by Pete Kahle
Victoria headed back toward us holding a paper plate piled with something dark green. Reggie trailed after her. TJ put an arm around me and leaned to whisper in my ear. “Let’s fool him, okay? Make believe you’re who he thinks you are—Victoria—that’s still her name?” I nodded, my ear burning from his breath. “Victoria doesn’t talk, right? She won’t tell on us—” He stopped talking as his bodyguard approached.
I knew TJ loved practical jokes. What harm would it do to humor him?
# # #
Him. Our friend, here where he could see and touch us, where we could see and touch him. Our host had brought us to the place just right. When the music made itself we wanted so much to loosen—as clear, as close—but managed to stay human. Barely. Only because that we could dance.
Oh, blending. Warm as sun and straight and sudden, strong and fast and laughs and breaths to take. Oh, yes and yes and yes. The power of his quick hands. The speed of his hips revolving, rocking free of heavy gravity.
Then he went away from us. Not far. In back of black velvet, in a hidden pool of shadows, with our host beside us, we could wait. While he, in front, poured upon with gold, with rich and changing sounds, showed everyone, if they would only see, his love.
# # #
Nobody else thought Victoria was scary. After all, all she did was dance. It was me they worried about, ironically. Stupidly.
Had she always eaten without chewing? Without swallowing? Why was I only now noticing? Why wasn’t anybody else?
Me, I was surprised I paid attention to anything except how fucking sexy she was. And TJ. But I was mostly able to keep my focus on the viewfinder. Slight problem: some of the people present didn’t want me filming them. Reggie and the other bodyguard on duty—Frank—moved out of frame whenever they noticed me shooting. Frowned if it looked like I might be about to aim the camera their direction. And another suit—blue—who appeared briefly before the show, he didn’t like me one little bit, either. They called him Dr. Cunningham. At the time things were too busy for introductions.
I watched the show from the wings with Victoria and Reggie. Got some nice sequences.
Good thing.
They’d taken over a low-rise apartment building in Meguro. Victoria and I got a room together on the top floor. Connection was fine, so I uploaded my footage to the cloud. Seeing as it’d had all eight bars even on ground level I set the Samsung’s link for continuous. Every inch I shot from then on uploaded automatically. Immediately.
Another good thing.
Victoria’s skin was dry again. I didn’t know what that meant. Something different for her than for other girls. I kissed her fingertips a long time, but she got up from the bed before I did anything more, and I let her. I thought I’d better go see what I could record. I thought we’d make love after that the rest of the night.
Our apartment was on the street side. Not till we got off the elevator did we hear the noise of the party. The lobby’s lights blazed across empty stonework floors and shone through long, low windows into the building’s courtyard. I saw a blue swimming pool with dark shapes gliding in it, and a crowded teakwood deck. So crowded, in fact, that finding TJ took me a while.
I should have trusted Victoria to home in on him. A conference between Reggie, Frank, Dr. Cunningham, and a man I’d never seen before distracted me, though—the more they obviously didn’t want me to take their pictures, the more I was determined to immortalize them for TJ’s fans. When I finally lowered the Samsung, I saw my stars right away. They knelt together next to the deck’s fence. A fat-bristled pine sheltered them.
From a few feet away I could tell they were gazing raptly at something small. I had to kneel down with them myself to see it, though: a turtle maybe two inches wide. A striped head with bead-bright eyes poked hesitantly from its shell.
“Shhh! It’s a baby.” TJ’s whisper was weirdly easy to pick out. “We’re just getting it to not worry enough so—”
“Time for your milk, TJ. Long day tomorrow.” Dr. Cunningham had joined us under the pine. “What’s that?”
“Someone else who needs to sleep.”
“‘Someone?’ Nobody there. Now come on.” He couldn’t see the turtle; too tall. But the turtle saw him, or probably heard him, and his head vanished back inside his shell.
“Wish I could do like that.” Like a child, TJ let himself be hustled off to bed.
The party showed no sign of quitting after he left, but I quickly persuaded Victoria we should follow suit.
I switched off the overheads and our apartment was still so white. Modern floating ceilings, deep pile carpets, muted table lamps—all were white or not far from it. On a bed so big they probably hadn’t come up with a name for the size, Victoria lay like a line drawing by Picasso, inky definition where her shoulder pressed into the pillow, where her lips met in a dark, essential crease, where her eyes drowned me….
I woke up. That was when I realized that I had been asleep.
I woke alone.
# # #
We would not often dream. Why need to? Up in the air, sometimes we would, yes, to remember our mother. Not now, not since we had found him. We only wanted a way to describe to him how he could help us. We would find it soon enough; for now it made us happy that our friend slept so nearby we could sip his breath.
But should it be so shallow? Should it be so slow?
We rose. We put on the shapes of clothes. We went to the rooms where we had marked his presence. Even worse than earlier—hardly moving, his heart, the sponges of his lungs. Wearing down the lock, we went in, only we had nothing we could do. Where should we go? Who would know how to make him breathe as much again? Humans had to have air, fresh air, all the time.
