Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest

by Frazier, Robert

  Once we lived as civilized residents of a civilized metropolis. Now we retreat, losing ground to the mutations of the wild. As their multifarious forms proliferate, their mythology invades our lives, a compulsion for those who embrace the heresy of a bestial faith, a prison for those of us who resist the onslaught. We survive as a pocket of humanity in a deluge of green terror, cut off from the North, facing a relentless enemy from the South. Already more than a third of the city has been abandoned to the wilds.

  ***

  On a routine sweep of City Center I find her in a decaying subbasement of the old Opera House where the classic tragedies of Verdi and Donizetti had once been performed. The beam of my torch momentarily blinds her dark eyes, unaccustomed to the light. I can see from her stricken glance that she is one the Mutant Rain Forest has made good use of. She has become a tragedy all her own. The stalk binding her bare body to the bare dirt, a curve both graceful and horrific as it clings to the base of her spine, resembles that of a mushroom, thick and spongy, white blotched by patches of gray. And she is now its naked human cap.

  My happenstance comrades, roaming the deserted stage and hallways above, sound the all-clear. And after a moment of indecision I answer in kind, turning my torch away from her eyes, leaving her to the shadows of her damp fungal hermitage and whatever monstrosity she has become. Not a word is exchanged between us.

  Of course I recognize her in those flash seconds, despite the intervening years and how pale she has become. Yet it is only hours later in the dim hall of the barracks, lying sleepless on my cot among the unending noise of sleeping men—snores and sighs and dream whimpers—that I replay the details of our past together.

  A wealthy landowner’s daughter and the son of a servant, we played together as children. The forest was distant then, no more than a threat sometimes used to frighten us into obedience. We played together for hours and days on end, oblivious to our origins. Until time and age made them manifest, forcing the adult world into our existence. Then she left me behind for a life of private tutors and trips abroad, a privileged world I was never allowed to enter.

  Still I watched from afar as the girl I had known began to mature into a woman. And fool that I was, I nurtured an adolescent infatuation that I called love. I embarked upon an awkward courtship, sending her furtive notes to which she never responded. I once stood beneath her lighted window with a cheap guitar and serenaded her with a cheap love song. Only the night answered. And eventually her father’s rage, who insisted that such nonsense must come to an end.

  My thoughts had returned to her more than once over the years. Wistful and unfulfilled. Now I wonder what hazardous course her life had taken that has transformed her to a prisoner and slave of the forest. I know that her father is no longer the wealthy landowner, that the forest has long since claimed his cultivated fields and mansion. Yet how has it seduced her when I had failed? Harboring vague regrets, I drift into a restless sleep.

  ***

  I wake to a scream engendered by someone’s nightmare. I don’t realize I am the culprit, the scream my own, until I hear the exclamations and curses of those around me that I have also awakened. Whatever that dark dream, it instantly flees from my consciousness. Yet my troubled sleep has formed a resolution in my mind.

  I dress hurriedly in the dimness and make my way to our makeshift armory. There I choose a machete whetted razor sharp. When I test its edge a small drop of blood purls upon my finger. With my laser rifle strapped across my shoulder and the machete shoved into my belt, I enter the dark streets.

  It is a cold night and a bone-raking chill fills the air, heightened by a light yet steady wind from the south that carries the fragrances of the Mutant Rain Forest into the city. Some claim that it is only this cold that protects us from the forest’s ruthless onslaught. They say that with the rains of spring and the heat of summer the mutations of the forest, both animal and vegetable, will thrive. They will grow more profligate and insistent, attacking with renewed vigor.

  Others of my kind, those who sleep by day and guard the city by night, now patrol the streets.

  I pass freely among them, nodding or exchanging greetings with those I know. I make my way to City Center and the old Opera House, a hulking shadow against a cloud-clotted sky that absorbs and diffuses the city lights. There are no stars visible.

  As I descend into the depths of the building, my torch guiding me, I begin to shiver. It seems even colder here than in the streets above. I have decided that I will either free her from her enslavement or end her life trying, for surely death is a fate preferable to the one she now endures.

  I find her as I had before, in the same dank subterranean chamber. This time, as my torch exposes her naked body, she gives out a short sharp cry, more avian than human. Yet her eyes do not blink from the light. Instead, they meet mine in a grave and curious stare. I wonder if she knows who I am, if she recognizes me from our shared past. In my fatigues, with my untrimmed beard and shaggy hair, I appear a far different man than the youth she once knew. Just as she must be a far different woman, if woman you could still call her. I wonder how much of her mind and thoughts remain or if her human awareness has been completely stripped away by the forest.

  I approach her and raise the machete. Yet as my arm descends to sever the stalk that binds her body to the dirt, she reaches out swiftly to grasp and hold my wrist with a strength I did not expect from her slender form. The blade falls from my hand.

