The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  He watched as miniature cities rose and crumbled; stars stumbled and collided, warriors clashed in battle, the world fell from its axis, and righted itself again, and at the end of it, Ariel was there, staring at him, his eyes piercing beyond the shell of skin to the pain beneath.

  “Now, you must give birth to life,” Ariel said.

  Outside, the moon was a sliver of silver fire, and he saw the Wordeaters dancing on the pillows.

  “No need for fear,” Ariel said.

  He looked up at his son.

  And the Wordeaters were around him. They surrounded him with their smell of lilies and wild roses. They filled him with the scent of rich loam, the wild growing of trees and the harvesting of rice.

  Images burst to life on the back of his eyelids. Warriors sprouted wings and flew away like eagles, the earth split apart into a thousand splintered reflections of itself, and the stars floated down to earth to speak with the remnants of a lost generation.

  He lay there for a long time and when he opened his eyes he saw Ariel floating upward on the beams of the moon.

  “No,” he cried. He stood up, and tried to catch hold of his son. “Stay,” he pleaded.

  And he wept because his arms were not strong enough, and he felt his son slip away from his grasp until there was nothing left but a ray of moonlight across the cover of their bed.

  * * *

  —

  “He was never ours to keep,” his wife said.

  In the darkness, her pale skin shone like ivory, and her body was soft and yielding under the bedcovers.

  She turned her face away and he saw the glimmer of tears on her cheeks, and when he reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, he felt her shudder with grief.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And he thought of how he had shut her out, of the days turned into weeks and months of not speaking.

  He looked at her and saw how sorrow had hollowed out her cheeks, and etched lines upon her face, and for the first time in a long time, he reached out his arms to her.

  * * *

  —

  “We could have another child.”

  They were walking together on the beach, squinting against the glare of sun shining on white-topped waves.

  “No,” she whispered.

  She looked out and thought of her son whom she had lost to the waves and to the moonlight, and of her husband who stood beside her.

  “There are so many stories in the world,” she said. “So many stories packed into books. So many words packed into libraries waiting to be tasted, and swallowed up by people like me.”

  “We’ll make another child, if you want.”

  She looked at him and saw the sadness and the longing and the aching shyness that transformed him from the boy she’d fallen in love with into this man with whom she had chosen to share her life.

  “Tell your stories,” she whispered. “Write your words and give them life. Let them be the child Ariel once was. Fill your tales with his laughter, with the color of his eyes, with the scent of his breath and the feel of his hand in my hair. Write your words. Bring him back to me.”

  She saw the look he gave her. Saw wonder wake up in his eyes, heard the catch of his breath, and felt the thrill of his hand reaching out to touch hers.

  “Let it be our memorial,” she said.

  A breeze blew in from the sea, wrapping them in the warmth of its caress.

  “The breeze comes from faraway India,” he said. “Where a little boy plays on a beach of black sand and the sun is a ball of red fire.”

  They walked on, and his words floated away on the breeze to where a little boy with silver hair sat singing a tuneless melody under the light of the setting sun.

  Ramsey Shehadeh (1970—) is an American writer who has published stories with Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and elsewhere. When he isn’t writing fiction, he occupies his time as a software developer. We’d like to see him spend more time writing fiction and less time on software! This story was first published in Weird Tales #350 in 2008.

  CREATURE

  Ramsey Shehadeh

  AND SO CAME CREATURE out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his approach with wide eyes and open mouths, and then scattered like leaves.

  The sun sat smudged and pale behind a gray smear of cloud, and the air stank of scat of putrefaction. But Creature said: “What a fine day it is!” Though he did not say it, of course, he thought it, and so the cityfolk thought it too. And when he released a great bolus of happiness into the air, they paused in their desperate flight, and smiled, and thought: “What a fine day it is!”

  Creature surveyed the sea of smiles around him, and was well pleased. He rolled along, growing and shrinking and flattening and widening as he went, dispensing false joy to the destitute and the hopeless, the desperate and the sad. They lined his path like parade-watchers, caught helplessly in his spell.

  All except for the Little Girl. He found her standing in the middle of the road, gazing up at him with an expression of puzzled reserve.

  She touched his yielding black skin, and said: “Who are you?”

  “I am Creature,” said Creature. “You are quite happy to see me.” Although he did not say it, of course, he thought it, and so the Little Girl thought it too.

  She smiled. “Will you tell me a story?”

  “Certainly!” said Creature. The sky rained ash and soot, and in the grimy dusk of midday the doomed people of the city rediscovered their despair and slunk back into their slow nowhere peregrinations. “Would you like to hear a happy story, or a sad story?”

  “A happy one,” said the Little Girl. She was slumped and emaciated, and her features sagged against her bones like melting wax. But her eyes were bright, and the mouth in her face was smiling. Creature looked inside her, and saw the scars where her childhood had been, and felt a cold thrill of sadness. He shied away from it, and began.

