by Bryan Hall
It was Kim.
Men in the crowd gazed hungrily at the stump of the neck, and Brennan felt himself wanting to join the queue that had lined up for a turn at the gaping raw meat of her neck.
He sat up. The taste of bile filled his throat, and he thought for a moment that he would be sick, but the sensations faded. He was hot, his skin reddish and covered with a sheen of sweat.
He stumbled into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. He took a drink and quickly spit out the oily chunks into the sink. He checked the date on the container but saw the milk should have been fine. With a sigh, he put coffee on instead, knowing that sleep wouldn’t be returning to him soon anyway.
He could feel the box there, sitting on a chair. He had to admit the strangeness of it all attracted him. He wanted to know, to understand.
After pouring himself a cup of coffee, he removed the lid and began to read.
The first several newspaper clippings had something to do with a scientist in Chicago. Brennan noted there was a pencil scribble just under the byline. Don’s handwriting again. Something from the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word ...”
Brennan read the articles, but the whole story wasn’t there. He knew the scientist was doing some kind of work with sound. Sound as it related to what? To medicine? The rest of the story didn’t make sense until he realized that Don had put the articles in chronological order with photocopies of scientific reports and an obituary feature. The scientist, it seemed, had saved a young woman, an Eve Christie, from what should have been a mortal wound (a car accident according to one report, though other reports listed a fatal stabbing and a self-inflicted gunshot wound) with some sort of mysterious acoustical technique. The article wasn’t clear on this point. Brennan continued reading and found that the story quickly turned rather bizarre.
The girl, it seems, woke up one morning, bought a shotgun, and gunned down her boyfriend for reasons unknown. She then drove to the nearby university, found the scientist who had—by all accounts, however conflicting—saved her life, and blew his head off. Then, in a bit of the text highlighted, presumably, by Praggart, the girl died. While that newspaper didn’t mention how, another report included in the box did: her body was found by grad students just after she had shot the scientist. Her body, by the students’ accounts, disintegrated.
Brennan frowned and got another coffee.
The next piece of information in the box was a photocopy of the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, listing—Brennan would find—every sound the human vocal apparatus is capable of making, regardless of language. The chart represented these sounds with strange-looking symbols, and documented how each sound was made via anatomical “articulators” like the lips, teeth, palate, etc.
Brennan briefly glanced at the chart, didn’t understand either how to read it or its possible significance, and tossed it aside. He picked up instead the crumpled black-and-white photograph. It was a simple photo of a whitewashed house, with laundry-laden clotheslines and a child playing in the front yard. Brennan stared at the photo, unable to articulate exactly why the picture disconcerted him so ... until he saw a shady silhouette cast through a bed sheet on the line. The figure was clearly humanoid, but there was something wrong with it. Its proportions, the angle of its limbs ... something Brennan couldn’t pin down.
The textbook followed, and Brennan was puzzled by it as he flipped through the heavily highlighted and underlined passages. A cross-section diagram labeling each of the articulators for speech had been drawn over in pencil. Various fanciful swirls, dot patterns, and whorls adorned the figure, with no explanatory notes.
Brennan sighed and got up from the table to get another cup of coffee. The first faint rays of sun were peeking through his kitchen window, and he glanced out to sneak a glimpse of the sunrise. What he saw was a bald, albinotic figure, dressed in some sort of skin-tight black leather, staring at him from the yard. White towels and linens waved from crisscrossing clotheslines around the figure, but Brennan kept his eyes on the figure. It nodded to him, a sort of beckoning gesture, and Brennan squeezed his eyes shut, expecting the figure to have vanished when he reopened them. The figure remained, however.
Brennan crossed to the back door and hesitated before opening it. It was madness to go out there, of course, but wasn’t it all madness? More than anything, he wanted to see, wanted to know. He had to know.
He approached the figure in a kind of waking dream. With each step, the figure’s pale features came more into focus and, while the creature’s visage was not familiar, marred as it was with all manner of hurts, Brennan realized that he knew the thing.
