The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “You do not understand pigs,” said the bird, whirling. “Pigs have an angel.” Whereupon she whistled like an express train and a small cactus plant rose out of the earth and slid into the bowl which the bird had left at her feet.

  She said: “Piu, Piu, Little Servant, cut yourself into bits and feed yourself to the pigs so they become inspired with Pig Angel.”

  The cactus called Piu cut himself into little round bits with a knife so sharp and fast that it was impossible to behold.

  The morsels of Piu leapt into the mouths of the unconscious pigs, whereupon the pigs disintegrated into little meats roasting in their own heat.

  The smell of delicious roasting pork brought drops of saliva into Juan’s mouth. Laughing like a drainpipe the bird took out a telescope and a pair of pincers, picked up the morsels of pig meat, and set them in her small bowl. “Angels must be devoured,” she said, turning from green to blue. Lowering her voice to the dark caves under the earth she called: “Black Mole, Black Mole, come out and make the sauce because Juan is going to eat the angel, he is hungry and has not eaten since daybreak.”

  The new moon appeared.

  With a heaving and steaming of the earth, Black Mole poked his starred snout out of the ground; then came flat hands and fur, sleek and clean out of so much earth.

  “I am blind,” he said, “but I wear a star from the firmament on my nose.”

  Now the bird whirled so fast she turned into a rainbow and Juan saw her pour herself into the Pyramid of the Moon in a curve of all colours. He didn’t care because the smell of roasting pigs made food his only desire.

  Mole took out all sorts of chiles from the pouch he wore. He took two big stones and ground up the chiles and seeds into pulp, then spat on them and poured them into the bowl with the cooking pig meat.

  “I am blind,” said Mole, “but I can lead you through the labyrinth.”

  The red ants then came out of the ground carrying grains of corn. Every ant wore a bracelet of green jade on each of her slim legs. A great heap of corn was soon ground up. Mole made tortillas with his flat hands.

  All was ready for the feast. Even Saint John’s Day had never seen anything so rich.

  “Now eat,” said Mole.

  Juan dipped his tortilla into the bowl and ate until he was gorged with food. “I never had so much to eat, never,” he kept saying. His stomach looked like a swollen melon.

  All the while Mole stood by saying nothing, but taking stock of all that happened with his nose.

  When Juan had finished the last scrap of the fifth pig, Mole began to laugh. Juan was so full of food he could not move. He could only stare at Mole and wonder what was so funny.

  Mole wore a scabbard under his fur. Quickly he drew out a sharp sword and, swish and shriek, cut up Juan into small pieces just like Piu had sliced himself up to feed the pigs.

  The head and hands and feet and guts of young Juan jumped about shrieking. Mole took Juan’s head tenderly in his big hands and said: “Do not be afraid, Juan, this is only a first death, and you will be alive again soon.”

  Whereupon he stuck the head on the thorn of a maguey and dived into the hard ground as if it were water.

  All was quiet now. The thin new moon was high above the pyramids.

  MARÍA

  The well was far off. María returned to the hut with a bucket of water. The water kept sloshing over the side of the bucket. Don Pedro, María’s father, was shouting: “I shall beat that hairless puppy Juanito. He stole my ladder. I know mangoes don’t grow around here. I shall thrash him till he begs for mercy. I shall thrash you all. Why isn’t my dinner ready?”

  Don Pedro yelled again: “She has not come back with the water? I shall beat her. I shall twist her neck like a chicken. You are a no-good woman, your children are no good. I am master here. I command. I shall kill that thief.”

  María was afraid. She had stopped to listen behind a large maguey. Don Pedro was drunk. She thought: He’s beating my mother. A thin yellow cat dashed past in terror. The cat is also afraid, if I go back he will beat me, perhaps he will kill me like a chicken.

  Quietly María set down the pail of water and walked north towards the Pyramid of the Moon.

  It was night. María was afraid, but she was more afraid of her father, Don Pedro. María tried to remember a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe, but every time she began Ave María, something laughed.

