A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “I heard the transmissions in my helmet. A crackling response from the ground crew was half-garbled. All I could make out were the words escape pods.

  “ ‘There are escape pods on board?’ I asked.

  “Tracy never got a chance to respond, because a small, clear stone, a space diamond, shot through the window glass like a bullet, shattered her fishbowl, and hit her right between the eyes.

  “ ‘Oh, fuck,’ I heard Parson say.

  I immediately felt the current of the atmosphere whistling out of the ship. Tracy’s lifeless body was sucked against the windshield, which was slowly cracking, a pattern of fractures in the glass growing out from her like those trees branching in her paintings.

  “ ‘Where are the escape pods?’ I asked Parson as we clawed our way back along the passage. I couldn’t even recall them mentioning escape pods in our training. Ahead of us, his last movement bobbed like a flying mud slide in midair. ‘What the hell?’ I said as it hit us.

  “ ‘I told you the toilet was broken,’ he said. His helmet needed a windshield wiper.

  “ ‘The escape pod—where and how?’ I managed to get out. Fighting a vacuum is hard work. My trips to the top floor of the casino kept me moving. I was sweating, and the water was pooling in my suit. There was something bad about that, but I couldn’t recall what it was.

  “Parson was losing ground; his spindly theremin-playing arms weren’t enough for the job. ‘It’s the bed,’ he yelled.

  “ ‘How do I activate it?’

  “ ‘Save me,’ he yelled and grabbed my foot with both his hands.

  “ ‘Activation?’

  “ ‘You gotta take your helmet off and say, “Take me home.” ’ There was a pause. ‘It’s voice activated.’

  “I tugged him a couple of feet, and just when I made it to the cabin, I looked back and the control cabin window gave out completely. Amid a cluster of glass shards, Tracy flew off into outer space. I got a burst of adrenalin from fear of death and kicked hard with my leg to shake off Parson.

  “ ‘You bitch,’ he yelled back at me as he flew away.

  “I put everything into it and was able to get into the bed, strap myself down, and take my helmet off. The atmosphere was leaving the ship at hurricane force. I screamed, ‘Take me home.’ Nothing happened. ‘Take me home,’ I repeated, and this time my desperation increased my volume and it managed to overcome the rush of air. From the wall side of the bed, a covering arced over my body and encapsulated me. My helmet was gone and I couldn’t breathe, but soon enough an emergency source of air came on. It was pitch black inside, and the fit was tight. The ship was shaking and seemed to be tumbling end over end. The pod vibrated like a washer on the spin cycle. And of course my claustrophobia was stuffed in there with me.

  “The last thing I heard before passing out was Parson’s voice from some speaker in the pod. He said, ‘I am the universal note,’ and his crazy cosmic bellowing followed me into unconsciousness. The next thing I knew, there was a terrible jarring, a shuddering thump, and the cover of the pod drew back. I saw before me a field of pure white. I was dizzy, fading in and out. I thought for sure I’d made it to heaven. I went out cold, and when I came back again the white field drew back and there were two huge men in dark suits and dark glasses. Behind them stood Masterson wearing a sour expression and shaking his head.

  “They helped me out of the pod. We weren’t in heaven, but rather the white field I beheld was a parachute. We were in the Nevada desert. We walked over a small rise to a black limousine parked there in the middle of nowhere. The two big guys got in front, and Masterson and I got in the back. Thank God the car was air-conditioned. ‘What happened?’ I said, resting my head back. The driver started the car, and we were off. There was silence until we reached a paved road.

  “ ‘What happened, sir, was that you have severely deflated my sense of wonder.’

  “I laughed, thinking he was joking, but when I looked at him, his face was red with anger. ‘Sorry’ was all I said, because already I was thinking about the fifty thousand. When we came to a midsize desert town, a place called Numa, the car pulled over at a street corner and parked. Masterson handed me a bank roll. He said, ‘Here’s two thousand dollars. Buy some clothes, get a place to stay, and lay low for a while.’

