The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  “We think Bleachy ate some of whatever it is,” the son said. “The doctor put him down. We did the funeral already.”

  “Well, he was very codependent,” the father said. “I guess it’s a shame about the bathroom though.”

  The father closed the restroom door and stuffed towels in the crack underneath, except where in the corner under the hinges he inserted a flexible rubber tube, to occasionally check the air inside. The door remained locked for two days, until the appropriate gear had been gathered, during which time the family’s trash bins overflowed with trash. A stripe of grime crossed the kitchen wall, past which many emergency bags of trash had been dragged into a blue-green bonfire in the backyard. The refrigerator crisper drawers were no good. The father dug a small outhouse a few feet from the bonfire, a shallow hole covered by a Batman tent from the son’s youth. The father laid two different shits into this hole, and on both occasions brought along a tiny pistol in his fanny pack.

  When finally they were ready to venture into the restroom again, the family wore dust masks around their faces and latex gloves on their hands. With one hand in his fanny pack, the father opened the door several inches. Inside, lying across the counter, was a gray crocodile wearing a tan sweater.

  Bleachy, the mother wrote.

  “Dang it,” the father said.

  “I knew you weren’t a cat,” the son said.

  The mother stared at the wet pencil shavings littered along the crocodile’s skin and tried to understand.

  “I got stuck halfway,” Bleachy said. “I had to come back up. I almost drowned.”

  I’m sorry, the mother wrote. I understand how you feel.

  Bleachy lurched forward and locked his jaws around her throat. The son ran downstairs, listening from under a pile of kitchen trash as shots fired out. There was the sound of his father screaming, and then a kind of gurgle, and then the house became silent again.

  Something inside the son’s head encouraged him to fall asleep, and so he did, still wearing his dust mask. He dreamed of shoes on dry leaves. When he awoke, Bleachy had eaten all the trash in the pile, and was now licking clean the son’s knee.

  “Please don’t kill me,” the son said.

  “Don’t worry,” Bleachy said. “You’ve made some poor choices, but you’re young. You still have time to change.”

  “Where’s my dad?” the son asked.

  “How would you like it if there was a big tube that poured someone else’s trash on your house?” Bleachy asked. “How would you like it if I took you away and made you cough in my toilet?”

  Bleachy placed his teeth around the son’s calf and bit down until he felt the bone underneath. The son cried out, looking at the new holes in his leg, his eyes cracked like crayon. The jaws came unclamped without a sound, and Bleachy turned and crawled away, out of the house, still wearing the son’s tan sweater. Filled with a feeling that was almost sorrow, Bleachy lifted his long gray head and breathed in deep, hoping to find a scent that would remind him of home.

  Erik Amundsen (1975– ) is an American writer whose stories and poems have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Jabberwocky, Not One of Us, and Lackington’s. He keeps a low profile, so not much is known about him beyond his fiction and poetry. We find that his work is just as mysterious as he is, and we like that about him. “Bufo Rex” was first published by Weird Tales in 2007.

  BUFO REX

  Erik Amundsen

  I AM CALLED BUFO, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toad stool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits.

  I’ve never put much stock in humanity, despite what stories might have said of me; I am no great lover of human aesthetics, being, myself, so physically bereft. My hide is olive and warted, my fingers pointed and long, my body flat and fat and swollen around, my face a wide mouth and bulging eyes. Some assume, for all of that, I must want for a bride, something pink and smooth of limb, soft, mammalian, to balance out the whole of my existence. As if, somehow, this will lighten the aesthetic load I place upon the eye of God. Well, I assure you when the eye of God tires of looking at a creature such as myself; I suspect I shall be the first to know. Until then, I’ve no use for a bride and no means or place to keep her; I’ve mates by the score and children by the hundreds with no need to have ever met either; beneath the brown waters, my wedding chamber, they leave of themselves, as do I, without second thought. What could I hope to gain by maintaining one of the warm-blooded creatures you men pant and yell to possess that I do not already have, save a lifetime of trouble?