  She rises up, her arms encircling my neck, and pulls me down toward her. She begins soundlessly showering my face and neck with kisses. And fool that I once was, fool that I remain, I fall to my knees beside her, dropping the torch and returning her embrace. It rolls away, throwing its beam against a rough stone wall, leaving us in relative darkness. Her bare flesh is not cold but warm to the touch, radiating a heat all its own, stripping the chill from my body. Her mouth and tongue are feverish and urgent.

  Lying by her side, I awkwardly remove my clothes with one hand, holding her close to me with the other. Although I do not know if she is human or an extension of the forest, it no longer matters. My reason is lost, my senses trapped by a rising passion that has endured for years without consummation. I begin whispering endearments to her in the dark, speaking her name over and again. She does not answer. No sound escapes her lips except for her heavy breathing and the sighs of passion. Then I enter her and although my body and senses remain engaged in an act both terrifying and sublime, my mind and my vision are all at once traveling elsewhere.

  I take on the form of a great bird of keen eye and iridescent plumage sailing high above the Earth, flying through the stratosphere, far higher than any bird has a right to fly. I see the continent spread beneath me, the mottled blanket of mutant infestation stretching forth from the Amazon Basin to cover near half the land, its tentacles snaking north to the Isthmus and south to Patagonia. I swoop lower and am suddenly plummeting downward through dense green leaves and a riotous florescence of blossoms to the forest floor. I am a horned jaguar standing over sixteen hands high, gliding sinuously through the foliage, my nostrils flared, testing the fragrances of the thick night air in search of prey. I am a millipede python, dropping hundreds of feet through the tortuous branches of a towering mahogany onto the muscular back of that same jaguar, my spurred legs digging through its fur and into its flesh, injecting a soporific venom, my body winding round its torso, crushing the breath from its body. I am a miniature winged albino monkey, no, a whole tribe of winged albino monkeys, a hive mind, flitting and leaping and chattering through the highest branches of that same tree. I am a copse of huge black and gold orchids being devoured to extinction by a herd of ravaging tapirs, their variegated hides shaded by saffron and amber and celadon. It is as if through the union of our bodies the forest and its manifold incarnations are speaking to me, immersing me in their beauty and their horror. I am imbued with the sentience of the forest, not a singular sentience as some believe, but a thousand warring ones that conspir
e to a whole, eliciting an overriding consciousness that wars against the world at large, as if the acts of slaughter and consumption within its borders, the endless round of creation and death and recreation, provide it with further sustenance and growth. And as my final thrusts within her seal our union, I am hurled from the sum of that consciousness into exhaustion and down the black well of a dead sleep.

  ***

  And it is blackness to which I awaken. I have no idea how many minutes or hours have passed. The batteries in the torch have run down while I slept and we lie together in complete darkness. I try to rise only to find her body rising with me, pulling me back to the earth. I feel a sharp pain along my chest and stomach and thighs. I cry out and she cries with me, in that same piercing avian tone I heard before. Reaching between us I feel the ropey fungal tendrils that have spread from her flesh to mine. In rising panic, I grapple for the machete, but wherever it has fallen, it is beyond my reach. And it is probably useless in any case. Even if I could stand the pain of severing those tendrils, I am no doubt already infected as she.

  So I wait in the dark, bound irretrievably to a lover I have desired and sought for so long. Or at least a simulacrum of that lover. Just as I am bound to the mind of the forest. Already I can feel my individual thoughts becoming increasingly cloudy and intoxicated.

  And I know this is how they will find us, with their laser rifles in hand. Unless our forest finds them first.

  DEATH OF A DOME CITY

  Boston

  Safe in the aseptic hold

  of our geodesic dome,

  where the air is circulated

  constantly and passes

  through hundreds of filters

  to assure its purity,

  we remain protected

  from the implacable horror

  of the Mutant Rain Forest.

  Yet across the horizon

  we see the forest advance

  from the south like a dense

  and mottled green army.

  Creatures from that world

  roam beyond it by night.

  The squatters that once

  surrounded our city

  have fled to the north,

  the makeshift dwellings

  and happenstance streets

  of their shantytown

  now deserted of life.

  Sealed in the womb

  of our transparent dome,

  fueled by renewable energy,

  where all matter is recycled,

  where molecular structures

  are formed and reformed

  to satisfy our every need,

  we remain self-sufficient.

  We live a life of relaxation,

  of plenty and pleasure,

  experiencing all manner

  of virtual entertainments

  that our ancestors could

  never have envisioned.

  Yet the forest continues

  to advance without respite.

  We watch the flames

  from our laser cannons

  blacken the encroaching

  walls of noxious vegetation.

  We see a rain of defoliants

  stream from defensive towers,

  endlessly spraying the forest.

  Like some sentient being

  the forest responds with

  massive storms of pollen,

  dead leaves, shreds of bark,

  clogging the mechanisms

  of our devices and burying

  them beneath mounds

  of particulate debris,

  more fertile ground for

  its growth to colonize.

  Trapped in the prison

  of our impregnable dome

  where daylight shrinks

  as huge lianas with

  suckered pods climb

  the transparent walls,

  soon we no longer see

  the sun or the heavens.

