It made him feel small and trivial, filled him with disgust and horror as he looked at it. Its glowing eyes, or what passed for them in such a being, looked at him then, studying as it heaved and swayed. It sang on, there in the dark, this thing his wife had taken him to see, a sound between the creaking of limbs and the susurrating sound of wind through leaves. He couldn’t understand what it meant. Looking for some answer, too overwhelmed by the power here, and the being that was its source, he turned to Em. “I don’t understand, I don’t…how does this all go together? How can this be and how does it change…”
“Don’t you see, Stephen? Don’t you feel what it’s given me? It’s like the wires were crossed or the roots that gave me life were corrupted in some way that left me damaged and weak, incomplete. It wasn’t my fault that I was always broken, it wasn’t my mother’s fault, it just was and there was nothing I could do to make me enough for anything and anyone.” Her hair was in her eyes, her hand back on their daughter’s back, their daughter who cooed at the being as happily as she did at her own mother.
“You were always enough, Emily; you were always all that anyone needed. This…I don’t know what this is, I don’t know how to process it.”
“She’s a kind of mother, a being beyond man, a natural mother who can help us grow, to heal.”
“But how? What do you do? What could you possibly offer it?”
“I didn’t understand it myself, not at first. The book was vague and hard to follow. Mostly pictures and some dead language copied from another source. I don’t worry about it now; some things just are and are meant to be. As for what I do, well, I’ll show you.”
She took Catherine out of her sling and handed her to him with a kiss for both before stripping down to nothing. The energy still thrummed, making his head ache and his body shudder, but it seemed to become more soothing now, the sound of the creature’s singing more like a lullaby. He looked at her there, in the middle of the woods with nothing to hide the curves of her body, and he noted the change in her, the strength and certainty that she only carried when she wasn’t fully aware before. This was his wife made whole. No matter how strange and horrific this all seemed to be, there was nothing he could say to deny that she had centered and grown, blossomed. I love her, I love seeing all of the doubt fall away, but like this? What do I do with this? How does it change things? Do I stop it? Do I make her go back?
She spoke words aloud, alien things that sounded familiar though he’d never heard them spoken like this, audible and clear. Clearly this had been a part of the concoctions, spellwork muttered to herself as she combined things, asked the being to bless them with whatever it was it generated for her. She was speaking to the tree, the sound of it trilling but also marked by clicks and guttural sounds. This was his wife now, this strange woman.
Em kept singing, the tree swaying and shifting with its own song, and with a look of open love and trust she carefully walked over the ground to stand a few inches from the creature. She looked up, moonlight highlighting the edges of her face and the curves of breast and hip as she raised her arms above her head and out from her body, then embraced the tree. He stifled a laugh at first, it was so surreal to see it, but then all humor fell out of it. Jesus fucking Christ!
Spikes had come out of the flesh of the tree, its glowing eyes fixed on him as they pierced her flesh in several places, bleeding her. Em had cried out at the initial piercing, but she pushed into the being now, feeding it her blood through small vines that coiled up the spikes and out onto her wounded flesh.
“Emily!” He’d shot forward when he saw it, Caroline still in his arms and giggling at the sight of her mother rapt and quivering against the tree. He struggled to take action, however, knowing that he shouldn’t get the baby too close in case it sought to pull her in too. Looking around he saw Ems clothes and set their daughter down in them, puddling them up to make a nest for her before striding back toward the tree. By the time he’d reached it the vines were slipping free of her, her body beginning to fall back. Without the help of the tree, she was beginning to slip to the ground, so he darted closer, catching her and settling her on the ground.
His wife’s eyes slipped open, tired and half-lidded, as she felt him set her down on the ground. “This is what I do, this is how the tree gains its life force and then it nourishes me in return, giving me the power to nourish Caroline as it was always intended. Look.”
She gestured back toward the tree, to which he now saw he was alarmingly close, its glowing yellow eyes fastened on his only a few feet away. As he watched, he realized what Em was referring to. Here and there along the front of the tree, in the places where the spikes had been, in fact, small buds had begun to blossom, growing into green pods.
