by Nick Mamatas
As a member of the Ratbastards writing and publishing group, he co-edited the first three critically-acclaimed Rabid Transit chapbooks. In 2004, he received the Spectrum Award for Best Short Fiction for his short story “Lark Till Dawn Princess,” and his first novel, The Patron Saint of Plagues was published in 2006 by Bantam Spectra.
Barth has read Tarot for twenty-seven years, bakes a bad-ass kashka bread, and, currently, he’s proudly honing his fatherhood skills. He lives with his wife Lisa and son Isaiah in Minneapolis.
SOMETHING IN THE MERMAID WAY
Carrie Laben
As fall crept on and the storms got worse, the supply of monkeys ran low.
At first, we actually prospered, because we were able to use the monkeys that the other shops could not. The best monkeys for making into mermaids, by most standards, were the suckling young—their skins were pliant and they were of a size that matched well with many common fish. But my mother, in her youth, had developed a process that let her shrink the larger monkey skins—even the full-grown monkeys who often died in defense of their young and whose rough pelts the hunters would part with for small coins—down to an appropriate size, without drying them out too much to work with.
Thus we had survived ten years ago when the monkeys had been exterminated from Isla Scimmia, turning the name into a cruel joke that outlanders used to taunt the inhabitants for our dark coloring and the heavy hair on our arms. More than half of the families who made mermaids then had since left the island altogether, some for Rome, some for the New World or parts still more exotic. One notable family, a husband and wife and five daughters ranging from a twenty-five-year-old spinster to a toddling child, had all drunk arsenic.
Mother was disgusted. She’d held the family in high regard before; along with her own, they’d been among the few original mermaid-making families to survive when the mermaids themselves went away, to weather the early storm of competition from Fiji, to cope with the way the fish seemed to shrink every year and the fickleness of the sailors who were always looking for some new novelty. The eldest daughter had been her particular friend.
But these days, according to Mother, everyone was a degenerate. She announced it loudly as she ducked into the workshop, shaking the rain out of her loose dark hair. “Degenerates! Think they can sell me stinking half-rotten monkeys for twice, three times the usual price. They’d try to sell a shell to an oyster and ask for pearls in payment.”
She held two packages—by the smell of them I could tell that she’d managed to find a few acceptable monkeys. She almost always did, even when Annagrazia and I came home empty-handed. I took one of the packets, wrapped in coarse oiled cloth, and untied the ends to reveal one of the small grey North African monkeys.
“You got the good kind,” Annagrazia said, unwrapping the other bundle and laying it on the table beside her knives.
“Too big,” Mother said, and fished out a packet of glass eyes from the pocket of her cloak. “It will take days to shrink them properly.” The shrinking process was Mother’s pride and our salvation, and she hated it—it was long, tedious, it produced smells that gave her headaches. To hear her talk she’d as soon never do it again. But she laughed at the women who came to try to buy the secret from her.
Annagrazia picked up her knife and tried the blade carefully against the inside of a coarse-haired leg. The lower half of the monkey would be discarded, of course, but there was no need to cut it to ribbons—the fur could still be used to line boots or collars. “I like these grey ones though. They look the most like real mermaids.”
“Like those white-eyed idiots at the docks would know a real mermaid from a hole in the fence.”
“I don’t care if they know. I know.” She slid the knife along the inside of the leg, skirted the groin, and split the belly. I thought for a moment that she had cut too deep and the rotting intestines would spill, but the knife glided along and left the muscles in place. “Which reminds me. Did you get brown eyes?”
“Blue eyes. The sailors like blue.”
“There never was a mermaid with blue eyes,” Annagrazia said, as she had so many times before.
“There never was a mermaid that was actually half monkey and half salmon either.”
When Annagrazia finished skinning the monkey, I took the body away to clean and bone and see if any meat could be salvaged.
Just before the storms finally broke, I noticed that Annagrazia was looking pale and sick. The quality of her work was falling off a bit too—not enough that I could see it, but enough that she cursed and wept at her tools before Mother patted her hand and told her it was good enough, it would still sell.
Annagrazia threw her needle across the workshop and ran to the kitchen.
Three days later, Mother sent me to the apothecary for pennyroyal.
“You’ve left it too late,” she was scolding when I got back.
“I haven’t. I had an idea. I can make a mermaid that looks real, Mama, when you see . . . ”
“And your plan required fucking some sailor boy from the docks?”
“A man from one of the island families would have been better, but it makes no nevermind. Our blood is thick. Anyway, my stupid sailor boy was able to give me some brown glass eyes.”
“You and those eyes!” I thought for a moment that Mother might slap her. But Mother never slapped Annagrazia. She shook her head and snatched the pennyroyal from me and went for the kettle.
The baby slipped out in a mess of bloody unnamable fluid, and never drew a breath before it was out of the world. Tradition called those babies the happy ones.
“Let me hold it,” Annagrazia said, and I placed it in her arms. “There, look. The hair is so fine on the arms, and the eyes are brown.”
Mother smiled. “You’re right. Our blood is strong. No sailor boy in that.”
Annagrazia reached for the knife she’d kept by the bedside in readiness.
