by Paul Kane
Fun, he reminded himself. Think of this as a game, nothing more.
And there it was—the seam. He probed its edges, its surface, the contours of the face in which it was hidden; clockwise, counterclockwise, side to side, up and down, and then—
—click!
The sound was so quiet, so soft, so subtle, that none of them should have been able to hear it, but hear it they did, and for a moment all stared in wonder as a section of the box slid out, revealing an interior that was so shiny Lewis could actually see part of his face reflected.
“Is that some kind of a music box?” asked Penny.
It took a moment, but then Lewis heard it, as well; a soft, tinkling melody like a bird’s song at morning.
Lewis lost all track of time after that; for him, the world was the box, its faces, his eight fingers and two thumbs, and the fervent hope that he was still the best puzzle-solver anybody had ever seen.
His fingers danced over the surface of the box, finding more seams that opened to reveal hidden indentations that in turn offered up more clicks. Lewis hunched over the box, possessed by it, enamored of it, his concentration total, his control the strongest it had ever been when confronted with a riddle, brainteaser, or puzzle. As with the toy cube in a life that seemed so long ago and no longer part of him, he eventually fell into a rhythm, found his heart beating in time with his breathing while his fingers pressed down in countertime, on the upbeat. He didn’t know how or why but his whole body—his entire being, within and without—seemed now to be part of an orchestra, every digit a note, every movement a new instrument joining in the music, every breath a change of key, every click! the sound of the conductor’s baton tapping against the podium as the next section of the symphony began. Part of him knew the music was coming from the ever-opening box, but he would not allow himself to think about that because to do so would invite wonder, and wonder would invite hesitation, and under no circumstances could he hesitate now. The box was offering its secrets up to him, almost as if it were telling him where next to press, to tap, to push, caress, and pull.
It’s letting me open it, he thought to himself. It wants me to succeed.
His fingers danced a glissando over the six sides once more, and when the final clicks revealed the mirrorlike interior of the last six sections, the box came alive in his hands, rose from his palms as if it were a bubble, a leaf in the wind.
And it began to spin. There was no way to tell if it was spinning slow or fast because the interior sections caught the light from the single bulb overhead and turned it into a prism, the colors shooting out and slicing over the surface of the basement walls, the music from within nearly deafening as now the sound of a great pealing bell overpowered all others. Lewis could feel his heart slamming against his rib cage in time with the bell. He looked over and saw that Penny now sat close to Carl, the two of them holding each other, staring at the miraculous thing happening in front of their eyes.
The whirling colors slowed as the dancing box began to spin downward, and with each turn the light in the basement flickered in, then out, until, at the last, everything was cast into a darkness so complete that for an instant Lewis thought he might have just died and discovered that there truly was no God, after all. Not even a hint of a God. Only nothing . . . except, however, suffering and loneliness.
A moment later the single bulb came back on, only now it seemed to glow much brighter than before. Looking around, it seemed to Lewis that the structure of the basement had changed; there were corners where none had been before, and areas once easily seen were now in cavernous shadows. The place even smelled different; the overlaying stink that had been their constant companion was gone, replaced by something damp and heavy with rot. Were things like this supposed to happen when you released a genie?
He began to say something to Carl and Penny but the first word came out as a broken whisper and fell to the ground, writhing there for a moment before it crumbled to dust.
Lewis was aware of every aspect of his physical self in so complete a way that he would not have been surprised to hear his very cells talking to one another. Even the house seemed to be breathing. Lewis froze in place, his eyes wide, and that’s when the genie that had been hiding in one of the newly shadowed corners began moving into the light.
It is magic! Lewis sang within himself, barely able to contain his joy. The box was magic and there was a genie and he knew exactly, precisely what his first wish was going to be . . . but then he pulled in a deep breath and nearly gagged on the damp, heavy stink of putrefaction that assaulted him.
“Who summons us?” said the genie.
Lewis’s mouth hung open, lips and tongue dumb meat, made mute by a single word: us. Who summons us ?
Sounds of movement from other corners, deeper shadows, crept and slithered forward. Lewis looked around once, quickly, and then closed his eyes as he tried to rid his mind of what he’d glimpsed; unable to do that, he willed these sights to break apart, to fragment, to become the disconnected pieces of a picture puzzle that by themselves were still horrible, but so much easier to confront than the whole. This was an old trick he’d taught himself long ago, when the searing ugliness of things he’d seen, things he’d been forced to do, to watch, to imagine, threatened to consume him: take the memory, the image, the lingering sensation and all thoughts connected with it, snap them apart, and scatter them to the wind.
And so he scattered:
impressions of things turned inside out;
flayed skin that billowed out like a dress caught in an updraft;
fresh, sick-making scars that covered entire bodies;
eyes burned closed;
noses split down the center and peeled backward;
hooks and nails and staples mangling genitals;
shiny black liquid dribbling from torn lips;
bowels on the outside, stretched into tubes that fed a creature’
s own filth back into its mouth . . .
. . . break and scatter . . . break and scatter . . .
. . . there.
Facing the first genie—which surely wasn’t a genie at all—he steeled himself and opened his eyes.