  “ ‘Out here?’ I said. ‘You’re dropping me off?’

  “ ‘That’s right, and remember, do not mention the Icarus to anyone. If you do there will be regrettable consequences.’

  “ ‘But my fifty grand,’ I said.

  “ ‘We have to wait till things cool down. Check your bank account in three months. It will be there. Now get out.’

  “ ‘I just came back from space,’ I said. The guy in the driver’s seat opened his door, and I knew he was coming to drag me out. ‘OK, OK,’ I said. I got out of the car. It was hot as hell on the street, and I wasn’t used to standing under the influence of gravity. I fell to my knees on the curb. ‘Your rocket ship was crummy,’ I yelled as the door closed. The black car drove off.”

  “They just left you there?” I asked.

  Werber nodded and stared off at the liquor shelf as if he couldn’t believe it either. He finished his third gin and pushed the glass forward. “Well?” he said.

  “Is that all of it?” asked Breelyn.

  “Well, there’s the fact that I never got paid.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  “Never got another dime out of the Rocket Club. I went back east and lived for a while on the remainder of the initial five thousand in my account and what was left of the roll Masterson had handed me. A few months after the bank deadline came and went with no payment, I decided to write a fictional account of the mission. I figured if it was fiction, who would care? I really got into it. My best work ever. I sold it to ACE for one half of a double. Remember when ACE did the doubles?”

  “I used to get them off a spinning rack at the local newspaper shop when I was a kid,” I said.

  “This was two books in one?” asked Breelyn.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A cover and story on one side, and then you flipped it over and there was another cover on the back and another story that read to the middle of the book. You can definitely still find them.”

  “I made, for me, good-enough money on that book. The production went along. They sent me a finished copy of it a few weeks before it was to hit the bookstores, and then, all of a sudden, I get a call from the editor, and he tells me, ‘We’re pulling the book.’ I was heartbroken. When I asked why, I was told, ‘We had a visit here from some of your friends in the federal government. They told us the book never existed. They confiscated all copies before they shipped to the stores.’ A few days later, I was rolled on the street not far from my apartment. Four guys with dark suits and glasses roughed me up, bloodied my nose, and warned me that if I didn’t keep the Icarus thing quiet, I would permanently disappear.”

  “I don’t know,” said Breelyn. “I’ve got a hard time believing.”

  “I’ll say,” I added.

  Werber reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a paperback book, and tossed it on the bar. “All aboard,” he said. And there it was, staring up at us. A picture of a rocket ship streaking through space, and in the background, a visage of Satan, laughing. The title was in red saber-style across the top and in the corner was the ACE logo. The ship was the same as the one Werber described in his story.

  Breelyn poured the old man a fourth straight gin.

  “Who’s on the other side?” I asked and turned the book over. On that side there was an illustration of a guy, at night, crouched down under a tree, holding a futuristic-looking rifle while overhead in the starry sky a spacecraft in a shape sort of like a telephone searched the ground in the distance with a beacon of green light. The title on this side was in block letters in the sam
e sea green as that of the searchlight. It read Six Against the Mind Barons by Tom Purdom. Breelyn picked the book up and turned it over to see Werber’s side again.

  “Purdom lives in Philly,” I said. “He’s probably here at the convention.”

  “That guy’s got a story in Asimov’s this month,” said Breelyn. She looked at the ceiling. “I think it’s called ‘Civilians.’ ”

  “You can’t mention this book to him. He’ll say nothing about it. In 1983, I ran into him at the Worldcon in Baltimore. He told me how important that confiscated work was to him. He rewrote it, taking all the space opera elements out and setting it on Earth in the twenty-first century. I think ACE was gonna publish it as a stand-alone, but Purdom was so set back by them initially pulling the title that he missed the deadline by three months and that was it. Having Mind Barons confiscated was a kick in the nuts. I didn’t have it in me to tell him the truth, about the Icarus and everything.”

