Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12

by Apex Authors

  Miriam found the thought of going into one of the buildings unnerving; as dark as it was outside, it was not as dark as inside one of the windowless buildings, and she found the idea of being enclosed in one of them too much like being inside a cave.

  No, she decided. She would remain in open space.

  She camped by the wall of one of the buildings, finding the way by touch, feeling the panic she had tried to stomach all evening rise. Where was Ya'el?

  She pictured her lover lying nearby, unable to speak or move, and nearly got up again to look for her. But it was no use. She would have to remain where she was until daylight returned, and hope.

  And pray, she decided, knowing as she did that it was her last measure, a desperate childhood instinct she had been able to suppress until now. Prayer, she once wrote, was hope's unsightly cousin. One she now desperately held onto.

  She lit two small candles from her pack; their illumination seemed to reflect her mood, desperate and fragile in the great abandoned space. She knelt on the ground, her knees sinking into soft sand, and carefully made a small crater in front of her, which she filled up with the grey fungus of a cigarette.

  She lit a match, edged it close to the weed until it began to catch fire, then leaned close, inhaling the smoke. She closed her eyes.

  Why she prayed with her eyes closed she didn't know. The words, when at last they came, were a jumble of broken sentences, of flickering images, dull and ragged, nothing like the poetry for which she was known. She prayed—to whom, also, she didn't quite know—asking only for Ya'el to be alive, to be well, to be back with her.

  But prayer brought her no relief, and as the last vestiges of smoke faded away she remained empty, crouching in the darkness, eyes still closed against the world.

  She fell asleep at last, curled against an ancient wall the Nephilim built. She didn't dream.

  Morning rose about her like a temple. She woke at first light and sat with her back to the wall as the sun came up, lighting the buildings around her at a measured pace, from the foundations up to the skies. They towered over her, those monuments of a vanished race, and her heart caught with the twined beauty and futility of it, and the sudden conviction, like a rush of blood to the head, that they were responsible for the vanishing of her beloved.

  She stood up abruptly, pain flaring in her legs, numb from her uncomfortable slumber. Not waiting for the blood to circulate, not waiting to light a cigarette from her diminishing box, not waiting for anything but driven by an urgency she now sensed in everything about her, Miriam began to walk away.

  She shouted Ya'el's name over and over as she walked, her eyes moving across the alien landscape as if starved of anything but that which she was looking for. The silence oppressed her. The shadows gradually shortened until it was midday, the sun high in the sky. Still there was no sign of Ya'el.

  Miriam became dizzy with hunger and the pangs of not smoking. On her head, the yarmulke moved restlessly, sending shocks of pain through her scalp.

  Still, she wouldn't stop.

  She began to see the visions again: the movement of light coalesced into living beings; they occluded her vision, their movements like the drifting of leaves, their buildings strangely real, unchanged.

  The buildings were the same, she realised. Unlike in the desert, where the phantoms of habitation rose around her. Here, the buildings were the same, sand-coloured and broken. Why did she not hallucinate buildings? she wondered, then a bark of laughter escaped her, sudden and unwelcome. What did it matter?

  She had to find Ya'el.

  She searched all throughout the day, getting lost in the identical-seeming avenues of Migdal, seeking her beloved. At last, when the shadows again lengthened and the brilliance of the day subsided, Miriam reached—by accident or design, she couldn't later say—the seeming heart of Migdal. The tall tower that gave the place its name rose above her, disappearing into the darkness above.

  "Ya'el!"

  She was huddled against two boulders, looking like a rag doll thrown aside in a fit of pique. Blood was coming out of her head, her nose, her mouth, and for a moment Miriam was unable to identify the source of the wrongness about Ya'el's shape, a wrongness she felt immediately was there.

  She knelt besides her lover, running shaking hands over her inert body. “Ya'el?"

  Then realization hit her and unseated deep-buried fear. Ya'el's yarmulke was gone, and in its place was an eroded, bleeding crater.

  "Can you hear me? Are you okay?” She was shouting, her voice echoing weakly against the tower.