“I asked a question,” said the creature. “Who summons the Order of the Gash?”
“I did,” Lewis managed to get out, finally. He shot a quick glance toward Carl and Penny; the two were now wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, faces buried in each other’s shoulders as they shuddered and whimpered.
Good, he thought. Stay that way. Don’t move, don’t speak, and keep your eyes closed.
The creature moved farther into the light. “And what do you want of us, worm?”
“Tasty worm . . . “said another creature somewhere behind Lewis, its voice a mockery, clogged with something thick roiling from a throat equal parts metal and muscle.
The creature that had spoken first stopped moving, looked at Lewis, and then turned its jaundiced eyes toward Carl and Penny.
“Ah,” it said. And smiled. Its mouth was filled with too many small yellow, jagged teeth, all of them shaped like tiny backward hooks. “Sweet, tender flesh.”
“Sweet meat . . .”
“Such a treat . . .”
“Juicy to eat . . .”
Hook-Mouth held up one of its hands, silencing the others. “You summoned us. What do you want?”
Lewis looked once more at Penny and Carl. This had been a terrible, horrible mistake, he knew that now, but maybe he could still save them.
“I called you,” he said to Hook-Mouth. “They had nothing to do with this.”
“Answer me. What do you want of us?”
“Help us get out of here.”
Hook-Mouth burst out laughing. “Help you? You have no idea what you’ve done.” It began moving closer and closer to Lewis as it spoke. “We help no one but the Order of the Gash. We are not in the business of saving bodies or souls. We are more interested in feeding on them. Slowly, with a dark delight you cannot even begin to imagine.�
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“Then take me. Help them get out of here safe, and take me.”
“You still don’t understand. There is no bargaining here, no deals to be made, no compromises to be reached. All of you are coming with us. And knowing as I do how much grief you will feel over the fates of your friends—because their fates will be your fault—that only makes consuming you more enchanting, and the taste of your suffering even more delectable.”
It was so close now that Lewis could feel its diseased breath on his face.
“Ah,” said Hook-Mouth. “Behold, my brethren—the tears of defeat.”
“Defeat . . .”
“Sweet . . .”
“Juicy meat . . .”
Hook-Mouth lifted a hand, reaching for Lewis’s throat. “You and your friends are going to know such glorious agony. The things we have in store for you are such excruciating pleasures that a useless pile of walking offal like you can never begin to—” As soon as Hook-Mouth’s hand gripped Lewis’s neck, the creature froze.
Lewis felt as if the live end of a power cable had just been jammed into the top of his skull. Everything went white and became anguish—but why should this be any different than the life he and the others had been forced to live for a seeming eternity?
Hook-Mouth pushed Lewis away, slamming him back into the wall. His breath and strength hammered from his body, Lewis sank to the floor. Carl and Penny gripped each other even more tightly as their shuddering and whimpering intensified.
Hook-Mouth seemed to have lost its balance. It stepped back, its legs—or, rather, the things that had once been legs—shaking. When it pulled in its next breath, it was a ragged, thick, wet sound. It looked past Lewis to its companions in the shadows and began shouting in a language Lewis had never heard before, but he didn’t need to understand it to know the intention behind the words; the inflections were more than enough.
Hook-Mouth was angry, yes, but more than that, it was shaken and confused. After screaming for a few seconds more, it closed its mouth and eyes, regaining its composure.
Lewis struggled back to his feet, making a terrible decision. “Do whatever you need to do. Just . . . do it fast.”
Hook-Mouth, still a bit dazed-looking, shook its head. “We’ve always known humans like you existed, but I never imagined that we’d . . .” It closed its eyes again, for just a moment, and slowly shook its head.
“No,” it said, nailing Lewis to the wall with its sickening yellow gaze. “Here you were, and here you’ll stay.” It moved quickly, placing its hands on Carl’s and Penny’s heads. The pair shrieked and Hook-Mouth laughed—but this time it was not a laugh of mockery, no; this was the sound of a terminal cancer patient chuckling at a tumor joke.
“We will go now,” it said, and began turning to walk away.
“You can’t just leave us here!” screamed Lewis, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
Hook-Mouth whirled back to face him. “Oh, yes we can, and that is precisely what we are going to do.”
“Why?”
“Because there is nothing we can do to you that hasn’t already been done, or that you haven’t already imagined! You have nothing to offer us. You have wasted our time.”
“But—”
“Enough!” Hook-Mouth stared at Lewis for a moment. “I do have to thank you, though. For a moment there, as I shared your pain and your thoughts and memories, I nearly . . . envied your remaining here. That will disturb me for a long time to come. It may even pain me. Oh, how I hope it does just that.”
“Then if you really want to thank me, get us out of here!” Lewis was only vaguely aware of hearing the back door open upstairs, followed by the sounds of the Cold Ones stomping back inside.
“If you want to thank me, then get us—”
Hook-Mouth only grinned and shook its head once again. “You have nothing to offer us, nothing we want, nothing with which to bargain.”