  That was my testimony in my first kingdom, when they dragged me in chains before the king and the pink creatures they sought so to protect swooned and then peeked through half lidded eyes at the monster. The sentence was exile, and they frog marched me to the border, and set me loose on pain of death to never return, but I am called Bufo, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toad stool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits.

  I have no treasure, no hall, nor wealth, nor store, save that the world contains everything that I have ever needed; food, bed, cool mud and warm sun. No gold, but the color of my eyes. But then, there is always some damned fool that must believe that something as swollen and hopping-loathsome as myself must have some use to men, as all things made by God, such as mosquitoes, poison ivy and the clap are wont to possess. So in this second kingdom of grasping merchants and opportunistic peasants, I learned to my sorrow what every damned fool knows; that toads possess carbuncles in their heads in the space where their brains ought to be. And because my carbuncle taught itself to think and learned that God made, upon the earth, no shortage of damned fools, this time, I showed myself the frontier.

  I am called Bufo, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toadstool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits. I seek out no company, but I’ll accept any which treats me decently and which accepts that it is the nature of the toad to eat insects and to lay in the bog. The woman was old, and she might not have been quite right, but I also saw the mounds where her husband and little children had years ago gone, and eaten some of the beetles who had crawled in their bones. Men are a sentimental lot, and sentiment, as any toad knows, rots the carbuncle. Or the brain, whichever it might be. She called me by her children’s names and made me clothing; it was perhaps inappropriate but mildly charming. I can only apologize for being a poor conversationalist, but to say we were familiar might be characterizing our relationship a little too strongly.

  Some men set her on fire so they could have her house. I’m not quite sure I understood what it was all about, but they seemed upset that she’d been talking to me, though I know enough of men to see an excuse when it comes riding up the path, torch in hand. I suspect they would have used me the same way, for sake of consistency, but sentiment is not a burden under which I labor, or not one under which I then labored, and I fled, hopping fast and strong for all my girth.

  I tore my coat and my trousers, but what need have I for the cloth of men? I am called Bufo, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toad stool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits.

  I came to a fourth kingdom and the people here tipped their hats when they saw me come.

  “Please, sir,” they said. “We’ve a terrible time with flies and beetles, worms and slugs, and things like that.”

  “Don’t you fear I’ll steal your princesses?”

  “Our princesses have faces sweet as buttermilk but hearts as cold and dark and wicked as the water under winter ice and voices that make the hens lay weird black eggs, all seven,” they said. “Take the lot, and none shall miss them.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said. “What about the gem in
side my head, I’ve heard that all toads have them.”

  “All men know that only damned fools believe that, and we expose damned fools at birth, by law, in this kingdom.”

  “Better still,” said I. “If an old woman talks to me, you won’t set her on fire, will you?”

  “We’ve plenty of firewood to keep us warm in the cold months; old women are for stories and spinning.”

  “I think we may come to an understanding,” I said, and I, to my new bog went, and began my work. In a few short years I and my children and grandchildren had the kingdom’s pests well in hand, the princesses were all safely married to other countries, to ogres or to pirates, and the people left me to my work.

  But man has decreed that good things must not last, and, soon men came from the kingdom next door, you’ll remember them as the ones who set the dotty widow on fire for her house. It seems they’d run out of widows.

  In truth, I would have missed the whole thing, if not for a misunderstanding. A young man like the one I first met when I came here was speaking to a knight from the widow burning country, with his armor and his surcoat and his heavy cross. The knight asked the young man what god the young man served. The young man replied that, like the knight, he served Christ, but either the knight did not understand his language, misheard, or heed his orders, for he shoved the man back.

  “Kroaten?” the knight said, which was a name that some people used for me, long ago, and not quite like what the young man said. It got my attention.