  Ya'el's head turned, and her open eyes—and only now did Miriam realise that Ya'el's eyes had been open throughout—stared at Miriam. There was something terrifying about her features, a look of terrible victory etched in her face, yet also, Miriam thought, one of a desperate longing.

  "What happened to you?” Miriam said, tears burning her face with salt. The air was still, the sun growing lower on the horizon. “Oh, shit.” She frantically searched for her box of cigarettes, trying to extract one, light it, and shove it into Ya'el's mouth all at once.

  "Don't.” Ya'el's voice was a distant murmur.

  "You don't know what you're saying,” Miriam said, trying to hold the cigarette in Ya'el's unresponsive mouth and strike a match at the same time. She changed tack, put the cigarette in her own mouth and lit it, then pressed it into Ya'el's mouth and held her nose closed, forcing her to smoke.

  "I know exactly what I'm saying."

  Some of the smoke must have gone through, Miriam thought, as Ya'el's voice rang with sudden anger in the still air. Her eyes lost their intensity, and Miriam felt that for the first time they were really looking at her and were seeing her there.

  "What happened?"

  "Can't you see them?” Ya'el's face set in a grimace as she attempted to smile. “But of course you can.” She coughed, and blood spattered Miriam's front. “You always could."

  "See what?” Miriam asked. There was a sudden sensation of falling inside her head, as of an inevitable but unwanted outcome finally materialising.

  "Them.” Ya'el pointed in the air, before energy abandoned her and her hand dropped back to her side.

  Miriam reluctantly looked around her. The space around the tower was thronging with beings of light; they shimmered and flickered in and out of her field of vision, gliding past them and through them, moving between the gigantic buildings like ghosts.

  "You're hallucinating."

  Ya'el laughed, and before Miriam could stop her, she buried the cigarette in the sand, extinguishing it.

  "Not anymore."

  A silence fell between them. Miriam felt her anger flare. To have come all this way, and to be helpless—that, she couldn't stomach. She held Ya'el's hand in hers and tried not to think of the meaning behind Ya'el's words.

  "What happened to you?” She didn't know how she meant it, but the words came out choked and coated in bitterness, like wrongly-inhaled smoke.

  "I wanted to know the truth,” Ya'el said. The effect of the smoke Miriam had forced on her seemed to have dissipated. She looked bright and feverish, her pupils moons swimming in a milky sky.

  "What truth?” Miriam demanded. She felt a sudden, irrational urge take her, to slap Ya'el and bring her to her senses. Ya'el's words hovered at the back of her head; she refused to understand them.

  "For a poet,” Ya'el said, “you have a remarkable ability to ignore what your eyes tell you.” Her eyes tracked the moving beings of light and her face relaxed into a childish mask of pure fascination. “Their truth,” she said at last.

  Miriam didn't answer.

  Darkness fell. The ghostly figures of the Nephilim shimmered in the blackness, illuminating Ya'el's fragile, dying body. At last Miriam spoke, and when she did, bitterness again threatened to overwhelm her, making her voice quaver, disobedient to her wants. “Why Migdal?” she demanded at last. “Why come here to kill yourself?"

  She remembered Professor Yagil's vague smile, his assurance th
ere was nothing left in Migdal of any worth.

  Ya'el coughed. On Miriam's head, the yarmulke squirmed, hurting her.

  "Because this is where we landed."

  It came out as a whisper.

  "Miri...” Ya'el held her arms out, shaking as she did so. There were no words left. Miriam stooped down to her and held Ya'el in her arms, holding onto her tightly, trying to cover her, to protect her from the world. Miriam's face searched Ya'el's, inhaling her aroma, the mixture of sweat, smoke, and blood. Ya'el's lips, in a last physical act, found Miriam's and they kissed, lips dry and wordless.

  Miriam felt Ya'el let go as their lips touched. She kissed her nevertheless, praying uselessly, and when she laid the body of her lover back on the sand, there was nothing of Ya'el but that. A body.