  Breelyn put the book back on the bar and slid it toward me. I picked it up, took one more look at each side, and handed it toward Werber. I was amazed to see that the fourth gin was already gone. He waved his hands in front of him and said, “You keep it. I don’t want it anymore.”

  “Sure you do,” I said.

  He slurred his words. “Seriously, I’m through with it,” he said and belched. He smiled and put his head down on the bar. An instant later, he was out cold. Breelyn called the cab company. While we waited, she swept up and wiped down the bar. I sat there and finished my second forty. The taxi finally arrived and I helped her cart Werber to it. He’d roused a little by then and almost walked on his own. He shook our hands, and we poured him into the backseat of the cab. Breelyn told me that her father didn’t want her working in the bar by herself at night. The sun was starting to go down, and it’s not like there was a mob of customers, so she decided to close up. She went inside and turned the lights out. After closing the door behind her, she pulled the metal curtain across the front of the bar and padlocked it.

  She walked along with me back toward the convention.

  “That’s one buggin’ white man,” she said. “Like what’s a space diamond?”

  “Yeah, he’s a hundred percent sense of wonder, but what about the book?” I said.

  “That is weird.”

  We walked a block in silence, and at the next corner she had to turn left. I held Rocket Ship to Hell out to her and said, “Do you want it?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got other destinations in mind.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. Then I told her, “I’ll look for your name in the magazines.”

  “I’ll look for yours,” she said. She flashed me a Spock and was off down the street.

  Before heading back to Jersey the next day, I went to the dealer’s room at the convention. The bookseller Joe Berlant had a long table stocked three rows deep with old paperbacks. When no one was looking, I took the book out of my back pocket, shoved it in between two others, and walked away. Now, a dozen years later, and well into the new century, I sit by the window and dream of that book when evening comes on.

  * Story Note: A tip of the hat to my friend Tom Purdom, who let me use his good name in this story. Tom’s been writing and publishing science fiction since 1957. Back in the ’60s, he actually did have three short novels appear as ACE doubles. His recent work has appeared in Asimov’s Magazine and Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction, and an excellent career retrospective story collection, Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, has recently been published.

  The Fairy Enterprise

  Once upon a time, prior to the mastication of mill gears, the clang and hellfire of factories, before smog and black snow, fairies grew up naturally from out of the earth, out of the bodies of the dead, and found life again in one of the four elements. They gamboled invisibly but oft enough appeared as lovely women or tiny men or a demon come to lead you astray.

  Their boons and curses were a thread of magic in our lives. It was just the old world’s way of showing us its dreams. But fairies can’t survive on soot and fetid water. Cold iron is murder to them. Manufacture drove them away, to the desolate places, where, eventually, the miasma of commerce found them and cast its deadly spell.

  From the street to the palace, the fall of the fairy realm was roundly lamented, all the while industry spread like the cholera. Where others saw an unavoidable tragedy, though, and looked away, Mr. Hollis Lackland Benett, a man of a peculiar nature and vast capital, saw opportunity. It came to him on a carriage ride one mid-December night. The wind was frigid and the driving black snow gave the streets a grimly festive appearance.

  When leaving the industrialists’ soiree at Thrashner’s mansion, Benett gave orders to his shivering driver, Jib, who held the carriage door. “Take the long way home, old man, I need a rest.” It was said of Benett that his mind was steady as the movement of a watch but one whose gears were greased to speed ahead of the thoughts of others. He found it difficult to sleep at night. Only while the wheels of the carriage turned, pulling him ever forward, was he content to lay aside his ambition for a few hours. Sleep for Benett was utter darkness; he never dreamed.

