I still don’t know what really happened. My leg is curiously scarred, with a shape like some enormous hand. Every scar is a mass of smaller, circular impressions in the flesh, as though it had been stripped away. On my shoulder, a double crescent of sharp, women’s teethmarks has never healed.
♦
I see it everywhere now, that lost town. The past of those who settled here, and that which they must have brought with them along with smallpox, gunpowder, horses and Christianity. Something worse. From my mother’s house, where she looks after me, I can see the beach. I watch the beach-combers every morning at first light. I hardly sleep. I want to leap out of my chair and warn them, tell them to keep clear of the sea.
I’ve seen the strangely ornate design of the lampposts on the boardwalk. The way the warning signs about the riptides go missing every few weeks. At night I see that phosphorescent glow where the water touches the shore, and imagine I can see red lights hidden its aura.
I walk with my mother, hand in hand. She complains when my grip crushes her arthritic bones as we pass a redhead and I see, in her eyes, the recognition and bold appraisal of the girl who bit me.
But where can I go?
This is home.
OF THE FACELESS CROWD
by Gábor Csigás
It’s six in the morning and I have to get up. I would get up, but the floor will be cold and I don’t know where I left my slippers, so I just decide to stay in bed. After half an hour of rolling around in slow motion, I take another pill, without water because my glass is empty. As I said, I’m not going to get up this morning, not even to refill my glass. The pill does what it always does, what its name promises (I know you know its name.) It makes me slip out of reality. I dream of nothing, the blank, thoughtless grey of the wet sky, staring in on me as I lie there among the sheets. Dreaming of nothing.
It’s only eight, still in the morning, when the rain wakes me up. It’s monotonous, but somehow faster. It patters on the windowpanes, conjuring up images of colourless high-tech weapons in my head. I try to push them down, to banish them. It’s not me any more. They must go. I’ve got nothing to do with them now. I sit up, taking a look at the bent mirror in the corner of my room. My shape seems just a blur. I feel as if I should take a shower, or at least clean my eyes somehow, because clear vision and an odourless body can save your life. I push these thoughts down as well. I’m just the unemployed husband of an employed woman these days. I have no business having such thoughts, absolutely none at all.
After watching TV for an hour, I notice Polly’s slippers under the second-hand table beside the bed. Her feet are quite a few sizes smaller than mine, but I use them anyway, fumbling through our room, through the mess, towards the worn-down kitchen. I barely notice my feet coming to terms with their situation. I reach the coffee pot, and start pouring something black directly into my mouth. Minutes later I’m sick in the toilet, but it certainly wakes me up. While throwing up, I study a half-nude supermodel on the cover of a magazine. Our eldest son (serving his endless days in some distant country now) left it on the cold floor last week, when he visited us for a day. I don’t really feel moved by the brown-eyed girl’s ethereal beauty. I know that’s something I should feel worried about, but right now I feel nothing. Nothing at all.
Cooking takes time – quite a lot of time, as I’m not really used to it. It’s a ritual I have yet to learn, a ritual whose components vary. They’re different every damn day, or at least they should be, but since I’ve been doing it, it’s always pizza and some kind of soup. I’ve got to the point where I can alter the taste of the soup with the things I buy at the local store. I don’t remember their names, only the shape and the colour of their containers, and their places on the shelves. I can find anything and everything, if I’m told what to look for. This too is something I think I really shouldn’t remember, but I don’t push this down. Even Polly is glad that I have this knack for finding things. She never forgets to tell me what to buy. I buy nothing but what she tells me to. Nothing else. Soup is almost ready by the time Millie, our daughter, comes home.
Millie, I’m told – by her former friends – is working for the government of our amazing country. That’s a role I’m familiar with, but I don’t think I’d like to go into details about that. Quite the contrary. I let these thoughts sink, and just look at Millie as she takes off her shoes at the door. She wears high-heeled, transparent sports models, as advertised by some major brand on TV. I don’t know how she can afford them.
Secretly, I hope that she just pulled them off some dead agent of the type she and her ‘sweeper’ team (damn, I’ve had a thought about her job again) have to dispose of from time to time. If she really works for the people she’s said to work for, a pair of used shoes could be granted to her as some kind of extra, a benefit under some superficial terms in her contract. (Oh, doesn’t that sound weird? Sure it does. But that’s life. Weird.) Millie looks good. Actually, she is damn pretty. It must be the pills I’m taking that hold me back from committing something very awful and psychotic on some colourless day like this one. Yes, it must be the pills, and the knowledge that her employers would get angry at me. Even for such thoughts. They know what I’m thinking. They must know. So I just stand there, watching her go up the stairs without even looking at me. She passes under the shadow of a slowly rotating ceiling fan (Where have I seen this image? I should forget this. It’s a bad pattern from a movie.) I try hard to think about nothing. And I manage to do it. I’m empty. I’m nothing. I’m good at being nothing.