  The streetlights burn

  through day and night.

  And a wondrous and

  compelling fragrance

  fills the air we breathe.

  THE MUTANT FORESTS OF MARS

  Frazier

  In the shuttered enclaves of the overrun Americas

  Where green carries a stigma of the purely untouchable

  They whisper of the Frog Spirit’s moonfaced countenance

  Beside the snow-crusted Scandinavian valley roads

  Where only the most agile or artful dare to tread

  Its wolf blood and Fenrir lines that chill the bone

  Across the silvery dusts of the Sea of Tranquility

  Where the horizon is marred by compressor towers

  The lunar faithful give thanks for their sterile isolation

  Every culture every ecosystem every tongue

  Touched by the extensive reach of mutation

  Has a blasphemous name for this agent of change

  But on the terraformed red dirt plains of Mars

  Historical references are lost on the colonists

  They snort and sneer at such literate romanticism

  They consider it more a bioagent of inevitability

  Born from rain forests bred in wild profusion

  It stowed away on every sunship and shuttle

  From behind the pearly sheen of energy shields

  The new Martians call it simply the “god trait”

  Deepest sleeper in our evolving genomics

  West of the Olympus Mons volcanic cone

  Water ices reacted with lava flows to create

  The cobwebbed networks of Amazonis Planitia

  The newly populated flats and crags teem with

  Barely recognizable variants on an Earthly scourge

  Semi-sentient kudzu with meristem brain bulbs

  And the vast reiterations of the gargantua trees

  Cast long shadows over the lairs of red duendes

  Neon toucans ghost lemurs necrophida moths

  Here the resilient inhabitants the Schiaparellites

  Push back these aggressive advances of untrue biota

  And too fight the psychoactive ravages of pavonine

  They consult the first mystics and forest explorers

  They consult the Book of Genna for any slight clue

  To the origins and evolutions of what they become

  With a stoic ear attuned to the great green voice

  They await the corruption’s disarmingly hot embrace

  And their impending ascension toward the unknown

  Toward the unholy annexation of all human forms

  Robert Frazier lives on Nantucket Island, once known as the center of the American whaling industry, with his wife, Karol Lindquist, a nationally recognized basket maker. He works as the curator of exhibitions for the Artists Association of Nantucket, and has oil paintings in galleries in New York State, Cape Cod, and on the island (visit www.oldspoutergallery.com). He has attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, and the Franklinia Workshop. Frazier is the author of nine books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award, as well as an Asimov’s Reader Award for poetry. He was on the 1991 final ballot for a Nebula Award for fiction (collaborating with Lucius Shepard). Over 100 poems have appeared in Asimov’s SF, as well as in The Twilight Zone Magazine, F&SF, Omni, and other anthologies and publications. His books include Perception Barriers, The Daily Chernobyl, and Phantom Navigation. He received the Grandmaster Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2005.

  Bruce Boston lives in Ocala, Florida, once known as the City of Trees, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon, and the ghosts of two cats. He is the author of more than fifty books and chapbooks, including the dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale and the psychedelic coming-of-age noel Stained Glass Rain. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov’s SF Magazine, Analog, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Daily Science Fiction, Year’s Best F
antasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase. One of the leading genre poets for more than thirty years, Boston has won the Bram Stoker Award for Poetry Collection, the Asimov’s Readers Award for Poetry, and the Rhysling Award for Speculative Poetry, each a record number of times. He has also received a Pushcart Prize for Fiction and the first Grandmaster Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Currently, in addition to his writing, he edits speculative poetry for The Pedestal Magazine. www.bruceboston.com.

  Luke Spooner currently lives and works in the South of England. Having graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first-class degree he is now a fulltime illustrator working under two aliases: “Carrion House” for his darker work and “Hoodwink House” for his work aimed at a younger audience. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures.

  THE END?

  Not quite . . .

  Have you read Bruce Boston’s Brief Encounters with My Third Eye—Over one hundred of Boston’s best short poems (under fifty lines) from more than forty years of publishing, including fifteen award-winning poems.

  If you enjoyed this book, we’re certain you’ll also like the following Crystal Lake titles:

  Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories—An anthology of dark fiction that explores the beauty at the very heart of darkness. Featuring horror’s most celebrated voices: Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Tremblay, John F.D. Taff, Lisa Mannetti, Damien Angelica Walters, Josh Malerman, Christopher Coake, Mercedes M. Yardley, Brian Kirk, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Amanda Gowin, Richard Thomas, Maria Alexander, and Kevin Lucia.

  Tribulations by Richard Thomas—In the third short story collection by Richard Thomas, Tribulations, these stories cover a wide range of dark fiction—from fantasy, science fiction and horror, to magical realism, neo-noir, and transgressive fiction. The common thread that weaves these tragic tales together is suffering and sorrow, and the ways we emerge from such heartbreak stronger, more appreciative of what we have left—a spark of hope enough to guide us though the valley of death.