From upstairs there came a loud crash, followed by more stomping, and then a male voice screaming, “If you hadn’t gunned the goddamn engine, she wouldn’t’ve run away from me like that! I almost had her, you stupid fuckin’ cow! She was a pretty little thing, too!”
Hook-Mouth, seemingly intrigued, looked up at the ceiling, listening, following the stomping and sounds of fists hitting flesh with his eyes.
“The box!” shouted the woman. “Where’s the fuckin’ box?” Lewis bent down and picked up the black box, staring at HookMouth.
Upstairs, the Cold Ones continued to snarl accusations and strike each other.
Lewis held up the box and began to push the pieces back into place. “Well, if we don’t have anything you want . . .”
“You don’t,” said Hook-Mouth, gazing at the ceiling.
And then, looking at Lewis, grinning broadly: “However . . .”
’Tis Pity He’s Ashore
Chaz Brenchley
Sailor Martin. You should not be here.”
The voice came from the tangle of shadows in the back of the shop. It was salt-abraded, familiar, unchanging. Live long enough, go far enough, you will find those things that never change: the places, the people, the truths.
Not many of them, and not all are welcoming or welcome, but still: they stand like islands in the sea, islands in the storm.
Johnnie was, is, always will be, one of those. Johnnie calls himself a chandler, and that’s as dishonest as he’s ever been. Johnnie sells much that came from the sea, but nothing that’s useful to a sailor, nothing that any boat should ever want or need.
Johnnie and I, we’ve got history. He likes to say I’m his best customer. Sometimes I think I’m his only customer. The shop is a collection, more a museum than a place of exchange. The only trade is inward. Johnnie loves to buy, if a thing is rare or dark or strange enough; he hates to sell. Except perhaps to me.
“You should be afloat,” he said. “Stood well off, in deep water. Bad weather coming.”
I knew it, I could feel it: a tension all through the city from harbor to high-rise, a breathless unease, a readiness. Not only for the typhoon in the offing, though that was the reason I’d put in. Any other trouble I preferred to meet at sea, but delivering a billionaire’s new yacht to KL, I thought I’d best not turn her up storm-toss’d.
“What do you hear, Johnnie?”
“I hear everything. You know this.”
Of course I knew. The true question was What do you believe?—which of course he would never tell me, and I could never believe him if he did.
This was how we dealt with each other, in hints and doubts and rumors; it was how he dealt with everybody. Even his name was not Johnnie. That was a joke, perhaps, or several jokes. Surabaya Johnnie for obvious reasons; Rubber Johnnie because he always bounced back; Johnnie-come-lately because he had been here on this waterfront, in this store, forever. I could attest to that.
For a man his age he was still robust, still unrepentant, and some of his teeth were still his own. The cracked and ancient ivories, those few. The gold ones, mostly not: he mortgaged them at need. A man needs negotiable wealth, and his stock-in-trade won’t serve if he will never agree to sell it. I held lien over one of those teeth myself, from the last time I’d touched port.
“Go back to sea,” he said, “sailor.”
I shook my head. “Not until the storm blows over.” That, or something other.
“Well, then. Come here. I have a thing for you.”
Johnnie’s storefront was neon-lit, as gaudy as any of his neighbors’; his window that season held a shabby stuffed bird of paradise, some unconvincing scrimshaw work at unlikely prices, an uninteresting kedge. This was the stuff he might actually be willing to sell to strangers, except that nothing there would ever entice a stranger through the door.
Farther back, where the goods were more curious and you might actually want to look at them, the light was correspondingly fugitive and unforthcoming: a few dim bulbs half hidden behind stacks of tea chests and sea chests that mig
ht open up to disclose a seventeenth-century mariner’s journal or a shrunken head from Java shore or a knotted mess of hooks and lines that was once a patented system for catching mermaids.
Take them out, carry them forward into a better light, and perhaps you’d see that the mariner’s maps depicted no known coastline; that the shrunken head was actually a monkey’s, dribbling cold sand from an opening seam; that the fishing tackle was no more than a standard Whitby mackerel rig, somehow strayed half a century, half a world, out of its proper time and place.
Where Johnnie sat, there was no light at all, unless he chose. He lurked in the crevices between the heaped and hidden stock like a wary spider watching his things, his occasional customers, me. To us, he was invisible; to him we were brightly lit, exposed. Untrusted, of course. Even me.
Especially me, perhaps. How could he trust the man most likely to leave here with something that used to be his own?
Nevertheless, he called me back into his absolute domain, the little cubby where he kept his utter treasures, utterly in the dark. I had to grope my way past the rough iron touch of ancient spars, the salt-sour harshness of coiled cable, cold, smooth-polished wood that might have been anything. Then he lit a storm lantern, and I laughed at him.
“Hush,” he said, all wrinkles and wind-ruined skin, wizened but not wise, “storm is coming. Ready or not, Sailor Martin.”
There was a kitten asleep on an upturned barrel. He scooped it up with stubby misshapen fingers, sailor’s hands; slipped it into a silken pocket in his sleeve. If it woke, it didn’t stir or peep.
The lantern hung from a hook above, showing walls of furniture all around us, secret ways of access that might shift like channels in sand between one tide and the next.