When the mermaid was finished, it was indeed perfect.
“The spitting image of my grandmother,” Mother said triumphantly. “This is the finest mermaid that has ever come out of any shop on this island since our ancestors died out. The price we can put on this—we could fool a ship’s doctor with it.”
“We can’t sell it,” Annagrazia said. “It’s too perfect. This is the best thing I will ever do. I will keep it.”
Then Mother did raise her hand to slap her, but Annagrazia was holding her skinning knife and they stood staring at each other for a long time.
“I will keep this one,” Annagrazia said with a smile, “but I can make more.”
Carrie Laben lives in Brooklyn with four cats, three rats, and one human. She currently writes software user manuals and other still more dire things for a living, but this is a big improvement over milking cows and selling used books to agitated mental patients. This is her first outing as a professional fiction author, but she has had several essays published in various books and periodicals that you haven’t read if you haven’t been to Ithaca, NY. In her spare time, she enjoys collecting books, looking at birds, and finding new and different things to eat.
THE THIRD BEAR
Jeff VanderMeer
It made its home in the deep forest near the village of Grommin, and all anyone ever saw of it, before the end, would be hard eyes and the dark barrel of its muzzle. The smell of piss and blood and shit and bubbles of saliva and half-eaten food. The villagers called it the Third Bear because they had killed two bears already that year. But, near the end, no one really thought of it as a bear, even though the name had stuck, changed by repetition and fear and slurring through blood-filled mouths to Theeber. Sometimes it even sounded like “seether” or “seabird.”
The Third Bear came to the forest in mid-summer, and soon most anyone who used the forest trail, day or night, disappeared, carried off to the creature’s lair. By the time even large convoys had traveled through, they would discover two or three of their number missing. A straggling horseman, his mount cantering alo
ng, just bloodstains and bits of skin sticking to the saddle. A cobbler gone but for a shredded, bloodied hat. A few of the richest villagers hired mercenaries as guards, but when even the strongest men died, silent and alone, the convoys dried up.
The village elder, a man named Horley, held a meeting to decide what to do. It was the end of summer by then. The meeting house had a chill to it, a stench of thick earth with a trace of blood and sweat curling through it. All five hundred villagers came to the meeting, from the few remaining merchants to the poorest beggar. Grommin had always been hard scrabble and tough winters, but it was also two hundred years old. It had survived the wars of barons and of kings, been razed twice, only to return.
“I can’t bring my goods to market,” one farmer said, rising in shadow from beneath the thatch. “I can’t be sure I want to send my daughter to the pen to milk the goats.”
Horley laughed, said, “It’s worse than that. We can’t bring in food from the other side. Not for sure. Not without losing men.”
Horley had a sudden vision from months ahead, of winter, of ice gravelly with frozen blood. It made him shudder.
“What about those of us who live outside the village?” another farmer asked. “We need the pasture for grazing, but we have no protection.”
Horley understood the problem; he had been one of those farmers, once. The village had a wall of thick logs surrounding it, to a height of ten feet. No real defense against an army, but more than enough to keep the wolves out. Beyond that perimeter lived the farmers and the hunters and the outcasts who could not work among others.
“You may have to pretend it is a time of war and live in the village and go out with a guard,” Horley said. “We have plenty of able-bodied men, still.”
“Is it the witch woman doing this?” Clem the blacksmith asked.
“No,” Horley said. “I don’t think it’s the witch woman.”
What Clem and some of the others thought of as a “witch woman,” Horley thought of as a crazy person who knew some herbal remedies and lived in the woods because the villagers had driven her there, blaming her for an outbreak of sickness the year before.
“Why did it come?” a woman asked. “Why us?”
No one could answer, least of all Horley. As Horley stared at all of those hopeful, scared, troubled faces, he realized that not all of them yet knew they were stuck in a nightmare.
Clem was the village’s strongest man, and after the meeting he volunteered to fight the beast. He had arms like most people’s thighs. His skin was tough from years of being exposed to flame. With his full black beard he almost looked like a bear himself.
“I’ll go, and I’ll go willingly,” he told Horley. “I’ve not met the beast I couldn’t best. I’ll squeeze the ‘a’ out of him.” And he laughed, for he had a passable sense of humor, although most chose to ignore it.
Horley looked into Clem’s eyes and could not see even a speck of fear there. This worried Horley.
“Be careful, Clem,” Horley said. And, in a whisper, as he hugged the man: “Instruct your son in anything he might need to know, before you leave. Make sure your wife has what she needs, too.”
Fitted in chain mail, leathers, and a metal helmet, carrying an old sword some knight had once left in Grommin by mistake, Clem set forth in search of the Third Bear. The entire village came out to see him go. Clem was laughing and raising his sword and this lifted the spirits of those who saw him. Soon, everyone was celebrating as if the Third Bear had already been killed or defeated.
“Fools,” Horley’s wife Rebecca said as they watched the celebration with their two young sons.
Rebecca was younger than Horley by ten years and had come from a village far beyond the forest. Horley’s first wife had died from a sickness that left red marks all over her body.