I’m trying to eat the pizza and the soup I cooked alone, the grey of the TV blazing out at me from the screen. There’s a live feed on – I mean, a leaked live recording – of some people shooting some other people again, in a distant country (or the next street, who knows these days.) Only maybe it’s not people but things that dress like commandos, things that don’t really want to accept that they’re being shot to death and just keep coming back. The third time they do the trick the channel switches to ads. I have to switch too, because I’m all for action now. (It’s the pill doing this to me, isn’t it? It must be the pill. Yes, we’re supposed to blame the pill. People love and believe that.) If I can’t know what the end of that programme would be, I just have to see the end of another programme, get involved.
A call breaks my focus about five minutes later. It’s Polly, and she’s a bit stressed out. Her voice is a bit sharper than I’m supposed to love. She tells me to turn the fucking TV off else she’ll do it from where she fucking is, with these words. Now, that wouldn’t be good, she’s right. I could hardly be luckier than this. That not-so-secret branch of government has a shitload of employees.
You never know who’s watching over you or how he or she will react (of course within legal boundaries only) to what you’re doing. Legal boundaries mean nothing sometimes though, especially if they’re binding someone like Polly. That’s why I’m so lucky to have gotten just Polly and just this warning, and not someone who’s only like Polly but is not, in fact, Polly. God knows what they could’ve done to me. Well, maybe nothing, but I could’ve been spoiling someone’s big-ass fun and I’m nothing to do that, even if I don’t really get punished this time.
I spend the whole afternoon in bed, and I don’t have any bad feelings about this. I don’t have any feelings about this, or anything at all for that matter. Anything at all. (One more pill? One more pill. Just one more.) I’m watching TV again, only this time I’m watching myself in it. My head disappears in an unblinking three-hour stare. My vision blurs again, the window a dull white patch of weak light on the left. I wonder what it might feel like when it’s not raining, but that never happens here in this corner of my beloved country, does it?
After the fourth hour, my perception begins to clear, but I’m starting to see images that I don’t think are really there at all. I see people whom I know to be long dead, or at least stuffed away in a big tank th
at’s lit from the inside with a sickening bionic green, the light they so often overuse in cheap sci-fi flicks. They are people I used to know, some of them pushed over to the other side by me, myself. They’re turning up on the empty, unpowered screen in front of me. I see them as if they were my reflection, as if it were them sitting on my bed, and not me. But it’s me – that’s what I keep telling myself, carefully unmoved by the ghostly images on the screen. It’s just me, no one else, nothing else. Just memories coming up and trying desperately to reshape the world, to reshape me. They don’t get more than a few seconds, each of them a few seconds. Their show is well over by the time Polly returns home from work.
Something is wrong with the way we’re making love, but neither of us knows what it could be. I’m lying under her, pulsing. I think I’m big because I can feel that I can fill her, and the moment I think that thought I burst out laughing. She stops, even her sweating stops, and she stares at me from above, and I tell her it’s nothing, really nothing, and that she should just keep doing what she’s doing with her muscles down there. And she is crying now, tears of forbidden bitterness running down her cheeks, and she is moving.
I rise up to her face to taste that angry sadness that we all share. And those words I push down, and her ass I push down onto my lap, her skin tightly pressed onto mine. And I’m wondering what we could become if we melded together for real, if we became one. If there was nothing to stop us, nothing at all. But there is something.
Millie’s standing in the open door, watching us. Her eyes are dull and distantly disinterested, and what she’s saying is that we’re doing it wrong, that we’re doing it without any sign of real joy. The moment she says it, we know that she’s right, but we come, together, anyway. We seem to come. Millie goes away and out.
It’s eleven in the evening when suddenly Millie returns home, a gun in her hand. I’m waving at her to stay silent, as Polly is already sleeping. She’s had a very tiresome day. Millie raises the gun to her head, to her temple, standing in the door. She pulls the trigger, and even though it’s just a light firearm, a very light one, her head explodes in a way that scares the shit out of me at that moment. As she’s sliding down the bloodied wall, I’m checking whether Polly woke up, but she hasn’t. I’m happy for that, because this is just enough for me to deal with. I really don’t think there should be more, and if she woke up, there would definitely be more.
I slip out of the bed carefully, stealing up beside Millie’s apparently lifeless body. As I’m taking her up the steps to her room, a trail of blood coiling behind us, I’m thinking about the things I thought about Millie half a day before. What I think about them is that the world always has some surprises for you, but there’s nothing surprising in this, nothing, nothing, damn it, nothing.
♦
At midnight, the fax under the TV babbles out something on a piece of paper (oh, we have Smartphones and tablets and stuff too, but the fax, the fax is more reliable they said, don’t ask why.) I wake Polly, and we read the paper together. She asks me about the blood on the floor that I forgot to clean up, and I tell her what happened. She stays calm, since it’s midnight already, and we’ll have to shift soon. In the next shift it’ll be easier for her, and harder for me, and this much hardship she can bear for a few minutes more. That’s what she’s telling me while we’re walking up the steps to Millie’s room.