  A puff of dust arose on the path a few metres ahead. Out of the dust walked a small dog. It was hairless, with a speckled grey skin like a hen.

  The dog walked up to her and they looked at each other. There was something distinctive and dignified about the animal. María understood that the dog was an ally. She thought: This dog is an ancient.

  The dog turned north, and María followed. They walked and sometimes ran till they came to the ruin and María was face-to-face with Juan’s decapitated head.

  María’s heart leapt. Grief struck her and she shed a tear which was hard as a stone and fell heavily to the earth. She picked up the tear and placed it in the mouth of Juan’s head.

  “Speak,” said María, who was now old and full of wisdom. He spoke, saying: “My body is strewn around like a broken necklace. Pick it up and sew it together again. My head is lonely without my hands and my feet. All these are lonely without the rest of my poor body, chopped up like meat stew.”

  María picked a thorn off the top of a maguey, made thread out of the sinews of the leaf, and told the maguey: “Pardon me for taking your needle, pardon me for threading the needle with your body, pardon me for love, pardon me for I am what I am, and I do not know what this means.”

  All this time Juan’s head was weeping and wailing and complaining: “Ai, Ai, Ai. My poor self, poor me, my poor body. Hurry up, María, and sew me together. Hurry, for if the sun rises and Earth turns away from the firmament I shall never be whole again. Hurry, María, hurry. Ai, Ai, Ai.”

  María was busy now and the dog kept fetching pieces of the body and she sewed them together with neat stitches. Now she sewed on the head, and the only thing lacking was the heart. María had made a little door in Juan’s breast to put it inside.

  “Dog, Dog, where is Juan’s heart?” The heart was on top of the wall of the ruin. Juan and María set up Don Pedro’s ladder and Juan started to climb, but María said: “Stop, Juan. You cannot reach your own heart, you must let me climb up and get it. Stop.”

  But Juan refused to listen and kept on climbing. Just as he was reaching out to get hold of his heart, which was still beating, a black vulture swooped out of the air, snatched the heart in its claws, and flew off towards the Pyramid of the Moon. Juan gave a shriek and fell off the ladder; however María had sewn his body together so well that he was not really hurt.

  But Juan had lost his heart.

  “My heart. There it was, beating alone on the wall, red and slippery. My beautiful heart. Ah me, ah me,” he cried. “That wicked black bird has ruined me, I am lost.”

  “Hush now,” said María. “If you make so much noise the Nagual may hear us, with his straw wings and crystal horns. Hush, be quiet, Juan.”

  The hairless dog barked twice and started to walk into a cave that had opened up like a mouth. “The Earth is alive,” said María, “we must feed ourselves to the Earth to find your heart. Come, follow the Esquinclé.”

  They looked into the deep mouth of the Earth and were afraid. “We will use the ladder to climb down,” said María. Far below they could hear the dog barking.

  As they started to climb down the ladder into the dark earth the first pale light of dawn arose behind the Pyramid of the Sun. The dog barked. María climbed slowly down the ladder and Juan followed. Above them Earth closed her mouth with a smile. The smile is still there, a long crack in the hard clay.

  Down below was a passage shaped like a long hollow man. Juan
and María walked inside this body holding hands. They knew now that they could not return and must keep on walking. Juan was knocking on the door in his chest crying, “Oh my poor lost heart, oh my stolen heart.”

  His wailing ran ahead of them and disappeared. It was a message. After a while a great roar came rumbling back. They stood together, shaking. A flight of stairs with narrow slippery steps led downwards. Below they could see the Red Jaguar that lives under the pyramids. The Big Cat was frightful to behold, but there was no return. They descended the stairs trembling. The Jaguar smelled of rage. He had eaten many hearts, but this was long ago and now he wanted blood.

  As they got closer, the Jaguar sharpened his claws on the rock, ready to devour the meat of two tender children.

  María felt sad to die so far under the earth. She wept one more tear, which fell into Juan’s open hand. It was hard and sharp. He threw it straight at the eye of the beast and it bounced off. The Jaguar was made of stone.