“What ... happened ... to you?” he said to it.
“I ascended.” The creature said with a choir of voices.
“How? What is all this?” Brennan said.
The creature’s face contorted, layers of flesh and sinew unfolding and creasing into something that Brennan realized with revulsion was a smile.
“Let me show you.” It sang.
The layers of independently moving tissue around its mouth flagellated, and a symphony of hisses, clicks, and keening wails emitted from it. Brennan was entranced by the raw, bloodless wound in the creature’s face. The musculature beneath the flawless, pale skin, the pinprick holes riddling its teeth, the gill-like folds along its jawline. The wounds were clearly more than just decorative markings, unlike those piercings and brandings made by primitives the world over.
Brennan had been so enthralled by the being’s appearance that he had not noticed that they had traveled somehow. He was surrounded, now, by black glass. Volcanic rock, perhaps. And tiny puffs of a greenish steam coiled up from cracks in the floor here and there in an endless dance. Brennan looked to the creature and said, “Where are we? What’s happening?”
In an instant, they were surrounded by chittering creatures, the misshapen homunculi of a particularly cruel god. Ashen faces glared up at Brennan with yellowed or cataract-glazed eyes. Broken and rotten teeth gnashed at him from behind scarred and burnt lips. Alien tongues spitting alien curses.
For a man who had made a living by frightening others, Brennan O’Rourke knew then that he had never known true horror. This, the cacophony of madness that surrounded him, the sea of unwashed and unholy flesh, this was horror. He felt it in the meat of his body, smelt its reek in his nostrils, burning his lungs ...
But the creature that had brought him here, the pale phantom with the eyes of a former friend, that thing seemed right at home. It reached out an alabaster hand and caressed the withered little mutants that had swarmed them.
“What is this?” Brennan said again.
“Proof.” The creature sang. “Of something more. Something greater.”
Brennan wanted to scream. There was nothing great about this place. He felt a dull hum that thrummed from the rocks and liquefied his bowels; he wanted more than anything to run from the place or, barring that, to bash his head against the black glassy stone until his spilt brains ceased to register the abomination of the place.
“You know how I have searched. Let me tell you what I have found, old friend: In every corner, only darkness. In the far reaches, only a gibbering nothingness. In the human heart, only cruelty. There is only one god in this plane, Brennan. Me.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“I want you to join me. I want us to re-create the world.”
Brennan looked at Donald Praggart’s mutilated, ethereal face and said, “How?”
“In the beginning was the Word.”
The independently moving pieces of the thing’s face began twitching and flailing, producing an eerie howl that rippled through the spaces around them and ripped them from the hellish scene.
Brennan hovered in a vast emptiness, illuminated only by the odd luminescence of his companion, a cold, dim glow that pooled out of Praggart’s alien skin like sickness.
“The boy, the scientist, pointed the way.”
“The scientist from the newspaper?
Did he really heal that girl?”
“Oh, yes. But his magic died with him.”
Brennan recalled the strange, highlighted end of the story—the incredible melting girl.
“He knew the key was sound. The sound of creation, of God. He attained some small success, but he was unwilling to take the next step.”
“Which is?”
“The human throat is incapable of speaking in God’s voice.”
Brennan stared at Praggart’s horrific face and the meaning of his words began to sink in. He remembered the chart detailing the sounds each bit of the mouth and throat were capable of producing.
“You ... you changed the articulators,” Brennan muttered.
Donald closed his eyes and smiled beatifically. Brennan took note of the tiny holes, drilled with care into gums and teeth. Apertures that must act like the holes in a flute. He noted the gills along Donald’s jaws, the layers of movable tissue around his mouth; slits in musculature that opened and closed like multiple sets of vocal cords.
“Jesus ...”
“No, not Jesus.” Praggart said with a grin.
“And you did this yourself.”
Praggart still smiled, clearly proud of his achievement.
Brennan thought about it and, hesitantly, said, “Show me.”