  Wrapped in a bearskin throw, he leaned into the corner of the carriage and closed his eyes. For a few moments he was aware of the sounds of the wheels on cobblestones, Jib’s chattering teeth, the murmur of the wind, the hard snow pelting the window he leaned upon . . . and then he wasn’t. Sometime later, he woke suddenly and sat forward. Rubbing his eyes, he ducked his head to look out the window and immediately realized they were passing Milner’s Bakery. Then he noticed, only for a flashing instant, a tiny white figure of a man, no bigger than a finger, ice-skating horizontally across the place’s window pane, leaving a gleaming streak in his wake.

  Before Benett could register his amazement, the scene was out of sight, the carriage moving on. He banged three times on the ceiling with his walking stick, a signal to Jib to now head directly home. His mind was sprinting forward toward the assumption that the strange sight was merely an optical illusion caused by the snow blowing through the light of the street lamp until somewhere in its course it tripped and fell into a memory.

  He was in his childhood bed, the counterpane pulled up to his chin. The elm outside the open window rustled and a soft breeze blew in to gutter the candle flame. His mother rested back in the rocker, and like every night, when she returned late from the mill, she told him stories. If he woke early enough before dawn, he might find her gaunt figure, like a ghost in the moonlight, asleep in the chair. The gleaming creature he’d seen on the baker’s window was like something from one of her tales.

  The memory of his mother faded into a memory from the gathering earlier that evening, at Thrashner’s. Binsel, the butler, freshened every one’s brandy, and the conversation turned to predictions of the next development in the bounding evolution of industry. Cottard spoke of electricity and the experiments of Edison. Dodin resurrected the specter of Malthus before suggesting that a factory-like approach to thinning the herds of the poor might catch on with the moneyed set. The economic theories of Mills and Carey made the rounds until Thrashner laughed aloud. “Bollocks to all that rubbish,” he said. “It’s simple. Ask yourselves, ‘What is it people want?’ People with money, that is.”

  The vision of the fairy, the two odd memories, seeped and mingled together behind Benett’s eyes. Perspiration on his mustache, a prickling of his scalp, were definite signs forecasting a brainstorm. His mind sped to meet it. When the carriage finally came to a halt outside Whitethorn Hall, he looked up to see the sun shining. Jib had driven in circles all night through the storm. Upon disembarking the carriage, Benett discovered his man frozen solid, icicles hanging from the eyes and nostrils, the ends of the hair. It was the horses who had eventually brought them home. He petted their snouts, and, taking a last look at Jib, whispered, “A pity, o
ld boy,” and then went in to warm up.

  After a nap, a bit of lamb stew and a bath, Benett, wearing his yellow silk lounging attire, settled down at the desk in his study with a pot of tea by his side. He lifted his pen and began to jot down the plans for his new factory. He worked all afternoon and was only disturbed once, by his butler, Jennings, who approached to inform him that Jib could not be buried; the ground was frozen.

  “Put him in one of those old whisky barrels, sprinkle some kerosene on him, and torch the blighter,” said Benett impatiently. In a second, he was back to work. Jennings cleared his throat and timidly asked, “And what, sir, should we tell his family?” “Good question,” said the master of the house, and looked out the window. “Send them three farthings and my condolences.” The pen went back to the paper.

  He was finished work for the day, sitting by the window, with a glass of port and his pipe. Through the twilight, he could make out Jennings and son, rolling a barrel into the courtyard. This was set upright on the snow-covered walk. Next they passed his view carrying the pale Jib, stiffened in the posture of the driver’s box. Benett heard a terrible crack as they shoved the corpse into the barrel. Then Jennings’ boy had the kerosene and Jennings had the matches.

  A moment later, Benett was outside, in only his slippers and billowing yellow silk, waving his walking stick and directing the immolation of Jib. “Don’t be cheap with the kerosene, boy,” said the master. For the lad’s trouble, he slapped him across the backs of his thighs with the stick. “Three matches at once, you dolt,” he yelled at Jennings. The butler threw the lit matches, and there was a sudden puff of flame. A few minutes later, Jib began smoldering. “Good Lord, he smells like the queen’s own turd,” cried Benett. “Quite,” said Jennings, whose son nodded.