Leopold. You’re right this far that they all must have had the same sort of beginning. Only it is given to very few to see the beginning, as you and I have seen it, or so near the beginning.
Furniss. Now, Leopold, I hardly see what you are driving at. I am not much on religion, as they say in America, but I believe there is a Power above all. Call that power God, and let us say that God does as He pleases, and on the whole that it is best that He should. I don’t see that you can get much further than that.
Leopold. I don’t believe that God ever made the plague, or the black death, or the red sickness.
Furniss. Oh, don’t you? Then you are, I suppose, what the churchmen call a Manichee – you believe in the two powers of light and darkness, good and evil. Well, it is not a bad solution of the question as far as it goes, but I can hardly accept it.
Leopold. No, I don’t believe in any gods but the One. But let me explain. That is a nice dog of yours, Furniss. You told me one day something about his breeding, and you promised to tell me more.
Furniss. Yes, it is quite a problem in natural history. Do you know, Tommy’s ancestors have been in our family for four or five generations of men, and, I suppose, that is twenty generations of dogs.
Leopold. You told me something of it. You improved the breed greatly, I believe?
Furniss. Yes; but I have some distant cousins, and they have the same breed and yet not the same, for they have cultivated it in quite another direction.
Leopold. What are the differences?
Furniss. Our dogs are all more or less like Tommy here, gentle and faithful, very intelligent, and by no means deficient in pluck. My cousin’s dogs are fierce and quarrelsome, so much so that they have not been suffered for generations to associate with children. And so they have lost intelligence and are become ill-conditioned and low-lived brutes.
Leopold. But I think I understood you to say that the change in the breed did not come about in the ordinary course of nature.
Furniss. I believe not. I heard my grandfather say that his father had told him that when he was a young man he had set about improving the breed. He had marked out the most intelligent and best tempered pups, and he had bred from them only and had given away or destroyed the others.
Leopold. And about your cousin’s dogs?
Furniss. Just let me finish. It seems that while one brother began to cultivate the breed upward, so to speak, another brother was living in a part of the country where thieves were numerous and daring, and there were smugglers and gipsies, and what not, about. And so he began to improve the breed in quite another direction. He selected the fierce and snappish pups and bred exclusively from them.
Leopold. And so from one ancestral pair of, say, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, you have Tommy there, with his wonderful mixture of gentleness and pluck, and his intelligence all but human, and your cousin has a kennel of unintelligent and bloodthirsty brutes, that have to be caged and chained as if they were wild beasts.
Furniss. Just so, but I don’t quite see what you are driving at.
Leopold. Wait a minute. Do you suppose the germs of cow-pox and small-pox to be of the same breed?
Furniss. Well, yes; you know that I hold them to be specifically identical. I see what you are at now.
Leopold. But one of them fulfils some obscure function in the physique of the cow, some function certainly harmless and probably beneficent, and the other is the malignant small-pox of the London hospitals.
Furniss. So you mean to infer that in the latter case the germ has been cultivated downwards by intelligent purpose.
Leopold. What if I do?
Furniss. You think, then, that there is a secret guild of malignant men of medicine sworn to wage war against their fellow-men, that they are spread over all the world and have existed since before the dawn of history. I don’t believe that there are any men as bad as that, and if there were, I should call them devils and hunt them down like mad dogs.
Leopold. I don’t wish to use misleading words, but I will say that I believe there are intelligences, not human, who have access to realms of nature that we are but just beginning to explore; and I believe that some of them are enemies to humanity, and that they use their knowledge to breed such things as malignant small-pox or the red sickness out of germs which were originally of a harmless or even of a beneficent nature.
Furniss. Just as my cousins have bred those wild beasts of theirs out of such harmless creatures as poor Tommy’s ancestors.
Leopold. Just so.
Furniss. And you think that we can contend successfully against such enemies.
Leopold. Why not? They can only have nature to work upon. And very likely their only advantage over us is that they know more of nature than we do. They cannot go beyond the limits of nature to do less or more. As long as we sought after spells and enchantments and that sort of nonsense we were very much at their mercy. But we are now learning to fight them with their own weapons, which consist of the knowledge of nature. Witness vaccination, and witness also our little victory over the red sickness.
Furniss. You’re a queer mixture, Leopold, but we must get back to the picnic people.
And so they got up and went back together to the dancers, nodding to me as they went. I sat there for awhile, going over and over the conversation in my mind and putting together my own thoughts and Mr. Leopold’s.
Then I joined the company and was merry as the merriest for the remainder of the day. But that night I dreamt of strange-looking clouds and of the shadows of invisible cars, and of demons riding in the cars and sowing the seeds of pestilence on the earth and catching away such evil specimens of humanity as James Redpath to reinforce the ranks of their own malignant order.
Lovers at Dawn
Eric Reitan
He’s on the balcony, the small of his back pressed so hard into the rusty metal railing that it digs into his flesh. He faces his lover. She’s always been too beautiful to think about with anything but an ache, but now he’s learned disgust.