  “Your god is the same as Kroaten devil!” the knight yelled. Now, I have been called a devil before, fairly often. I’m quite certain no one has ever been feebleminded enough to worship me. But now the knight had my attention and I was not disappointed, if, indeed, I had been expecting a repeat performance of what happened all those years ago at the widow’s house on a much grander scale. My children and I hopped off to the bog and waited. When the smoke cleared, only men from the widow burning nation remained, loudly thanking God for their victory over Kroaten Devil.

  Over me.

  I am called Bufo, I grow fat upon insects. I make my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lies in the bogs. My throne is the toadstool and witch’s butter is for my biscuits. I am an unsentimental being; I was born in a bog and fed first on brothers and sisters. I am not prone to fits or to passions, and I do truly believe, to the core of my being that sentiment rots the brain. I sat on my toadstool for days and smelled the smoke of the widow burning nation, and I felt; the experience was unfamiliar, yet I knew it as it came to me. I have been watching you men for a very long time, and I know what you are all about. I turned my bulbous golden eyes to the castle, where the widow burning king had unfurled his victory flag, and I decided that I was tired of you men and your killing game.

  It’s then that I decided you should see how nature plays.

  First I went to see Scorpion, and he was sitting at the edge of the water.

  “Will you ferry me across?” he asked. “I cannot find your cousin frog.”

  “That isn’t why I’m here,” I said.

  I went to visit violin spider, playing his violin in his reclusive cave.

  “Have you come to listen to me play my newest funeral march?” he asked.

  “In a sense,” I said.

  I visited black widow in her widow’s weeds.

  “Let us speak of love and loss,” she said. “I shall tell you of my dear husband whom I so miss.”

  “You shall be reunited,” I said.

  I visited many others, angry wasp, busy bumblebee, and busier honeybee, fire ant, horsefly, all the ones you might expect, and many you might not, some I usually do not visit, and never have, some who considered themselves safe from me by their natures, the long legged spider, certain butterflies; the exact recipe is secondary. That day I swelled to twice my usual size, sloshing with the witch’s brew bubbling in the cauldron of my belly. I sat upon my toadstool, terrible pain now coursing through that warted, fat body of mine, skin splitting, suppurating with the strain of all the poisons within, wondering why, in God’s name, I would choose to do this to myself.

  Perhaps I was tired of moving kingdom to kingdom one hop ahead of the ever changing idiocy of God’s chosen. Perhaps it was to remind man that it was terror that filled Adam’s eyes when he fled the garden after he dropped anarchy on the rest of us. I’ll never truly remember now.

  With veins that pumped the fires of hell, I hopped off toward the castle, the ulcers in my skin burning the ground black where they touched.

  The castle’s kitchens were well known to me; for it was here that I began my work, years ago, contending with this kingdom’s pest problem. In a way, this was more of the same; all things returning to their beginning. Cooks, hastily brought from the widow burning nation, were equally hasty in preparing the victory feast for the king and his men, in situ, and, as one might imagine from the nation I described, there was all kinds of cooked flesh. There was also soup, a great, steaming, bubbling savory cauldron of it. I watched from the window, a trail of sloughed off skin and puss trailing down the outside. I waited, and I hadn’t long to wait, for I was surely dying now, from all the poison I consumed. But the cooks had ridden long and hard to get here and the soup, one of the opening courses, was not one of their first priorities. Their attention wandered, and when all of them were out of the kitchen at once, I leaped. The pain that followed was a joy compared to the hours that brought me to that point.

  I was called Bufo, I grew fat upon insects. I made my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lay in the bogs. My throne was the toadstool and witch’s butter was for my biscuits. I expected to dissolve then, into brute nature as beasts are wont to do, but I did not. Instead I hovered over the huge kettle and watched my body, already made tender with all the venoms, dissolve into the soup. The cooks, hearing the splash, returned and speculated a bubble; no matter, for the soup was being called for, a stir, a taste; what was it they had done, this had never been so good; and they set out the bowls.