We thought the one with the name of Reggie might make this better. We smelled him behind the next door. We pounded on it and pulled him out when he opened it and shoved him ahead of us, and then he stopped asking us what we wanted.
“Oh god! Oh no!” and other words he shouted. He called a number on his phone and pushed on our friend’s body, on a place outside his heart. Which no longer beat. No longer beat.
Others arrived. They didn’t matter. He was dead. Last night our friend was alive. This morning he was not.
This morning our mother had no one to defend her. We had failed. We had failed. How would we make amends?
Who caused this? No way to be sure. Traces of too many humans filled the dying room.
They took what was left of our friend away, somewhere he could fall apart in peace. We drifted down to the waterside. I had not felt this way before. Too hot, and not with his kind heat. Shame and hurting boiled in us, churning us, eating us apart. So we slipped in the pool. Cooler, easier. We loosened but we did not lose our form.
Who caused his death? Who would we kill?
We would kill who we could.
A short while. Then the first one came. Dr. Cunningham. We reached out one who was an arm. Touched him. Tasted. Loosening a little more, we let him feel our sting. Till he could feel no more. Set him to float with his face to the dawn. Listened to his slowing heart and waited for another.
# # #
The pool was full of corpses and plastic bags. That’s what I thought. That was what it looked like from TJ’s balcony.
He wasn’t there. I didn’t know it then, but he wasn’t anywhere. He was dead, and his body on its way to the morgue.
There were lots of other bodies though—not in the apartment itself, but visible from it, from where I stood. I couldn’t tell whose. Not mine. Not—wait, no, please not—Victoria’s?
I ran down the fire stairs. I knew I ought to call the police, an ambulance, somebody, but first I had to see.
Five dead men. Two dead women. Neither her.
Seven corpses—plenty, though not enough to literally fill the pool. The plastic bags weren’t actually plastic, either. Nor were they bags. Jellyfish. Transparent, with traces of blue and green bioluminescence showing in the shrinking shadows thrown by the cou
rtyard’s pines.
Seven corpses. Yes, I’d have to call, and be questioned, and put my budding career as filmmaker in jeopardy. I’d have to explain TJ’s joke—his last joke, as I later learned. What was I doing there? Why had I missed my plane? Where was my mysterious girlfriend?
The jellyfish seemed fine. For jellyfish. The pool was probably that new saline kind. Lower maintenance. No chlorine. I put on my shades, but stooped down to confirm my theory before hitting their panic button. Dipped one finger in, pulled it out, touched my tongue. Tasted tears.
Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and was nominated for that year’s World Fantasy Award. With Cynthia Ward, she is co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, an instructional guide to literary inclusivity, and with Dr. Rebecca J. Holden, she’s co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler.
Her most recent horror short story publication, “Vulcanization,” appears in the January 2016 issue of Nightmare. It’s not exactly part of--but definitely contiguous with--Everfair, her forthcoming Belgian Congo steampunk novel due out from Tor in September 2016.
Cryptozoa
by Aaron Worth
Now, here is a puzzle, and no mistake.
Well, Ned, you are a man of science, are you not? Let us, then, work the problem out logically. We find ourselves in possession of three seemingly disparate data, to wit:
-Item the first: I have thrice taken out my pipe and replaced it again in my pocket, without once lighting it.
-Item the second: I have cast my eye over virtually every inch of this copy of the Brooklyn Eagle which I brought with me when I began my journey yesterday morning; yet, if a pistol were to be clapped to my head, I could not recall a single item to mind beyond the date (29 August, 1879—indelibly etched in my mind).
-Item the third: my right leg is jouncing up and down with a violence for which the mild vibrations of this train can scarcely be held accountable.
-Conclusion: I am in a state of pleasurable agitation, verging on excitement, a condition tending to wax rather than wane as I am rocketed northward in the wake of this marvellous creature of iron and steam.
All joking apart, however, as I draw ever nearer to the object of my quest, I do find it increasingly difficult to retain my inward, to say nothing of my outward, composure. (The little girl sitting opposite me has been watching me closely for the past half hour or so, occasionally whispering what I can only imagine to be doubts as to my sanity into her mother’s ear.)
And so, partly to settle my nerves, I have taken out pencil and note-book, with the object of setting down a clear account of the events and conjectures which have sent me hastening to the wilds of Maine. (Writing, I find, often has a calming effect on the nervous system.) It strikes me, too, that it will be as well to have as full a written record as possible of my experiences, so that when I come to write up the details of the case for publication (‘case,’ forsooth! I have been reading too many police novels!), I will not be undone by an undotted i, or an uncrossed t. After all, the public will be skeptical enough of my narrative without any omissions or haziness as to particulars.
But I should begin, no doubt, at the beginning: Who am I, and what am I (an Englishman) doing here, a stranger in a strange land?
My name is Edward Bellairs. As for my vocation, it is an unusual—even a singular—one. Privately—among those few friends who have stood by me in my years of trial, in the face of the world’s derision—and only half-facetiously, I style myself a crypto-zoologist.
But what on earth, I hear the reader ask with a perplexed frown, might a crypt-a-what-d’ye-call-him be? I do not find him in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary.