They were back in the house, in his kitchen. Praggart sang a discordant mix of notes and the linguistics book rose into the air, opened, came apart, and reassembled. Brennan stared at it, at the charts carefully marked with Praggart’s insane anatomical modifications.
“Can you help me?” Brennan said quietly.
Praggart smiled again and turned to select a suitable tool from the knife drawer.
And Brennan O’Rourke took the black lacquered box and slammed it into the back of Praggart’s head with a satisfying crunch. The pale being fell and rolled, turning to cast its pale eyes on its attacker. Brennan lifted the box again and, as Praggart inhaled to call forth whatever unholy revenge, he drove the wood down into the hellish hole in his former friend’s face, splintering honeycomb teeth, tearing sculpted muscle, and splitting jaw from skull.
The thing’s eyes, wide with shock, begged for mercy, for answers.
Brennan cut them out with a paring knife before the thing finally ceased.
His heart pounded in his chest. His breathing was labored and too fast.
He sat at the kitchen table and caught his breath.
And with the sun on the horizon, he assembled his tools.
The razor in his hand caught the first rays of light, casting rainbows down on the dead god on his floor.
Brennan O’Rourke adjusted his mirror, placed the tip of the blade just so, and smiled. He glanced down at the body on the floor and began to cut. As the blood burbled into his mouth, he said, “If you see the Buddha on the road, Don? You kill the Buddha.”
PRIMAL TONGUE
BY MICHAEL BAILEY
“Virkeligheden er jo ligesom i eventyrene,” said the woman in the terminal.
The woman smiled and moved her attention to the cooing child in the stroller. She put her hand on the leg of the man sitting next to her, a husband or boyfriend.
Danish. But Gil Sloat couldn’t understand a word of it. Were they talking about him?
The man took his turn. “Jeg håber, du har det dejligt og nyder livet.”
Then he chuckled.
“På godt og ondt,” she said, taking his hand.
We’re in America, people. Speak English.
“NOW BOARDING FLIGHT 0196 TO BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON.” A static-filled female voice, from the only airline representative working gate J87. Strange that airports still used overhead paging to announce flights. Internet and cellular technologies managed ticketing and seating assignments and boarding passes and other travel arrangements, yet a person—an attractive woman in an ugly blue uniform—was still responsible for controlling the chaos of boarding an airplane. Common courtesy and common sense were rarities.
“FREQUENT FLIER PLATINUM MEMBERS MAY BOARD AT THIS TIME.”
Most airlines had eliminated first class, but half a dozen membership programs allowed certain passengers to board before the masses, followed by active duty military, those with disabilities, and families with young children. These minorities then had to luggage-slalom through the impatient herd of coach passengers as they line-hopped to the front.
“THOSE WITH SMARTPHONES, TABLETS, AND OTHER HANDHELD DEVICES MAY BOARD AT THIS TIME.”
Gil imagined those words over the loudspeaker, followed by the amoeba-like flow of techno-lemmings piling through the gate, smartphones and tablets and other handheld devices aloft to protect them. Shoulders smashing shoulders. Men and women and children trampled by passengers eager to secure their overabundance of carry-on luggage. He imagined standing in back, or seated, like the Danish family, watching the chaos unfold instead of taking part, later to be penalized as his single, sized-approved carry-on is checked due to a lack of space in the overhead compartments. He could relate to those people. The patient ones, those he’d like to understand. The Danish woman shared his view; he could see it in her eyes.
The rapid boom in technology was partly to blame for the world’s ruin. Devices invented to simplify life more often simplified the living. Let a person become dependent on portable technology and then watch him get struck by a vehicle while crossing the street. It happened all the time. The chinonchest syndrome: when a person is so involved in their handheld device/gadget/toy, they forget to look up now and again. Zombies, all of them. Keystroke conversations, not spoken word.
And there Gil sat, hearing the words of people he wanted to understand, but he couldn’t understand them. The baby’s coos were easier to translate than the Danish. The child wanted attention. Maybe it was foreign cooing.