She stands inside the bedroom, half in shadow, the other half limned in yellow light from the hall. He thinks about the Phantom of the Opera, about the deformities hidden by the half-mask.
It would be hypocrisy not to kill her.
“Leave,” he rasps.
She shakes her head. “I won’t make it that easy for you.”
He heaves a sigh and turns away, toward the reddening sky. Her name sits in his mouth like something overripe, something he should spit over the railing. And yet it still has sweetness.
He isn’t surprised when he feels her hand on his back. She slips into place beside him, careless of her nakedness.
“Yours is a beautiful world,” she says.
* * *
On the very day of the Intrusion, David Conlan’s wife slipped on wet leaves crossing Maple Road, and she fell backwards into the path of a silver Volvo. She died before the ambulance arrived.
David was at work when it happened. As the ambulance was skidding through the rainy streets, he was flirting with the new receptionist. Her name was Sarah, and he was saying it aloud, the name like silk, while the paramedics worked to keep his wife alive. He was brazen and Sarah was blushing, and he saw the affair unfolding before him like something inevitable, as if it weren’t his doing at all.
He was on the phone, laying a variant of the same seducer’s charm on one of his corporate clients, when they came to tell him. They spoke in low voices as if that would make it easier to bear. At first he didn’t react. When they were gone he stood behind his desk, straightening papers and staring at the institutional painting on the far wall, the kind he sold to lawyers and doctors and modelling agencies. When he walked out, Sarah stared just past him in mortified silence. She would’ve slept with him if he’d been happily married. But not now.
It wasn’t until he was in hi
s car, driving towards the hospital, that his knuckles began to whiten. He had to pull over. He sat for a long while, clinging to the wheel. The sounds he made were the kind no one but his wife had ever heard. Which meant that there was not a single person, no living person on Earth, who’d ever heard his heaving sobs.
That night, when the rest of the world gathered in wonder and fear to watch or listen to reports of the Intrusion, David Conlan sat alone in darkness, holding his wedding album on his lap. Because that was the pathetically clichéd choice, the only option for someone like him, someone who had clichéd office affairs in a business that sold clichéd office décor.
The news cameras were fixed on the crystalline ships, the reporters’ voices trembling with fear and excitement and uncertainty, but as David stared at the screen he was thinking about the first time he’d made love to her, in a sleeping bag at Kathy Jensen’s cottage. That’s when they’d become lovers, and lovers is what they’d stayed until the word ‘wife’ pushed its way into things and did its domesticating work.
But in the wedding photos he saw the Jensen cottage girl, the girl who smelled like campfire smoke and tasted like s’mores. And he was weeping and clawing at his face, digging his nails into his cheeks as if that could tear away all the wasted years.
When he rose and went to bed, he saw the dent in her pillow, the tangible evidence of nearness in space and time. In the night, when he reached for her and his fingers settled on an empty blanket, he woke in surprise.
* * *
“Don’t touch me,” he says, and when she pulls her hand away he feels the cold place it leaves behind. He remembers her touch. He remembers last night’s kisses, his impassioned proposal, and the long, hot silence before her words: “There’s something you need to know.”
A part of him still wants to reach out, to fight his own gag reflex for another moment of contact. He’s disgusting. He disgusts himself.
“I never lied to you,” she says, but her voice is uncertain. “I would have told you sooner, if –”
“Leave,” he says.
“You don’t want me to leave, David.”
He spins towards her, a scathing curse ready on his lips; but her face is beautiful in the crimson light, and her eyes are deep. The first time he saw her, on a park bench feeding squirrels, the sun made copper highlights in her hair. Now the dawn light casts shadows laced with richer reds.
He looks away, silenced.
“I haven’t changed, David. I’m still the woman you fell in love with.”
“Woman?” He tries to laugh, but the sound withers in his mouth.
“I’m a woman now.”
“No!” The pain in her voice somehow revives his anger. He wants to hurt her, to hear her pain again. “You’re a…a cheap imitation. We saw what you look like. We know what you are.”
She sucks in ragged breath. The tears are spilling free. “I’m human!” Her tiny fist smashes his chest, hurting more than it should.
* * *
David Conlan did not pay much attention to the news in the days that followed his wife’s death. But even he couldn’t help but share the dread anticipation when the ships, at last, began to open. Along with all the rest he sat that night before his television. He imagined his wife beside him. He imagined holding her hand, squeezing it, feeling for the pounding pulse.
The news reporter tried, helplessly, to voice the currents of their collective emotions. “What do they want from us? What will they look like?” And all the while, the great crystal doors cracking open onto darkness.
Then, at last, movement. The world, even David Conlan, held its breath. A floodlight blazed onto the opening.
And then the screams, the nausea, the gunshots as the soldiers’ fingers convulsed on their triggers. And one by one, the aliens poured or dripped or sloshed into the world. All across the planet, from a hundred different ships, they made their oozing entrance.