The same pods he had seen her adding to her concoctions, smoothies and capsules alike.
Sweating and exhausted, he didn’t know what to make of any of it. He could only stare as the pods grew out and then stopped. The being watched him as he looked at them, clearly waiting for him to take them. He looked back at his daughter to be sure she was safe, finding her where he had left her, playfully tugging on a sleeve of her mother’s top. He startled when Em’s hand touched his shoulder, then looked back at her, searching her eyes for some indication of reason. There was understanding there, but also the humor of a mother watching her child begin to understand the world.
“Go ahead, take them and then bring them here.”
He did as she asked, at first with cautious fingers lightly plucking and gathering them in the crook of his other arm and then quicker as he realized the tree wasn’t going to do anything in response. In fact it seemed to hum, almost purring as he did it, clearly pleased. He brought them to his wife, and she gathered them from his arms, placing all but one of them to the side. This one she held between them with a soft smile.
“Eat this with me.”
“Uh…I don’t…” God, what in the hell did I do to find myself here. He was reticent; of course, it was all so absolutely out of his experience, beyond anything he would have imagined happening.
“It’s ok,” she said it with that same smile on her face, taking his hands in hers and putting the pod there, spring green and coiled tight like an ear of corn in its husk. She brought their hands to her face and bit off a chunk of it, chewing it up and swallowing before she lifted it to his mouth.
He pulled back a bit, looking at it and not really seeing anything terrible unusual about it except for where it had come from, his eyes on the wounds the tree had made in her flesh, noting that they were closing before his eyes. “See? Eat it, trust me.”
He looked into her eyes, eyes which had always been green, but which had never been this green, and he searched for a reason to take either of the two path presented to him. It was not lost on him that the tree stood behind him, its gaze burning into his back as he sat with his wife on his knees, nor was it any less clear that his daughter’s life was equally at risk if it chose to attack. I could try and run, grab Caroline and get away from here, hoping Em will follow and wouldn’t somehow be too much a part of this to leave it behind if I asked her to. I don’t know if she would, and I can’t see anything too clearly bad in it outside of the fact that it’s so fucking strange, but that’s the thing I most want to do right now, at least instinctually. I certainly can’t run off, grab an axe and kill the fucking thing like some asshole in a movie…but the thing she tells me with her eyes and her newfound strength, not a possessed, manipulated strength but one where she is still my wife, is that she needs me to embrace her as she is, as what she’s become.
Before he can think much more about it, he leans down toward their hands and takes the pod in his mouth, biting into it and breaking off a piece that he chews with surprising relish. When he’s ready, he swallows it and waits with his eyes closed, focusing on his body to see if he feels some change within, something to tell him he’s made the wrong choice. Instead the roaring thrum that had stood incongruous to his own heartbeat, his own
energy, became clear, the two of them lining up inside of him and making a natural line that shot through his core like a lightning bolt, invigorating him.
His natural distrust didn’t leave him, and he did look at their daughter to be sure she was safe, finding her asleep and breathing evenly atop the clothes, but something had shifted, something almost imperceptible had been realigned and made whole. He looked back at Em with a look of confused wonder in his eyes and, seeing this, she reached out to hold his face in both hands, smiled, and then gave him a long and lingering kiss. Something moved between them, some spark that was stronger than just the normal flow of breath and energy tied into such things, and soon he laid her down on the grass to make love.
Some small part of him cried out that this was insane, irrational, even dangerous, but by then she was writhing beneath him, and he was deep inside of her, pushing to meet her with as even a rhythm as he could on his knees. He cried out when the spikes drove themselves into his back, ejaculating involuntarily as he did and then falling back into the vines’ embrace. As the tree fed on him, he felt both pain and a strange sort of exhilaration, the same sort of feeling that he’d always seen attributed to vampires. Soon consciousness faded and he fell away, wondering what would happen to his daughter and his wife if this was death or something else.