Is there such a thing? Is all language the same until it’s learned? Is there, perhaps, a common language shared by all; something primal, unnecessary to learn, before we fuck it all up and disorientate the world by segregating ourselves with language?
“På godt og ondt,” Gil said, copying what the woman had said.
She looked up from the child.
He hadn’t meant to say the unfamiliar phrase, but the terminal was so dead with people not talking that the words came out of his mouth, as if wanting to be heard.
“Taler du dansk?”
A question. Somehow he knew she asked if he understood Danish; that much he could gather by facial movements and her curiosity.
Her husband nodded. “God eftermiddag!”
“Sorry,” Gil said, embarrassed. “I don’t speak Danish.”
The woman’s eyebrows furrowed. She spoke slowly: “But you know what was I said, in dansk. ‘For better or worse,’ you said.”
Why do so few Americans learn other languages?
Her English wasn’t perfect, but she had translated his words and could speak the language far better than his butchery of dansk, of which he understood zilch.
Gil apologized again. “I repeated the words because I enjoyed the sound. I only know English. What was that first thing you said? Virkeli-something ...”
“Virkeligheden er jo ligesom i eventyrene.” The words rolled easily off her tongue, with elegance and grace.
“Sounds beautiful. What does it mean?”
“Haha. It means—” Her eyes searched the ceiling, “I guess you could say: what is real is like the fairy tales.”
“If only that were—”
“PASSENGERS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS AND THOSE WITH CHILDREN CAN NOW BOARD.”
The crowd of passengers without special needs, and the childless, sandwiched closer to the front.
Gil had special needs. He needed to understand.
Maybe people don’t want to understand.
The Danish couple rose, searching for a path.
The husband shrugged his shoulders. “Eh,” he said. “Plane will not leave without.”
Seeing the couple made him feel alone. If only he and Nell we
re still together, he could stand by her side, hold her hand. Gil wore happiness like a mask and Nell ran off with it. He could no longer hide his depression from the world ...
“MICHAEL RILEY, PLEASE REPORT TO THE PODIUM. MICHAEL RILEY, PLEASE REPORT TO THE PODIUM FOR YOUR STANDBY SEATING ASSIGNMENT.”
“Well,” Gil said. “It looks like this is going to take some—”
“ACTIVE DUTY MILITARY MAY BOARD AT THIS TIME, FOLLOWED BY ...” The gate agent clicked off, covered the handset to help a customer—apparently not Michael Riley, unless he was a heavyset black woman with a cane—before starting again.
“FOLLOWED BY ZONE 1. ZONE 1 MAY BOARD AT THIS TIME.”
So many detailed instructions, yet no one listened.
“This is going to take a while,” Gil said. “I’m going to find some coffee and learn another language.”
“Ét sprog er aldrig nok,” the woman said.
Language translation apps were inexpensive, if you already owned a mobile device, but they rarely made the bestseller list. Those spots were apparently reserved for entertainment and educational packages. Those apps should raise the bar; instead, they seemed to make everyone stupider, as Nell used to say.
Gil bought a paltry vanilla latte—the last time he’d ever settle for coffee from one of the Starbucks machines—as he browsed the programs available at the A.I. Unlimited kiosk: an unmanned touch-screen mounted on a wall three gates down from J87. A scanner read payments, and a retractable cable connected to one’s Digital Software Adaptation Interface. D-SAI for short.
At the top of the list was a flashbook of Fahrenheit 451, which was amusing: the Ray Bradbury classic about a world where books were burned out of existence, only to be preserved by those willing to memorize them. The eBook version issued twenty years ago had made Gil laugh—paper pages turned/burned to digital—but that was during the push to eliminate paper. People still read then. Once the eBook craze dwindled—following criminalization of printing on paper—and people could simply upload stories into their minds without needing to read them, the concept of ‘reading’ died. For most people. Gil still ‘read’ and enjoyed it, although the stories he read were digital. He saw it as a vacation from reality; to be lost in the pages of fiction, immersed in characterization and plot. That was a liberating experience.