  Miriam found she couldn't cry.

  She sat cross-legged in the sand, holding the hand of her lover entwined in hers. As she watched, she knew her own body could not be deprived much longer, that she herself would soon die if she did not feed the yarmulke, if she did not let smoke enter her body. And still she resisted.

  Her mind, unable to stop working, was composing a poem, and as she sat in the darkness of Migdal she knew that, had she but written it down, it would have been her greatest work. It was a narrative poem she was writing in her head, the story of a ship arriving at a far and strange planet after crossing space itself; the story of those first people, landing here in this alien city, consumed by excitement, curiosity, and a confidence in themselves that was overwhelming.

  There are some things we are not meant to see, she thought. It was a line of Talmudic scripture, written a generation after landing. It was drummed into her in the cheder every day for years. She tried to construct that first meeting, between people and those who were more than people.

  It must have seemed a lush planet to the people of the Tikvah. They brought hope with them, and hope was what they saw. And that hope, she thought as her hands—independently, it seemed, of her conscious mind—began searching for the cigarette box, that hope was not a futile one.

  She put a cigarette in her mouth and, with shaking hands, struck a match.

  They were allowed to live, after all. They settled and raised children and worked and prayed. They wondered at the curious artefacts that littered the small space of their habitation, asked themselves why the machines stopped working, why no records remained, and they formed scholastic societies and played with archaeology and raised furious debates.

  She lit the cigarette and inhaled, and inhaled again, until her eyes filled with tears.

  The burning figures of the Nephilim receded, as if they never were.

  Her head cleared. The world around her was once again the world she knew, silent and peaceful and empty. She knew grief would come, later, and that she might be ready for it then, and she wondered again at the contracts one makes, the bonds between lovers and the pacts between a woman and a God she no longer believed in. And she wondered, also, at the covenant that must have been struck all those years ago, on landing, and at the way that which is commonplace might live with that which is truly alien.

  She sat holding Ya'el's hand in hers and waited for the sun to rise and end the long night.

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  Little Red Riding Hood—Life off the Path

  by Angela Slatter

  It's been an interesting journey for Little Red Riding Hood. She started life in a tribal tale about a girl who outsmarts a wolf—all on her own, no outside help. A few centuries later, she gets a red cap, loses about twenty IQ points and gets eaten by a transvestite wolf. Add another hundred or so years, the cap becomes a hood, she loses a few more brain credits, gets molested, and then eaten by the same cross-dressing wolf but is rescued by a big, strong man and learns never to disobey the rules again. Adding insult to injury, in the forties Tex Avery turned her into a stripper. Bruno Bettelheim looked at Gustave Doré's 1867 Little Red Riding Hood illustrations and saw dirty pictures—Little Red in bed with the wolf, giving him the eye. A red leather-jacketed Reese Witherspoon (oh, puhleeez!) played her in a nineties film version, Freeway, in which a friendly neighbourhood serial killer fulfils the role of the wolf. Just when you thought it was all over, Angela Carter came along, reclaimed her and set her free.

  So, Li'l Red—what happened?

  Traditional versions of Little Red Riding Hood were oral tales about a young girl's initiation into womanhood. The Italian version, which contains the crack-a-lackin’ lines: “Why is your chest so hairy, Grandmother?” “From wearing too many necklaces around my neck,” and replaces the wolf with an ogress, pitches Little Red as a girl on the cusp of growing up. In the French oral tales (often known as The Path of Needles or Pins) the heroine must choose one of two paths when she meets the wolf (or bzou) in the woods. There is no exact explanation of the difference between the Path of Needles and the Path of Pins; however, Yvonne Verdier, who studied manifold variations of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, believed the paths were symbolic of two periods of growth in a young girl's life. When a girl was sent off to be apprenticed to a seamstress, this was the path of pins (learning a trade as part of growing upi) and is regarded by Verdier as the path of maidenhood, the path of change from child to young woman. The path of needles was the next stage and implied sexual maturityii, the needle being emblematic of sexual penetration. Terri Windling suggests that girls who choose the path of needles before the path of pins are trying to “grow up too soon."iii