  The men set out in the stolen hall, the king at his enemy’s throne, and each in turn was given a bowl of me, which they, amid much boasting and jest, began to eat, while my shade looked on. Toads, you might realize, taste horrible, and while the first spoonful of the soup was sublime, the next was not as good, and the third not so good as the second and so on, as the course progressed, the men grew quiet, the compliments and smiles turned to grimaces, but pride, not wanting to be the first to declare the soup awful, drove them to continue. Near the end of the bowl, every spoonful was tongue spasming torment, and it was near that point that the King lifted his spoon and found, cradled inside of it, a carbuncle, red as hate, big as a goose’s egg.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, to no one in particular. “Those idiots were right after all.”

  He stared at it for a moment, his face turning red, then purple, and then black; and then he died. His body had swollen out of his clothes and his flesh out of his skin by the time it hit the floor. His men followed his lead a moment later, faithful to the last. His feast, appropriately, burned in the kitchen, and the castle has since become poisoned to the foundations, so that none may touch it and live. With this I am satisfied.

  I was called Bufo, I grew fat upon insects. I made my board under leaves, upon logs and my bed lay in the bogs. My throne was the toad-stool and witch’s butter was for my biscuits. Now owner of a man’s castle, my shade sits on a throne no less poisonous than a toadstool, waiting for the day when someone retrieves the poisoned stone. Perhaps then, we shall throw down another tyrant. One could grow accustomed to that.

  Manuela Draeger is one of French author Antoine Volodine’s (1950– ) numerous heteronyms, and she therefore belongs to a community of imaginary authors that includes Lutz Bassmann and Elli Kronauer. Since 2002, she has published novels for adolescents. “The Arrest of the Great Mimille” was originally published
as “L’arrestation de la grande Mimille” (L’ecole des Loisirs: Paris, 2007). This is the first publication of this novelette in English.

  THE ARREST OF THE GREAT MIMILLE

  Manuela Draeger

  Translated by Valerie Mariana and Brian Evenson

  I DON’T KNOW if you’ve already noticed, but there are fish inside the walls. At first, you’re not really aware of it, because they are small and slip discreetly from brick to brick, avoiding exaggerated splashes and swashings, but the moment they realize they’ve been noticed, they fill out and make themselves at home. You don’t hear them twist and turn much, no, but they make an appearance outside. The outside of their world, so the inside of ours. They puncture the wall, they stick out their fish chests, their faces welded to their bodies up to the gills, they half open their flabby mouths, they release a blue bubble and they go back in to wriggle elsewhere. This is not an agreeable sight, you really have to admit. The wall closes behind them without a trace. They have eyes the color of milky ink or murky gold, they do not blink, and this gives them a very expressionless look. A look that you catch without finding a little possible friendliness or complicity in it. You’d think that they were blind or in a bad mood. But they sense that you have seen them and, the next time, when they emerge again from cement or plaster, their appearance is already more imposing. The bubble, too, increases in size.

  I spoke of a blue bubble, which is quite peculiar, but I’ll add that it’s a cube, this bubble, and that makes it even less normal. The fish that live inside the walls release cubic, very blue bubbles: and there we have it. That’s what has been happening, for several weeks.

  That’s what you have to know for the story to begin.

  The blue I’m speaking of most often takes a dark blue shade, intense and gleaming. If there were still sheriffs, if the police still existed, it could very well be the color of their uniforms, in my opinion. As for the cubes, they would fit the hollow of your hand if you succeeded in seizing them, but you rarely catch them. They wiggle between the fingers that try to imprison them and they fly away. They join the others. They take their place up in the heights, and, little by little, they entirely cover the ceiling. You see nothing but slightly gelatinous blue cubes pressing against one another. It’s very pretty, you have to admit, and it’s all the prettier since, at night, they glow softly in the darkness which, at day’s end, slips in through the window: a cold and unsettling darkness, one never lit up by the moon since, months and months ago, the moon disappeared.