally, as they were scraping the last of the tissue from Great-Aunts thigh bones, one of them said:

  “I do not see a little Aunt.”

  “She should be here,” said another.

  They looked at each other. The third burst into tears. One of the others slapped the crying girl’s head.

  “We should look further,” said the one who had slapped her sister. “She could be behind the eyes.”

  The Nieces dug further into Great-Aunt; they peered into her skull, but found nothing. They dug into the depths of her pelvis, but there was no new Aunt. Not knowing what else to do, they finished the division of the body, then moved on to the other Aunts. When the last of the three had been opened, dressed, quartered and scraped, no new Aunt had yet been found. By now, the orangery’s floor was filled with tubs of neatly ordered meat and offal. Some of the younger orange trees had fallen over and were soaking in golden blood. One of the Nieces, possibly the one who had slapped her sister, took a bowl and looked at the others.

  “We have work to do,” she said.

  The Nieces scrubbed the orangery floor and cleaned the couches. They turned every last bit of the Aunts into a feast. They carried platters of food from the kitchens and laid it out on the surrounding tables. The couches were still empty. One of the Nieces sat down in the middle couch. She took a meat pastry and nibbled at it. The rich flavour of Great-Aunt’s baked liver burst into her mouth; the pastry shell melted on her tongue. She crammed the rest of the pastry into her mouth and swallowed. When she opened her eyes, the other Nieces stood frozen in place, watching her.

  “We must be the new Aunts now,” the first Niece said.

  One of the others considered this. “Mustn’t waste it,” she said, eventually.

  The new Aunts sat down on Middle Sister’s and Little Sister’s couches and tentatively reached for the food on the tables. Like their sister, they took first little bites, then bigger and bigger as the taste of the old Aunts filled them. Never before had they been allowed to eat from the tables. They ate until they couldn’t down another bite. They slept. When they woke up, they fetched more food from the kitchen. The orangery was quiet save for the noise of chewing and swallowing. One Niece took an entire cake and buried her face in it, eating it from the inside out. Another rubbed marinated brain onto herself, as if to absorb it. Sausages, slices of tongue topped with jellied marrow, candied eyes that crunched and then melted. The girls ate and ate until the kitchen was empty and the floor covered in a layer of crumbs and drippings. They lay back on the couches and looked at each others’ bodies, measuring bellies and legs. None of them were noticeably fatter.

  “It’s not working,” said the girl on the leftmost couch. “We ate them all up and it’s not working!” She burst into tears.

  The middle girl pondered this. “Aunts can’t be Aunts without Nieces,” she said.

  “But where do we find Nieces?” said the rightmost. “Where did we come from?” The other two were silent.

  “We could make them,” said the middle girl. “We are good at baking, after all.”

  And so the prospective Aunts swept up the crumbs from floor and plates, mopped up juices and bits of jelly, and returned with the last remains of the old Aunts to the kitchens. They made a dough and fashioned it into three girl-shaped cakes, baked them and glazed them. When the cakes were done, they were a crisp light brown and the size of a hand. The would-be Aunts took the cakes up to the orangery and set them down on the floor, one beside each couch. They wrapped themselves in the Aunt-skins, and lay down on their couches to wait.

  Outside, the apple trees rattled their leaves in a faint breeze. On the other side of the apple orchard was a loud party, where a gathering of nobles played croquet with human heads, and their changeling servants hid under the tables, telling each other stories to keep the fear away. No sound of this reached the orangery, quiet in the steady gloom. No smell of apples snuck in between the panes. The Aunt-skins settled in soft folds around the sleeping girls.

  Eventually one of them woke. The girl-shaped cakes lay on the floor, like before.

  The middle girl crawled out of the folds of the skin dress and set her feet down on the floor. She picked up the cake sitting on the floor next to her.

  “Perhaps we should eat them,” she said. “And the Nieces will grow inside us.” But her voice was faint.

  “Or wait,” said the leftmost girl. “They may yet move.”

  “They may,” the middle girl says.

  The girls sat on their couches, cradled in the skin dresses, and waited. They fell asleep and woke up again, and waited.

  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 Nieces wake and wait, wake and wait, for Aunts to arrive.

  THE FORK

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Jeffrey Thomas is a critically acclaimed horror writer whose work has appeared in several year’s best anthologies. One of his iconic creations is Punktown. “The Fork” first appeared in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Leviathan 3.

  “. . .are we the dolls themselves,

  born but never fed?”

  —Anne Sexton, The Falling Dolls

  He had no eyelids; his returning vision began at the center and spread out equally to all sides, like his returning consciousness. He lay gazing up at the low ceiling of his compartment, as if it were the sky and he were interpreting the billowing of clouds. Instead, he sought faces and figures in the whorls and knotholes of those splintered, moldering planks of wood. The grain made miniature galaxies and vortexes, like a petrified universe. He couldn’t conceive of the wood that composed his compartment ever having been alive, ever having been trees under a bright and open sky. He had never seen a tree, in fact, but it was like a collective memory etched in the rough grain of his own composition.

  Even straining his imagination, he could find no faces in the wood. He was not permitted even imaginary company, so it would seem.