Those who’d gathered near the ships fled in horror. The soldiers continued to spray bullets into the putrescence until their guns were empty. The aliens, if that was the proper name for moving gore, seeped forward undaunted. The soldiers fled in advance of the bombers.
At one point David vomited onto the floor. “Look,” he said to no one, pointing at his own puke. “It’s an alien.” He laughed at his own joke, a manic kind of laugh. He was laughing still as the explosives vaporized the dirt around the ships. The crystal was made of stronger stuff, and so the ships – sealed up again – remained untouched by the bombs.
For a time, at least, the world hoped that the monsters were gone.
* * *
He seizes her wrists to stop her pounding rage. “I saw,” he hisses. “I saw.”
She presses forward, mashing her face against the clenched tangle of their hands. “You know me, David. I am human. I am human.”
David shoves her away.
She stumbles on the threshold, falling gracelessly. “Please,” she sobs.
He pushes past her into the house. He pours himself the dregs of last night’s wine. He’s already swigging it down when the scent of Syrah fills his sinuses, redolent with the memory of last night’s passion. Her mouth had been flavored by this, sips and splashes between each liquid kiss.
He’s seeing again the oozing gore, and he runs into the bathroom. When he’s finished retching he stands at the mirror, staring at his pasty features and the dark bags under his eyes, every pore somehow more hideous than it has ever been. He scrubs his face furiously, hopelessly.
She’s so much like his wife, the way she used to be when he couldn’t get enough of her, before matrimony tamed what was best left wild. The same cheekbones. The same full breasts. The same dimples at the crown of her ass.
When he comes out of the bathroom he sees her, still sitting where she’d fallen on the balcony threshold, the morning sunlight yellowing her naked skin. He sinks onto the edge of the bed and drags a hand through his hair. She stands and returns to the railing, her hair splashing her back. A passing car honks madly. Cat calls are whisked away by speed.
He imagines her melting under him as he makes love to her. For some reason, he imagines that the gore is sticky.
* * *
It was too much to hope that bombs could vaporize the horror. There were countless stories of contact. One woman told of how she’d turned on her shower and it had come pouring out onto her before she could escape, entering her nostrils and ears. She woke an hour later, terrified it was still inside her.
A man David knew said he’d seen one rise from a sewer grate to consume a child, only to spit the boy out again, unconscious, a moment later. Stories like this were frequent enough to have the ring of truth: the creatures were making contact: enveloping, intruding, and then slipping back into hiding, their victims shaken but intact.
As the months went by, the tales became less frequent but more sensational – stories of abduction, of blobs of prehensile slime committing acts of brutal sexual violation. The reputable newspapers stopped printing them, and eventually they became once again just a subject for the tabloids. But then a different kind of story began to emerge. The aliens were masquerading as human. They were hiding among us. There were even a few who claimed to have witnessed the ooze coalesce into human forms.
For a long time David didn’t pay much attention. While the thought of aliens in human form made him shift uneasily, he was too absorbed in his own misery to contemplate the implications of the Intrusion. He called in sick too often to keep his job, and spent his days sitting in his house drinking beer and watching soap operas, carefully avoiding the shows he knew his wife had enjoyed. At night he’d take long walks around the neighborhood, remembering the walks he’d taken with his wife. He’d stop by the thick-boled oak on the corner of Chestnut Lane, remembering when they’d climbed it together to get a better view of a lunar eclipse. One of those few, last untamed moments af
ter their wedding day.
He’d pause at the stucco house she used to admire and imagine them living there together, lighting fires in the fireplace, raising children, fighting over which shows to watch and whose turn it was to do the laundry.
The idea that somehow the aliens had stolen her from him, that her death was part of their plot, a scheme to borrow her form and live among the humans in some cheap copy of her body – that idea, incoherent as it was, didn’t occur to him until later.
* * *
When she finally comes off the balcony, her despair has been replaced by anger. “Don’t you see? David, look at me! Look at my face!” Because he’s thrown on a t-shirt by now she has something to grab onto, and she does, seizing the collar. She brings her face close to his, her features fierce. But her voice has become quiet. “When we changed we became human, David. I have human blood, human skin, human eyes. I have human DNA. My needs are human needs. My desires…David, they’re human desires.”
“No.” He shakes his head.
“Do you know the most ironic thing, David? Do you? I am so human that the thought of what I used to be…it disgusts me! That’s how human I’ve become.”
“I made love to you, dammit!”
“Yes! To me. To a human woman. It doesn’t matter where I came from.”
“It does!”
“Have you ever looked at a fetus, David? Slimy. Translucent skin. Huge head and a tiny body. If you ask me, it looks more alien than…than a pile of goo! But then it becomes a person. Does it matter that your wife was once one of those things?”
“Don’t talk to me about my wife!”
“Does it matter?”
“It’s different!”
“How?”
“It just is!”
* * *
The problem was the regret. He’d always believed he’d be a good husband: faithful, sensitive. But when the problems started he stewed about them silently, never saying a word, never complaining, but growing angrier and angrier inside until he started imagining with something like anticipation that she’d die and he’d be free of her.
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