  “Once upon a time, there was a race of beings called the Lumplorians. Unlike most peoples, the Lumplorians came in all different shapes and sizes. Some of them were tall and bent at right angles, like an L; some were round like cookies, with arms sticking out of the tops of their bodies and eyes in the middle of their bellies. Some undulated like meandering rivers, and some were perfectly square.”

  The Little Girl giggled. “That’s silly.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Creature. “This was the nature of the Lumplorian. And because they were all so different from one another, because no Lumplorian looked like any other Lumplorian, there was no bond between them. This made them sad, because they were all alone. And then it made them angry, because they hated their sadness, and blamed each other for it. There were wars between the Lumplorians, a million, million tiny wars, because it soon came to pass that every Lumplorian was at war with every other Lumplorian.”

  “This is boring,” said the Little Girl, “Can we play now?”

  “But it is still a sad story,” said Creature, who knew that there are no happy stories or sad stories, only a single tale that stretches across the breadth of time, and happy or sad depends on which part of it you choose to tell.

  “That’s ok,” said the Little Girl. “I don’t care about stories anyway.”

  “Very well,” said Creature, and extruded two arms from the front of his body and picked her up. “What would you like to play?”

  “Let’s play Find Mommy,” said the Little Girl.

  “A capital idea!” said Creature. “How does one play Find Mommy?”

  “You look for Mommy,” said the Little Girl, frowning.

  �
�Of course,” said Creature. “Where should we begin?”

  The Little Girl pointed toward the Pitted Bridge, which spanned the River Sludge. “There,” she said.

  “Climb on, then,” said Creature, and handed her up to a second set of arms, which were emerging a little further up his body, and they handed her in turn to a third set, higher still, and so on, so that the Little Girl rose toward his summit on a rippling wave of arms.

  “And we’re off!” said Creature, and surged toward the bridge, undulating around rubble and bridging over chasms and puddling through potholes. Ruined buildings crowded in on either side, staring blindly down at them through shattered windows.

  They were nearly there when a black bubblecar, squat as a spider, silent as a whisper, turned the corner in front of them, and stopped. A gun rose from its roof and trained itself on them. Its doors opened, lifting like angular wings, and two blackclads stepped out wearing visors that reflected Creature’s shimmering undulate in their mirrored and opaque surfaces.

  The first blackclad leveled his weapon at Creature and said: “Halt!” Creature halted. He looked at their weapons, and felt something barbed and murderous rising in the banished parts of his mind.

  “Identify yourself!” barked the second blackclad.

  Creature extruded a mouth, and said: “I am Creature.”

  “Release the girl,” said the second blackclad, “and put your hands on your head.” He said this with some hesitation, because the girl was clearly the one holding onto Creature, and because, in his current form, Creature had neither hands, nor head to put them on.

  But Creature devolved into an oil slick, gently lowering the Little Girl to the street. And then he seeped into the cracks in the ground, and was gone.

  The Little Girl got to her feet, looking warily at the two men. Fear showed plain on her face. All children knew the dangers of encountering the blackclads, who despise unattached urchinry, and round them up at every opportunity, and ferry them to the Orphan Reprocessing Facility in the center of the city, from which no child had ever emerged.

  “You,” said the first man, “will come with us.”

  The Little Girl shook her head, and took a step back.

  The first man, who was fond of saying Halt!, pointed his weapon at her and said: “Halt!”

  And the girl halted, but not because the blackclad told her to. No. She halted because the bubblecar behind the two men was rising into the air on a surge of black foam. It was rising, and it was rising, and then it was falling. There was a great crash, and the car was lying on its side, where the two men had been.

  The black foam fell down to the ground, slapping against the torn tarmac like hard rain, then rose again as ten flat featureless figures with perfectly circular heads and rounded, linked arms, like cut-out paper men. They stood in a circle around the smashed car, their heads bowed, murmuring wordless elegies.

  After a few moments, the figures flowed into each other, and became one figure, a giant cauldron that stood on two spindly legs. “I have done a bad thing,” said Creature.

  “Those were bad men,” said Little Girl, who had seen many terrible things in her short life.

  “Nevertheless,” said Creature, and sighed. He trundled over to the Little Girl, and unwound an arm, and took her hand. “Let us proceed more discreetly.”

  * * *

  —

  Creature was born soon after the apocalypse, when the changes beset the world. He’d seeped out of his mother and spilled to the ground, a slick black rill in the muck of the afterbirth, and lay helpless at her feet, listening to the screams. He’d hurt her, clinging and raking and tearing at her body as it tried to expel him. Even then, he knew the horrors that awaited him in the world outside his mother.

  The sun was well below the horizon when she died. Creature watched his father, an emaciated halfman in tattered rags, kneeling over her, sobbing quietly. He lowered himself to the ground and pressed his half-body against hers, so that they became one body, three arms and three legs and three eyes. Two of the eyes stared away blankly into nothing, and the third wept.