  He sat up from the hard boards that formed his bed. Besides this, his only other furniture consisted of a small box positioned in front of a larger box, serving as his chair and table. His furniture was of the same wood that made up the walls, floor, ceiling: scarred, rotting, leeched of even the dingiest color. He had constructed two small windows in his compartment; one directly behind his chair and one on the opposite wall; naked smeared panes held in place by mildewed frames. He stood, and moved to the nearest one, staring out into the gloom. There were two parts of every day. Murky dark and utter dark. The pitch black outside his windows was lightening to an ashy gray, and he could just begin to make out details of the infinite enclosure of the vast outer room.

  A sound made him turn, a light tapping or skittering at the opposite window. There was a vague shape beyond the glass, a fluttering darkness that might have been the humped back of a taxidermist’s dusty bird come to life, or the husk of a huge milkweed pod infused with mindless sentience. Its various aspects were suggested to him from the worn hieroglyphics of his collective memory. But as he watched, the quivering black blot withdrew. He knew better than to rush outside to pursue it; he had done so in the past, and encountered nothing. The most he had thought he’d seen, once, was a very large moth with a single wing flying upwards in a jerky blur towards the machinery of the sky.

  Moving to the edge of the table, he looked down into his empty bowl. It was part of the sky, having dropped down here; he’d found it in the low scrub of flaked rust. A hemispherical cap that rocked when he touched it because it wasn’t meant to be a bowl, and did not have a flat bottom
to rest upon. There was nothing in it. Some stillborn memory indicated to him that he should put something into it, but he could never recall what. He had tried various things, hoping it might connect with him, that he might stumble upon the correct answer. He had placed a handful of rusty screws in there. A half-melted clump of hardened slag. A gray and stinking fragment of flesh, glistening slick with decomposition but still pulsing, its waning electrical and chemical commands wandering in ever slower paths through its cells. All of these things had dropped down from the sky, and been discovered by him half-hidden under the uneven bed of fallen rust outside his compartment.

  Beside the bowl lay a fork. He had taken that from outside, as well. It was either a reject, ejected from the mechanisms, or it had simply been fed through the wrong slot somewhere along the line, ending up down here. He had found other forks before, during one period of pitch black had even heard a pelting rain of them, clanging and clattering across the flat roof of his tiny compartment. He had gathered them up, when the gloom lightened, and heaped them in another of the compartments, in case anyone ever came looking for them. If they were defective, rejects, he could not tell; he had never used a fork, as he could summon no recollection of its intended purpose.

  This fork had one tine that was slightly bent toward its brother. Was that the problem? He tapped it against the edge of his box table, then swiftly held the vibrating fork to the side of his head. He listened to its brief, humming song. He had once done this again and again, a hundred times successively, hoping that there might be some coded language hidden in the fork’s song, some kind of instruction. Was the fork, then, a device to transmit the voice of the Masters? If so, that voice was beyond his interpretation.

  With one slim, stiff finger, he rocked the bowl once more. It seesawed, wobbled, slowly came to be still. He considered rocking the bowl again, as if the sound of its wobbling on the tabletop might contain the message he sought. He decided not to rock it. He went to the door of his compartment, three planks joined together, and creaked it open.

  A landscape of wooden boxes of various sizes lay before him, some lying separate and others touching, some piled atop others, some inside of others, all of them compartments much like his own. . .with the major exception being that none of them were occupied. Some contained items that he had stored or categorized or disposed of himself. Other boxes had been filled by other hands, apparently, long before he had been here. . .though time was as obscure a concept to him as that of trees. The time he had spent before dwelling down here gaped emptily, like that bowl he didn’t know how to fill.

  Between all the compartments, which stretched off into vague duskiness, the floor of this gigantic outer room was covered in something like (strobe-flash images through his mind) deep piles of autumn leaves, dunes of a desert, drifts of snow, ash from a volcanic blast. The carpet was composed of irregular flakes of rust, some as large as his hand and others fine as powder. . .a mere coating in some places, up to his knees in others. He kept his roof swept clean, so that they didn’t trickle through his ceiling boards, but some roofs were mounded with the fallen particles. Even as he watched, there was a subtle, minute sprinkling of them drifting down from above. The larger flakes tumbled or rocked gently as they floated down, like scales shed from an immense (flash: snake), yes, that was the word, snake. Tilting his head back, shielding his lidless eyes with one hand, he looked upwards.

  The light snow of metallic scabs sprinkled down from the machines of the sky. As the grainy air lightened (the source of this very diffuse illumination unknown to him), he was able to make out the general outlines of that high, distant ceiling. Even as he began to do so, he heard a faraway slide and clunk as some massive iron piece slotted into its socket. A faint grinding/rattling, then an echoing click fading away. Silence again. It seldom got very noisy; more like the ghosts, the memories, of sounds. Sometimes he thought that was all they were—more restless memories. But sometimes, especially when it grew pitch dark, he would hear great rumblings up there, and crashes, like (flash: trains) colliding. Like thunder might sound, he thought.