  They walked straight up and touched it, stroking the hard red body and obsidian eyes. They laughed and sat on its back, the stone Jaguar never moved. They played until a voice called: “María. Juan. Juan. Mari.”

  A flight of hummingbirds passed, rushing towards the voice.

  “The Ancestor is calling us,” said María, listening. “We must go back to Her.”

  They crawled under the belly of the stone Jaguar. Mole was standing there, tall and black, holding a silver sword in one of his big hands. In the other hand he held a rope. He bound the two children tightly together and pulled them into the presence of the Great Bird. Bird, Snake, Goddess, there She sat, all the colours of the rainbow and full of little windows with faces looking out singing the sounds of every thing alive and dead, all this like a swarming of bees, a million movements in one still body.

  María and Juan stared at each other till Mole cut the rope that bound them together. They lay on the floor looking up at the Evening Star, shining through a shaft in the roof.

  Mole was piling branches of scented wood on a brazier. When this was ready, the Bird Snake Mother shot a tongue of fire out of her mouth and the wood burst into flame. “María,” called a million voices, “jump into the fire and take Juan by the hand, he must burn with you so you both shall be one whole person. This is love.”

  They jumped into the fire and ascended in smoke through the shaft in the roof to join the Evening Star. Juan-Mari, they were one whole being. They will return again to Earth, one Being called Quetzalcoatl.

  Juan-Mari keep returning, so this story has no end.

  Elizabeth Hand (1957– ) is an American writer of stories, novels, and nonfiction. Since her story “Prince of Flowers” appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988, she has published dozens of stories and numerous novels in a variety of genres. She has also frequently published reviews and essays with The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and for twenty years has written a book review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s a little-known fact that she played a pivotal role in the short promotional film Shriek, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name. Her stories are collected in Last Summer at Mars Hill (1998), Bibliomancy (2003), Saffron and Brimstone (2006), and Errantry (2012). Hand has won four World Fantasy Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, two Nebula Awards and International Horror Guild Awards, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. “The Boy in the Tree” first appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 2 in 1989.

  THE BOY IN THE TREE

  Elizabeth Hand

  What if in your dream you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you woke you had the flower in your hand?

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  OUR HEART STOPS.

  A moment I float beneath her, a starry shadow. Distant canyons where spectral lightning flashes: neurons firing as I tap into the heart of the poet, the dark core where desire and horror fuse and Morgan turns ever and again to stare out a bus window. The darkness clears. I taste for an instant the metal bile that signals the beginning of therapy, and then I’m gone.

  I’m sitting on the autobus, the last seat where you can catch the bumps on the crumbling highway if you’re going fast enough. Through the open windows a rush of Easter air tangles any hair. Later I will smell apple blossom in my auburn braids. Now I smell sour milk where Ronnie Abrams spilled his ration yesterday.

  “Move over, Yates!” Ronnie caroms off the seat opposite, rams his leg into mine and flies back to pound his brother. From the front the driver yells, “Shut up!,” vainly trying to silence forty-odd singing children.

  On top of Old Smoky

  All covered with blood

  I shot my poor teacher

  With a forty-four slug…

  Ronnie grins at me, eyes glinting, then pops me right on the chin with a spitball. I stick my fingers in my ears and huddle closer to the window.

  Met her at the door

  With my trusty forty-four

  Now she don’t teach no more…

  The autobus pulls into town and slows, stops behind a military truck. I press my face against the cracked window, shoving my glasses until lens kisses glass and I can see clearly to the street below. A young woman is standing on the curb holding a baby wrapped in a dirty pink blanket. At her ankles wriggles a dog, an emaciated puppy with whiptail and ears flopping as he nips at her bare feet. I tap at the window, trying to get the dog to look at me. In front of the bus two men in uniform clamber from the truck and start arguing. The woman screws up her face and says something to the men, moving her lips so that I know she’s mad. The dog lunges at her ankles again and she kicks it gently, so that it dances along the curb. The soldiers glance at her, see the autobus waiting, and climb back into the truck. I hear the whoosh of releasing brakes. The autobus lurches forward and my glasses bang into the window. The rear wheels grind up onto the curb.