Millie is sitting like a dead doll in one of the big armchairs, where I left her. Naturally, she’s not moving at all. How could she? Nothing moves after being shot like that at such a close range. Well. Almost nothing. Only, there are no advertisements to switch to when she opens her slowly regenerating eyes, and looks at us with a smile that has nothing you could call human in it. I consider whether I should scream. Is that in the role? Are we supposed to still be in character, or not? I decide then, finally, after a moment of hesitation.
♦
Sliding into her shape, I reach up and caress her nipples that are my nipples now. I’m getting them perfect, and I love the thought that I’m one of the ones who could have sex with anyone in the world. Well, almost anyone. It’s just the shape of their bodies that we can steal. Or is it? Well... No. We can steal their lives, too, (yes, your lives), given enough time and enough rest to practice. Yes, to practice how to become, how to be nobodies, how to remain nothing in the crowd. A face you meet any day, every day. A grey face, a couple and their daughter whom you’ve always thought to be your slightly demented neighbours, a father, a mother, and their daughter.
We are nothing, if we must be nothing. We take shape in your mind, from your mind, out of your mind. Oh, humanity! We take shape, all kinds of shapes. (We are what they call top secret, remember? Remember, Mr. President? You’d better not. No need to know about bio-engineered doppelgangers built on tech ‘stolen’ from a certain alien race from Yuggoth.)
Even though I was the father yesterday, the fax says now that today it’s me who’s Millie. Yesterday’s Millie is the father today, and Polly has to remain Polly for another day, because of the angry call she gave me. That was a mistake, the mistake of breaking protocol and reminding us of our real identities. The mistake of disrupting the illusion that we, for this brief period of time that we spend here, are nothing. That we are nothing, oh, nothing at all. And I just love being Millie. Even the fact that I’ll have to shoot myself at the end of this new day, even that can do nothing to deter me from loving being Millie.
And with that thought, I kiss my new father and new mother good night, and go to sleep. And in my dreams, for a few hours, I really am nothing but an empty reflection of a distant and uncaring God.
SCRITCH, SCRATCH
by Lynne Hardy
Nestled in its sleepy valley, Muscoby was largely invisible to the rest of the world. It was just a little too far from the nearest station to have become a commuter haven. Likewise, it was that bit too remote in winter for the trip to the nearest town. Somehow the village struggled on, in spite of its obvious disadvantages. As the old ones withered away and died, and their children departed in search of a more comfortable life, outsiders began to take an interest. The quaint little cottages were bought up one by one for ever-expanding property portfolios.
The local council, officially responsible for the village’s wellbeing, had studiously ignored its existence for untold years. That gave them, to all intents and purposes, the dubious status of being Muscoby’s very first absentee landlords. As word spread, they suddenly remembered that the village was there. People with gleaming teeth began to use ominous phrases such as “development plan” and “diversification of revenue streams”. Before long, the road into the valley had been improved. A marketing campaign appeared, making much of the area’s history and natural beauty.
Muscoby’s tiny church was of historical interest, true. Its ancient carvings of mice and rats were far older than the church itself. The valley was beautiful when the sun warmed it, even if that warmth never extended to the woods that ran back into the high hills. A tea shop appeared in what had been the Post Office. Ambitiously, a field at the very edge of the village was converted into a car park, in readiness for the expected influx of tourists. Pleasant walks were planned and leafleted, linked up to the greater hiking routes that criss-crossed the region. The walks all steadfastly avoided the woods, however. Everyone in the nearby town laughed at the villagers’ uneasiness, but there was an undeniable something about the robust trees that discouraged closer inspection. The impressionable suggested that perhaps it was the way they rustled, even when there was no wind.
And then there was the rat catcher.
No one knew how long there had been a rat catcher in Muscoby. Some claimed that there had never not been the small, neat cottage at the uppermost edge of the village. It was close to the woods, and the catch of the day was invariably strung up between the trees beyond like so much bedraggled, furry bunting. The village’s children used to
run as close to the cottage’s door as they dared – back in the days when the village still had a school, and children enough to fill it – chanting their queer little rhyme:
Scritch, scratch, see the rat,
Bright eyes and twitching tail,
Scritch, scratch, chase the rat,
’Cross hill, and stream, and dale.
No adult of the village ever challenged the rat catcher’s presence or importance, no matter how bizarre his behaviour – not even the vicar. One of the past rat catchers, much to everyone’s embarrassment, had briefly entertained a dalliance with taxidermy. Several of his dioramas still existed, safely hidden from sight in the archives of the town’s museum. The public’s taste for costumed rodents engaging in popular social activities had long since waned. There had been some brief talk of mounting a new exhibition as part of the council’s promotional drive. Thankfully, common sense had prevailed.
The current rat catcher was a quiet man. The last of a long, long line, he carried out his duties with little fuss or fanfare. Every morning, Old Gurteen would patrol the fields and byways. He’d check and reset his traps, the corpses of his vanquished foes vanishing swiftly and silently into the sack he always carried with him. Then he’d wander into the woods, singing softly to himself, to hang the vermin from his lines by their tails. There they stayed, until nature took its course.
Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Page 15