  There was only a fine, nearly invisible mist or fog up there now, tendrils unfurling, shredding, reforming. Other times there were fat billowing clouds—either fumes or steam—and he had lain in the scratchy bed of rust gazing up at them. He had never seen faces in those, either.

  Occasionally hot slag dripped down from the heavens, whitely incandescent (perhaps it was molten metal, glowing through cracks, seams and vents in the far machinery, that was the source of daylight). Once, when it began to fall, he made the mistake of turning his face up to it. The heavy fluid that spattered his face had blistered it, and when his face cooled his skin cracked and bits flaked away. But it had not hurt him.

  When he pressed his palms to his temples, felt the subtle fluttering and twitching inside, sometimes he suspected there was another machine in there, equally as complex as the one that made up the sky, but this machine did not make forks as that one did. This one molded fluid thoughts, solidified them, ground them down, polished them, sent them along conveyors or discarded them if misshapen. This machine had filled endless wooden mail slots with broken bits of seashell, with glass eyes and tea bags, with teeth and clumps of hair and twisted spectacles and all the rest of those things he knew of but had never known.

  Sometimes he thought the fluttering in his cracked skull was from a taxidermist’s dusty bird, or a husk of milkweed pod infused with life.

  One of the memories he half-divined was of falling from that sky himself, like the forks, the screws, the slag. That was how his hairless head first became cracked, and running his fingertips along those jagged sutures helped him to half-recollect. He had slipped through a chink, slipped between a conveyor track and a walkway, while carrying along a wooden box full of forks. A blur of plummeting, the rush of darkness, forks tumbling all around him, a landing partly broken by the thick carpet of rust. A very long sleep, but at last a small click buried inside and then his head finally lifted. A grinding inside it, as if misaligned gears meshed again in improvised patterns. He stood, looked about him, saw the village of boxes, and began to walk toward them in his hesitant, flickering way. Even now, his jerking movements seemed to suggest that every command his head sent to his body and limbs staggered and skipped a beat before reaching them.

  Now, as many times before, he stared up at that sky with a numb longing, caressing the fissures in his smooth head, and dreamed that he might dismantle several of the box-like compartments. Using screws from a pile that filled one of these boxes, he would connect the dismantled planks, building an immense ladder, so as to reach that ceiling. So as to slip through its chinks once again, and return to his labors after this long time that he had been idle. He had a calling. It called to him in a weak, scraping, hissing voice, like the whispers of mechanized angels on high. He had a function, a purpose, a reason to exist. He was a maker of forks.

  But the logistics daunted him before he ever started the project. Even if he began his ladder upon the roof of the tallest box, how could he ever build one long enough to reach the sky? He would need to climb arduously back down and up again every time he needed more planks, an immense distance, as he could only hoist with him so many planks at a time. And what if the ladder teetered, fell over while he was at its summit, and he should plummet again? He might not survive such a fall a second time.

  He had seldom tried very hard to escape the outer room. It dwarfed and humbled him, made his desires seem minuscule and ridiculous, presumptuous and unrealistic. Instead, he had existed down here cycle after countless cycle, and thought that perhaps one day he would be discovered here and liberated by more capable hands; those of the Masters he had once served. Infrequently, however, his impulses to be freed gathered strength, took on life. As was usually the case, part of him was rising up to smother those impulses. The ladder idea wouldn’t work. Escape did not lie in venturing upward. He very nearly allowed his growing obsession to subside. . .

&
nbsp; Instead, as he had done several times before, he decided to search for his escape down here on the floor of the massive chamber. But in the past, he had only traveled as far as he could go while still being able to return to his compartment before it grew black in the outer room. He tried to never, ever leave his compartment when it was utterly dark outside. There was that perhaps-moth at his panes, on occasion, and he had heard other disturbing things that did not sound like the gnashing of the sky machines. But today he had come upon a new plan.

  He had never before been able to journey far enough to reach any of the outer room’s walls. He had only neared one of them close enough to make out its gray surface, misted with distance, before he had to turn back toward the village of boxes.

  Yet now he had the idea to bring a box along with him, and he could shelter inside it when the air turned black with night’s rot. A box small enough to tug behind him or push ahead of him, but large enough to contain his curled or seated body. So he commenced his inspection of the boxes, testing their soundness, experimenting with pushing them through the bed of metallic scurf. He preferred the idea of seeing in front of him more clearly, and so began to create a harness that would enable him to pull the box behind him. He found mounds of balled wire in one box, and extricated several strands, twisted them and affixed them in two loops to the outside of the box, using screws to hold them in place. He could then slip his arms through the two loops, so as to drag the box along behind him like a sled.

  This work took up most of the lighter part of the cycle, and he decided to rest inside his regular compartment until he could strike out fresh when the light returned.

  While lying on his bare cot, staring at the ceiling, he listened to the sounds outside his close walls. A stamp. . .stamp. . .stamp, as of a titanic metal hoof stomping on the ceiling far beyond this one. A second or two of scraping at one of his black window panes, then gone. And—perhaps he only imagined this, as his vision closed into a narrower and narrower circle—the feathery sifting of rust tumbling out of the sky and alighting on his roof, like soil upon a (flash: coffin’s) lid.