  When the darkness became absolute, Creature slunk away into the night, an amorphous puddle of shadow.

  At first, he foraged among the weeds and the thorn-brambles, but he soon learned to lie in wait for more substantial fare. He discovered the secrets of his body: how to flatten it into a dark patch of night, how to rise and thicken and envelop, to crush and consume. Everything in this world seemed bent on his destruction, and so he grew feral, and learned to cultivate savagery. All that had been human about him receded, save one image: the face of the mother he had never seen, smiling at him as she never had.

  As he grew, legends sprung up around him, becoming more fantastical with each telling: he was an animate piece of the night, an amorphous devil, a thing of pure evil that consigned the souls of his victims to the infernal realms of hell. The men who lived on the edge of the waste gathered into great hunting parties and came after him, but always to no avail, because he had discovered another talent: he could see their thoughts as if they were his own. He could divine their numbers and their tactics, their plans and stratagems, their feints and their traps before they came within a mile of him. He thwarted all of their efforts, and then he killed them, and then he ate them.

  But his ability to read their thoughts was ultimately more curse than blessing. He became entranced by the strange things that he encountered in their minds: wondrous, inscrutable feelings like joy and hope and love and compassion and humility and peace. To be sure, they were rare artifacts in these hard men, but all he had ever known was grief and pain and fear and hatred, and these new sensations, though strange and troubling, were beautiful. He saw the face of his mother in them, and understood that she was their talisman, their fortress and their apotheosis.

  He found that he could not destroy creatures who were capable of such wonders. He lurked instead at the edge of their encampments, drinking them in, savoring them. And, one day, quite by accident, he discovered that he could manipulate them, too; he learned how to manufacture happiness in their minds, to sow accord, to soothe despair.

  But he could do none of these things in his own mind, try as he might.

  And so he conceived of his plan. He would enter the city, and heal its people. He would revive their hopes, scatter their sadness, stoke their love. And then he would wend himself into the fabric of their lives, and bask in the reflected glow of their joy. He would make himself whole again, through the coerced love of the men who despised and feared him.

  * * *

  —

  The Pitted Bridge rose up from the banks of the Sludge like a leaden rainbow, but plunged abruptly near the midpoint of its arc into the dark waters. Two hundreds yards farther along, it rose from the river again and continued its journey to the opposite bank. Sagging ropes spanned the interval between the halves; from his position on the shore, Creature could just make out tiny figures shimmying back and forth across the gulf, like beads on an abacus.

  “All the way to the end,” said the Little Girl from her perch at Creature’s summit.

  Creature stepped onto the bridge, and began his ascent. He moved along a narrow avenue bisected by a fading, dashed yellow line, between dense thickets of shanties, reeking and ramshackle and piled up against the rails of the bridge.

  The bridge’s residents stopped their milling to stare. Eyes appeared at slit windows, heads poked out of curtained doorways.

  The Little Girl waved at a small boy with long thin arms that spindled out from his naked torso like spiderlegs. The boy waved back, beaming. “Hi Ugly!”

  “Hi Rat!” said the Little Girl, and laughed. “That’s my friend Rat,” she said. “We call him Rat because he’s always going in dark holes to get food.”

  “And why does he call you Ugly?”

  “Because that’s my name.”


  “Surely not,” said Creature. “Who would give such a pretty little girl a name like that?”

  The Little Girl did not answer. Creature quickened his pace, because the crowds were thickening on either side of him, and he felt the knife edge of hostility touching the skin of his mind. He sent out balms of goodwill; but he was nearly spent now, and his thin, paltry reassurances served only to dull the rising malice.

  “Mommy,” said the Little Girl.

  “Do you see her, Child?” said Creature, slowing.

  “No. Mommy called me Ugly.”

  “Ah.” Creature resumed his pace, and struggled to find the thing to say. “Well, I’m sure she did so in jest.”

  “She said it’s not safe to be a pretty little girl. She said she used to be a pretty little girl too and bad things happened to her and made her wish she wasn’t.”

  A feral dog shot out of the narrow space between two shanties and leapt at them, snarling. Creature extended a protoplasmic tentacle and caught it and held it in midair, speaking tenderness and peace into its mind until it grew calm. Then he lowered it to the ground and released it and molded the edge of a tentacle into a hand the color of obsidian and stroked it behind its ears. It sat on its haunches and watched them pass, sniffing at the air in their wake.

  “She wouldn’t let me go far away from the house,” said the Little Girl. “And after Daddy left she didn’t let me out at all. She paid a nice man named Bickle to watch the house when she had to leave but then Bickle didn’t wake up one day because of the knife in him and she had to stay with me all the time, because she said she couldn’t trust anyone else.”

  A burly and bearded and shirtless man stepped into their path. Creature slowed, then stopped. The man was fat and large and pink and hairless. He held a book before him, like a talisman, and said: “Leave this place, Demon. You are not welcome here.”