Instead of finding death he awoke in his own home, Em humming as she cooked in the kitchen and his daughter laughing as she shook her rattle. He sat up with a start, touching his back to look for wounds where he’d been stabbed and finding nothing. He stood, feeling a little wobbly on his feet, and then carefully made his way to the kitchen doorway just beyond the door to their bedroom, holding his head as he leaned against the frame and looked at his wife.
She turned and smiled at him with her vivid green eyes and put a hand to her belly. He didn’t need to be told what she meant by it. It was all too clear wasn’t it? Soon there would be another baby, this one more precious than the first, more natural.
A longtime fan of horror and fantasy, Ms. Lyons writes character driven novels that, while influenced by her darker interests, can also be heavily laced with fantasy, romance, history and magic. Amanda M. Lyons has lived her whole life in rural Ohio where she lives with her fiance and two children. Wendy Won't Go: Collector's Edition, Eyes Like Blue Fire, Water Like Crimson Sorrow, and Cool Green Waters came out from J. Ellington Ashton Press. She is also the co-author of Feral Hearts with authors Catt Dahman, Mark Woods, Jim Goforth, Edward P. Cardillo, and Michael Fisher and a contributing author to the extreme horror anthologies Rejected for Content: Splattergore, Rejected for Content 2: Aberrant Menagerie, Rejected for Content 3: Violent Vengeance, and Splat as well as many other anthologies through J. Ellington Ashton Press. Other Dangers Part 1: Slipped Through and the collaborative novel Lycanthroship are all also on the horizon.
Website: http://amandamlyons.weebly.com/
FAIR WARNING
DONA FOX
Every time Lyle caught another one, he almost wet his pants. He knew he could have been killed in the process or worse. And he wondered how many more were out there, hiding in this still green setting.
Thousands of acres of dark, wet evergreen forest. Trees to leap through and hide within. Soft ferns and a variety of mushrooms covered the mossy ground. Brooks wove through the mulch. Small to medium game felt safe, at home, unwary. The weather was mild, temperate. The Columbia River to the north and the ocean to the west, each only a small journey away.
Lyle lived in a cabin in the woods, outside of Portland, Oregon. He’d been catching these things for the last month and a half; one a week, pretty regular. He kept them in dog cages. The big open wire ones. He’d gone to McMinnville, Dundee, Sherwood—all the different little towns right outside of Portland to buy the cages so as not to arouse suspicion since he didn’t own a dog. Not since Buck got torn up by that bear. Now Lyle wondered if it had really been a bear that tore Buck apart.
Without a dog, Lyle had to hone his own senses. And they were warning him. He heard tiny branches crack behind him, too many leaves falling from the trees above, and the prickle on the back of his neck. Oh yeah, he was being watched. He was being followed. There were more of them out there. More of them in the trees. And they were watching Lyle. Watching him all the time. Waiting for their main chance.
Lyle chuckled. They weren’t gonna get it. He was hip to them. He patted his gun on the right and his knife on the left. He was ready. Come get me. He squinted his eyes and gritted his teeth. Come and get me you suckers.
They looked so human it didn’t feel quite right. But they smelled funny—like the ocean, the bad part that you try to ignore. That you always forget—until the next time.
And they were dangerous. Damn dangerous. Even the pretty ones. Hell, even the males were pretty. But they could make the ugliest faces and the most awful sounds.
Thank God, they got quiet when he turned out the lights.
***
“Damn, Martin, I’m sorry, guess there ain’t no game on tonight,” Lyle laughed as he turned off the television.
Martin laughed too and shook his head, “It’s okay, haven’t seen you in a while, how you been doing?”
“Hell, sit down. I made the ribs, and you brought the beer—let’s catch up.” Lyle flopped down on the old brown leather couch and grabbed a rib from the pile.
“What’s that?” Martin set down his beer as noises rose from below.