The question is a fair one, to be sure, and one best answered, methinks, with a brief auto-biographical account beginning in my youth (the child being father to the man, and all that).
I was (I suppose) an ordinary enough lad until, at the age of twelve, a copy of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle fell into my hands somehow, a book to me more thrilling than any adventure story by Ballantyne or Marryat. From that moment the great C.D. was my idol, and directly I informed my parents that I would become a naturalist like him; nor did I once waver in this resolution as I grew to manhood.
However, while at university in London, I wrote and delivered a paper which quite ruined my prospects for a conventional scientific career in England, as it were overnight.
The paper was titled ‘Of the Probable Existence of Crypto-Zoa,’ the last word being a neologism I coined with the help of a friend who’d taken a First in Classics at Oxford (my own Greek being a mere rudiment), intended to denominate that class of animals understood as being as yet secret or hidden from us.
In it I reasoned that, given the large portion of the globe that remains unexplored, it follows that there must exist countless species not presently recognized by Western science. Adducing such supposedly legendary creatures as the striped ‘African unicorn’ glimpsed by European explorers and the ape-like ‘wild man’ of the Himalayas, I further suggested that in the folk tales of primitive men we might glean some kernel of useful information regarding the possible nature of such species.
Only half-attending to the incredulous snorts and whispers that had begun to circulate among the audience, I went on to assert boldly that, armed with the means and methods of modern scientific inquiry, it would surely not be long before open-minded investigators of the natural world had brought a veritable menagerie of creatures, previously thought fantastical, within the sober purview of Reason.
I concluded my talk (very appositely, as I thought) by quoting Hamlet’s famous words:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
What was the reaction of my supposed colleagues? Let it suffice to say that I had mounted the dais with visions of glory before my eyes; I descended it amid a perfect typhoon of laughter and jeers.
I have never set foot within the confines of that—or indeed any other—university since that day, three years ago.
Instead, I set out to prove the justice of my claims in my own fashion. Let dry-as-dust creatures of Theory chortle themselves sick in their smoke-filled clubs; I shall prove a man of Action. (O, this hide-bound nation! Is it any wonder that the peerless C.D. cloisters himself in Downe, living a monkish existence among his orchids and earth-worms?)
When my father learned I had left University (he cherished hopes, poor man, that I’d end up a doctor), he cut me off entirely, but I had recently inherited a sum of money from a deceased grand-uncle, which I have invested in the pursuit of a wholly new field of study: for three years now I have travelled all over Britain, investigating with all the rigour of modern scientific method the claims of local folk regarding what I have termed the prospective crypto-zoa of each region.
I began my researches by spending a frigid winter quartered in Inverness, looking for evidences of the ‘Great Grey Man’ of Ben Mac Dhui, which I hypothesized to be a hominid survival from a bygone era. In this search I was ultimately disappointed. (However, whilst in Scotland I heard rumours of a marine ‘monster’—in all probability a remnant ichthyosaur—which is supposed to inhabit one of the lakes there, and which I mean to investigate on a future occasion.)
During subsequent investigations in Gloucestershire, Dartmoor, and Exmoor, among other locales, I sought evidence of such fauna as the giant cat reported by so unimpeachable an observer as Cobbett, and the so-called ‘Beast of Dean,’ which is almost certainly a pre-historic variety of wild boar (I have provisionally named it Sus Bellairsiensus). These expeditions proved, however, hardly more successful, at least as regards the finding of such tangible proofs as a doubting world expects.
I may say, however, that, as a kind of practicum or apprenticeship in crypto-zoology, these years were not without value. I have learnt a great deal about the methods that are most likely to s
erve me in the pursuit of my chosen profession (which is surely sui-generis in this world! I am myself a kind of vocational freak or monster, as I have frequently observed to myself with a smile, as I squatted with a field-glass in some lonesome moor, or in the shelter of a mountain crag, lying in wait for some ontologically elusive quarry or other).
Yet obstacles to my work in Britain were beginning to mount. First, word of my researches leaked out to the press, no doubt through the malicious agency of erstwhile colleagues (I write the word with a sneer), with the unfortunate result that, not infrequently, I began to find myself shadowed in the field by smallish flocks of reporters seeking comedic ‘filler’ for the London papers.
Of far greater inconvenience, however (for I am not a man to be deterred by the gibes of the ignorant), was the rapid dwindling of my resources, my grand-uncle’s small legacy being nearly exhausted by this time.
And so, five weeks ago, I staked all on one throw of the dice, taking passage on a Liverpool steamer bound for New York, fired with the resolution to vindicate my work in the New World, or pauperize myself in the effort!
But why America, you ask?
To begin with, there is much truth in the old saw which begins ‘A prophet is not without honour…’ (&c). Here, in this fire-new land not yet oppressed by the dead hand of Tradition, I shall, I feel certain, find more open and receptive minds than in old Albion.
I was lured, too, by persistent reports that had reached me from across the Atlantic, of a bipedal creature, sighted in the north-western regions of the country, not dissimilar in description to the Thibetan and Scots ape-men I have already mentioned.