  Jack Zipes refers to the original tales as having a “narrative perspective ... sympathetic to a young peasant girl ... who learns to cope with the world around her."iv The girl meets the wolf on the way to Granny's house and discloses where she's going (but makes no wager). The wolf kills and eats Granny, takes her place in bed, and induces the girl to eat and drink Granny's flesh and blood before climbing into bed with him. Recognising her danger, and with no one else to turn to, the girl uses her wits to save herself. Before she can be devoured, she claims she needs to relieve herself, the wolf (after first suggesting that she do it in the bed), ties a rope to her leg and lets her out. When outside, she ties the rope to a plum tree and runs home safely.

  The heroine in the oral tale eats her grandmother's flesh and drinks her blood. Gruesome though it is, this can also be seen as a metaphor for the revolution of the life-cycle. The young replace the old, the girl is coming into the fullness of her womanhood, she is all “power in potentia;"v the grandmother is at the end of the cycle, she is no longer fertile, no longer desired, no longer agile and active. Although the young girl has a traumatic experience (an education in the dangers of life), she has been independent and saved herself with no help from either a prince or woodsman, nor any other male figure.

  However, under the pens of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the tale became one of a girl's rape and murder, for which she herself is blamed.vi

  Operating in the salons of France in the mid to late seventeenth century, Charles Perrault was one of the leading proponents of literary fairy tales. Although by no means the only “recorder” of tales—female authors vastly outnumbered the males working in the genre at the timevii—it is his versions of fairy tales that have survived and dominated the Western fairy tale tradition. Perrault, who also claimed to be supportive of women's rights (at least for women of his own class), nevertheless managed to infuse his tales with patriarchal notions of how girls should behave.

  Although Perrault claimed to be “a mere conduit of past wisdom,"viii not creating stories but simply taking the tales from a “pristine source,"ix (nurses, gouvernantes, grandmothers, random old female gossips) he did not leave the tales intact. He changed them, transformed them to suit his own purposes. Marina Warner notes that he “set aside aspects which struck him as crude,"x and Zipes, in relation to Perrault's version of Little Red Riding Hood, points out that the author's “[own] fear of women and his own sexual drives are incorporated into his new literary version, which also reflects general
male attitudes about women portrayed as eager to be seduced or raped."xi

  Perrault's tales became moralising stories, warning women and children that if they did not conform there would be consequences. Perrault introduces into the literary tale the red cap/hood and the element of a wager between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood. He also implies that she is somehow careless in taking her time to get to Granny's house—that she is complicit in Granny's death because she wants to lose the betxii, and thus invites the wolf's sexual advances.xiii When she arrives at Granny's house she is raped and eaten. Perrault lays the blame very squarely on her shoulders (just in case anyone should miss the point):

  From this story one learns that children,

  Especially young lasses,

  Pretty, courteous and well-bred,

  Do very wrong to listen to strangers,

  And it is not an unheard thing

  If the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner.xiv

  Sharon Johnson has noted that Perrault's version of the tale reflects not only his assumption about gendered behaviour but also that of the society in which he lived—even in terms of how rape was regarded by French jurisprudence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Johnson argues that “Men are represented as naturally aggressive, and their ravishing of women is often eroticized."xv In a society where sexual violence was viewed as ‘desire, women were often blamed for inciting male sexual aggression by being objects of desire.xvi Perrault's central message is that she was “asking for it” and got what she deserved: “She was wearing red, Your Honour, and you know what that means!"

  Warner also notes Perrault's fusing of Granny with the wolf—the “crucial collapse of roles"xvii—may show that he was associating Granny, as a solitary old woman of the forest (the traditional place for witches, those with occult knowledge and therefore suspect) with the wolf, also a creature of the forest, natural, uncontrollable and an object of fear.xviii Perrault implies, consciously or otherwise, that those who associate with nature and the uncivilised get what they deserve.