“Some critter must be caught in the basement again, it’ll find its way out, best leave it alone to work things out for itself, unless you wanna get hurt,” Lyle threw his bone into the bucket.
“Sounds like a baby crying.” Martin wrinkled up his face as he took a meaty rib.
“Yeah, it sure enough does. I’ll just turn on the radio.” As Lyle wiped off his hands then reached over the back of the couch a howling rose from below.
“What kind of critter is that? Sounds like a wolf. You got a window out in your basement, Lyle?”
“Damn, Martin. I wanted to take some time and explain it all in steps to you first. I called you because you know about science—and you teach Sunday school, you know—that religious stuff. Maybe you can explain what’s going on,” Lyle sighed, “come on, then.” Lyle took a final swig of his beer, got up and opened the basement door, “you think you’re ready?”
Following Lyle’s lead, Martin finished off his beer, set the bottle down hard and went down the basement stairs behind his friend.
As Lyle stepped aside, Martin could see that the basement was filled with cages, and in half of the cages, young and beautiful naked creatures, maybe humans, were either dead or sleeping the sleep of the dead.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you some kind of nut case serial kidnapper? Lyle, I’ll help you out of this, man, I’ll do whatever I can. Are they dead?”
“No, they’re drugged. Except it looks like this little howler is waking up.” Lyle kicked a nearby cage and the creature in it spat.
“Gee, man.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I think I do.”
Martin started back up the steps. Lyle blocked his way.
“They’re vamps man.”
“Yeah, they’re hot. Well, the women, anyway. You know, I’m not…”
“No. They’re vampires.”
“Right. I’m going now, Lyle.”
“Okay. Martin. I’ll finish waking this one up for you. Wait for it. Give me that much. Just watch this, Buddy.”
Lyle came up behind the creature in the cage and jabbed it quickly with a hypodermic needle, “That should do it.” He jumped back and laid the empty needle on the workbench.
“What’s that funny stuff on its back?” Martin squinted into the cage.
“Wings.” Lyle’s response sounded like a challenge.
“Wings?”
“Yeah, what do you think about that–wings.”
“Vampires don’t have wings.”
“See, that’s the kind of kno
wledge I called you here for. So if vampires don’t have wings, what the hell are these guys?”
“What are you thinking? That you’ve trapped angels—or…or maybe fairies?”
“Maybe.” Lyle chuckled. “And I’m thinking it means something is really bad about all this, everything, I mean the whole fuckin’ world,” Lyle waved his arm in a wide circle.
The thing woke and slowly covered its nubile body with an under layer of transparent gauze that slid out from beneath the heavier, feathered wings. Terrified blue eyes scanned them, then, as it hissed, two brilliant white and shapely teeth became apparent, embedded in the upper jaw and laying gently over the full red lower lip.
Martin stepped toward the cage. Lyle grabbed him.
They struggled.
“No, Martin, stop. She almost had you.”
“My god. What was that! I had no control. I would have gladly crawled into the cage with her if you hadn’t fought me.”
“I know, Martin. I’ve barely stopped myself a dozen times. I know, my friend. Are they angels? Are they vampires? Can they be both? Are the angels in the Bible actually vampires?” Lyle’s eyes blazed. “Can you tell me, Martin? You teach Sunday school. I’m thinking, the angels aren’t human. And they’re beautiful, like these things. Angels have wings. Some of them are bad. You know, God thinks different than we do. Are the Biblical angels vampires, Martin? Are these things angels?” Lyle leaned toward the cage. “Should I run a test? Should I yield to her? What would happen? Maybe I’d go straight to God?”
“You’re not serious, Lyle?”
“No, no. Of course not. But I want to go to her. I want to climb into the cage with her. Sink my mouth into hers. Look in your Bible. I’m been studying up in the Bible about angels—but I’m not smart like you. Now I’m gonna study about vampires. You do that too, for me, please. I think they may be the same thing. I think men have been missing the point all along.”
Within Stranger Aeons Page 22