“Perhaps, but it’s the happiest anyone’s been for a month,” Horley said. “Let them have these moments.”
“All I can think of is that he’s taking one of our best horses out into danger,” Rebecca said.
“Would you rather he took a nag?” Horley said, but absent-mindedly. His thoughts were elsewhere.
The vision of winter would not leave him. Each time, it came back to Horley with greater strength, until he had trouble seeing the summer all around him.
Clem left the path almost immediately, wandered through the underbrush to the heart of the forest, where the trees grew so black and thick that the only glimmer of light came from the reflection of water on leaves. The smell in that place carried a hint of offal.
Clem had spent so much time beating things into shape that he had not developed a sense of fear, for he had never been beaten. But the smell in his nostrils did make him uneasy.
He wandered for some time in the deep growth, where the soft loam of moss muffled the sound of his passage. It became difficult to judge direction and distance. The unease became a knot in his chest as he clutched his sword ever tighter. He had killed many bears in his time, this was true, but he had never had to hunt a man-eater.
Eventually, in his circling, meandering trek, Clem came upon a hill with a cave inside. From within the cave, a green flame flickered. It beckoned like a lithe but crooked finger.
A lesser man might have turned back, but not Clem. He didn’t have the sense to turn back.
Inside the cave, he found the Third Bear. Behind the Third Bear, arranged around the walls of the cave, it had displayed the heads of its victims. The heads had been painstakingly painted and mounted on stands. They were all in various stages of rot.
Many bodies lay stacked neatly in the back of the cave. All of them had been defiled in some way. Some of them had been mutilated. The wavery green light came from a candle the Third Bear had placed behind the bodies, to display its handiwork. The smell of blood was so thick that Clem had to put a hand over his mouth.
As Clem took it all in, the methodical nature of it, the fact that the Third Bear had not eaten any of its victims, he found something inside of him tearing and then breaking.
“I . . . ” he said, and looked into the terrible eyes of the Third Bear. “I . . . .”
Almost sadly, with a kind of ritual grace, the Third Bear pried Clem’s sword from his fist, placed the weapon on a ledge, and then came back to stare at Clem once more.
Clem stood there, frozen, as the Third Bear disemboweled him.
The next day, Clem was found at the edge of the village, blood soaked and shit-spattered, legs gnawed away, but alive enough for awhile to, in shuddering lurches, tell those who found him what he had seen, just not coherent enough to tell them where.
Later, Horley would wish that he hadn’t told them anything.
There was nothing left but fear in Clem’s eyes by the time Horley questioned him. Horley didn’t remember any of Clem’s answers, had to be retold them later. He was trying to reconcile himself to looking down to stare into Clem’s eyes.
“I’m cold, Horley,” Clem said. “I can’t feel anything. Is winter coming?”
“Should we bring his wife and son?” the farmer who had found Clem asked Horley at one point.
Horley just stared at him, aghast.
They buried Clem in the old graveyard, but the next week the Third Bear dug him up and stole his head. Apparently, the Third Bear had no use for heroes, except, possibly, as a pattern of heads.
Horley tried to keep the grave robbery and what Clem had said a secret, but it leaked out anyway. By the time most villagers of Grommin learned about it, the details had become more monstrous than anything in real life. Some said Clem had been kept alive for a week in the bear’s lair, while it ate away at him. Others said Clem had had his spine ripped out of his body while he was still breathing. A few even said Clem had been buried alive by mistake and the Third Bear had heard him writhing in the dirt and come for him.
But one thing Horley knew that trumped every tall tale spreading through Grommin: the Third Bear hadn’t had to keep Clem alive. Theeber hadn’t had to place Clem, still bre
athing, at the edge of the village.
So Seether wasn’t just a bear.
In the next week, four more people were killed, one on the outskirts of the village. Several villagers had risked leaving, and some of them had even made it through. But fear kept most of them in Grommin, locked into a kind of desperate fatalism or optimism that made their eyes hollow as they stared into some unknowable distance. Horley did his best to keep morale up, but even he experienced a sense of sinking.
“Is there more I can do?” he asked his wife in bed at night.
“Nothing,” she said. “You are doing everything you can do.”
“Should we just leave?”
“Where would we go? What would we do?”
Few who left ever returned with stories of success, it was true. There was war and plague and a thousand more dangers out there beyond the forest. They’d as likely become slaves or servants or simply die, one by one, out in the wider world.
Eventually, though, Horley sent a messenger to that wider world, to a far-distant baron to whom they paid fealty and a yearly amount of goods.
The messenger never came back. Nor did the baron send any men. Horley spent many nights awake, wondering if the messenger had gotten through and the baron just didn’t care, or if Seether had killed the messenger.
“Maybe winter will bring good news,” Rebecca said.
Over time, Grommin sent four or five of its strongest and most clever men and women to fight the Third Bear. Horley objected to this waste, but the villagers insisted that something must be done before winter, and those who went were unable to grasp the terrible velocity of the situation. For Horley, it seemed merely a form of taking one’s own life, but his objections were overruled by the majority.
They never learned what happened to these people, but Horley saw them in his nightmares.