  The dog barks and leaps onto the woman. Apple blossoms drift from a tree behind her as she draws her arms up alarmed, and, as I settle my glasses onto my nose and stare, drops the baby beneath the wheels of the bus.

  Retching, I strive to pull Morgan away, turn her head from the window. A fine spray etches bright petals on the glass and her plastic lenses. My neck aches as I try to turn toward the inside of the autobus and efface forever that silent rain. But I cannot move. She is too strong. She will not look away.

  I am clawing at the restraining ropes. A technician pulls the wires from my head while inches away Morgan Yates screams. I hear the hiss and soft pump of velvet thoughts into her periaque-ductual gray area. The link is severed.

  I sat up as they wheeled her into the next room. Morgan’s screams abruptly stilled as the endorphins kicked in and her head flopped to one side of the gurney. For an instant the technician turned and stared at me as he slid Morgan through the door. He would not catch my eyes.

  None of them will.

  Through the glass panel I watched Emma Harrow hurry from another lab. She bent over Morgan and gently pulled the wires from between white braids still rusted with coppery streaks. Beside her the technicians looked worried. Other doctors slipped from adjoining rooms and blocked my view, all with strained faces.

  When I was sure they’d forgotten me I dug out a cigarette and lit up. I tapped the ashes into my shoe and blew smoke into a ventilation shaft. I knew Morgan wouldn’t make it. I could often tell, but even Dr. Harrow didn’t listen to me this time. Morgan Yates was too important: one of the few living writers whose readers included both rebels and Ascendants.

  “She will crack,” I told Dr. Harrow after reading Morgan’s profile. Seven poetry collections published by the Ascendants. Recurrent nightmares revolving around a childhood trauma in the military creche; sadistic sexual behavior and a pathological fear of dogs. Nothing extraordinary there. Bu
t I knew she wouldn’t make it.

  “How do you know?”

  I shrugged. “She’s too strong.”

  Dr. Harrow stared at me, pinching her lower lip. She wasn’t afraid of my eyes. “What if it works?” she mused. “She says she hasn’t written in three years, because of this.”

  I yawned. “Maybe it will work. But she won’t let me take it away. She won’t let anyone take it.”

  I was right. If Dr. Harrow hadn’t been so anxious about the chance to reclaim one of the damned and her own reputation, she’d have known, too. Psychotics, autists, artists of the lesser rank: these could be altered by empatherapy. It’d siphoned off their sicknesses and night terrors, inhaled phobias like giddy ethers that set me giggling for days afterward. But the big ones, those whose madnesses were as carefully cultivated as the brain chemicals that allowed myself and others like me to tap into them: they were immune. They clung to their madnesses with the fever of true addiction. Even the dangers inherent to empatherapy weren’t enough: they couldn’t let go.

  Dr. Harrow glanced up from the next room and frowned when she saw my cigarette. I stubbed it out in my shoe and slid my foot back in, wincing at the prick of heat beneath my sole.

  She slipped out of the emergency room. Sighing, she leaned against the glass and looked at me.

  “Was it bad, Wendy?”

  I picked a fleck of tobacco from my lip. “Pretty bad.” I had a rush recalling Morgan wailing as she stood at the window. For a moment I had to shut my eyes, riding that wave until my heart slowed and I looked up grinning into Dr. Harrow’s compressed smile.

  “Pretty good, you mean.” Her tight mouth never showed the disdain or revulsion of the others. Only a little dismay; some sick pride perhaps in the beautiful thing she’d soldered together from an autistic girl and several ounces of precious glittering chemicals. “Well,” she sighed, and walked to her desk. “You can start on this.” She tossed me a blank report and returned to the emergency lab. I settled back on my cot and stared at the sheet.