Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  Mom and Wilson exchange a look.

  Only now do you see the tarantula in the crook of his neck, almost lost in his hair.

  “Wilson…”

  “I want to go, Mom.”

  “Bally, you’ll get cold.”

  “No I won’t.”

  She should say, No, you can’t, and a part of you implores her to do so. But she gives up to Wilson with a nod, sagging back in her seat.

  Wilson rises, and this time you don’t step back. You make him go around you and you hear the surprised little sound he makes between his teeth. But maybe that’s for the ghosts now gathered in the shadows. Does he see the pig, who can hide most of its body beneath the table but not its glowing eyes? Or the tarantula on the counter? It’s in plain view, and you think you see Wilson shivering as he walks to the back, to where the first door leads into the bathroom and the second into a narrow closet. He opens this and rummages around, and if he sees Ragnar pressed into the back he says nothing.

  “Best seat in the house,” he says, coming back with a folding chair. “Out and up, Champ.”

  You pop open the door, and the ocean is there in full, wide and dark except for a band of silver which are the clouds on the horizon. As you climb down, the grass waves and engulfs your shoes and bell-bottoms, and you hear the faint sound of music behind you. Wilson clambers down, having to move sideways to bring the chair with him. You lead him to the back of the Winnebago, and the ladder, and it’s the ladder on the Doctor’s tower, lonely in the breeze against the ocean, with the top as tall as the tower when you crane your neck.

  A shearwater wheels against the dim clouds, catching the faint pulsing light of the drive-in screen.

  “You ready, champ?”

  But you’ve already gripped the edges of the ladder before he says it; it’s your idea to climb, your idea the whole way, now; the demented cries of the shearwaters rasping at the air, urging you to climb up.

  You find the bumper with your shoe, then the first rung.

  When you’re up, the breeze runs through your curls. You squint at the flat stage before you, the top of the tower elongated to lead your eyes to the very edge, where the faint flickering light is paired with music, distant, like something heard underwater.

  “Here you go!”

  Wilson’s now no taller than you, offering up the chair, which the wind threatens to take. For an instant he stands there with his mouth open. You know he’s feeling how tall you are; startled as you’d been startled at the spiral staircase at home, when it seemed he was going to climb up. He’s feeling his place in the rushing grass and even seems to cringe as another shearwater darts past, making its nervous sound. “Can you grab it?!”

  You lean down, strong as Ragnar. The chair is effortless to lift, awkward only because it threatens to flip and tear away from your hand, but you wrangle it onto the roof.

  Below, you hear Wilson say something about stomping if you need anything.

  You stand up, taller than you’ve ever been, tall as the Doctor’s tower over the ocean. Your bell-bottoms riffle like sails. Slowly, you walk, your Keds set firm on the deck, two paces, three, your eyes on the far end and that flickering light, and the small glowing screen now revealed. It’s no larger than your television at home, but it glows, and the toy cars are set before it like you’ve just lined them up to play, and at this instant the screen fills with the wide bright sea and a lone raft that you know is the sailor’s, bound for Moreau’s island.

  Beneath you comes the bang of the door; Wilson, inside once more.

  You walk to a handsbreadth of the end and unfold the chair, fighting with it against the breeze and watching, dizzily, as another shearwater makes a W in the sky, out and out over the screen, where the raft is now lost in the immensity of the sea.

  You set down the chair and, feeling both chill and hot, you sit.

  You try to ignore the islands.

  * * *

  “I rather prefer the older version. Island of Lost Souls.” The Doctor stands beside your chair, tall as a tower. His white coat rustles in the breeze. “Laughton makes you believe the madness. His ‘Doctor’ slyly harbors both grandiosity and pity.”

  You look to the screen, where Logan, running through the island forest, falls into a pit, watched over by a mysterious man on a barrier wall—Moreau.

  When you look back, the Doctor is removing an elegant cigarette case from his coat, along with a silver lighter.

  “That bygone year I came to the coast, the town was not far removed from its frontier days. Camp Capitola, named for the heroine of a popular novel.” He pauses to remove a cigarette from the case and return the case to his pocket. “It was a sullen place, those years. I found a haven in which to conduct my experiments, and a willing populace among the sea birds.” He draws on the cigarette, now lit, and, exhaling, ponders the ember at its tip. “When the times changed, and the spirit of the town changed, I found another willing populace. I offer no apology, just as I offered none then, the night they found me in the salon among my treasures. And hanged me from the stairwell.”

  You look past him to the islands.

  “It’s not often that Ragnar and I agree.” His voice becomes gentle. “But in this case, Ballou, he is right. The label didn’t read Doc Genius, alas. Domoic acid genus, however, comes from the hand of a doctor, and its composition is due to genius, that’s certain. A neurotoxin from the algae bloom, tweaked by me from the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia lupus,” His smile is gentle, too. “We must change Wilson into a beast who walks on all fours.”

  A shearwater circles, its chittering thrum more like an insect’s than a bird’s.

  The Doctor’s cold hand rests on your shoulder. “You won’t be going back to the House of 31 Sparrow Lane, Ballou. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Beneath your feet, you feel a thud. A roar, as of the ghost-pig writhing in its chains.

  It’s Wilson.

  * * *

  When you stand up, the Doctor’s hand dissolves into a rush of wings: a third shearwater, and a fourth.

  Below, on the luminous screen, inhuman faces peer out of jungle fronds, against which the shearwaters sketch their shadows by the dozens. To your right, one of the islands is closer than ever before, called forth by the shrieking birds.

  You stumble, chased along the deck. On all sides is the sea, until you collapse at the edge and look over.

  Something rustles the tall grass. The ghost pig disappears in the rush of shearwaters, and Wilson crawls after. Its tracks become his own. On hands and knees, he shakes all over like some four-legged animal, arms buckling, and collapses on his side.

  * * *

  The grass shivers across the beast man but it’s just a mound of pelt and clothes and it doesn’t budge.

  * * *

  Your comic book lies on the carpet, along with the Centurions and Wilson’s coffee cup, over a dark stain.

  Until it walks into the mouth of the cup, the tarantula is almost too dark to notice.

  Mom lies sprawled in the console chair, her sleeve tugged up above her elbow, her arm dangling like she’s waiting for someone to lift her hand and kiss it. Approaching, you almost step on the syringe.

  “Mom?”

  You can’t find her face for her hair. The smell of her perfume is wrong.

  You squint against the silver light, where shadows flitting past are the shearwaters and the air is silent.

  Everything is wrong.

  Spittle clings to her parted lips. When you move the hair with a shaking hand, you pull back, gasping.

  The bird fixes you with a single, gummy eye.

  Wings fluttering in an attempt to fly free.

  * * *

  And if you’re a boy with a wide imagination who hikes the beach at Capitola for miles on winter days, hikes until the promontory marking home is a speck you can hide behind your outstretched hand, then you’ll find the beach at Pelican Bay too narrow, too constricted by headlands and the high tide, and wild with birds, faci
ng the dark ocean and the towers.

  You sense the pig at your side, the fire of its eyes swinging left and right and left, lighting the sand and the wings of silent shearwaters and gulls—ghosts of birds darting past and around, and past once more.

  Ho, Ballou. Ho, Ballou. The tide is black and mounted with white froth, out to the islands that crowd offshore. Your shoes strike the water. Waves rush cold up your calves, seek to pull you in.

  Ho, Ballou. Ho, Ballou.

  The Doctor is out there. Ragnar, too. They’re together. They’ll always be together because they always come back. The thought is strangely hopeful. I can swim there, you think, while the tide froths cold and hard, sweeping past, seeking to start you on your way. I can reach it.

  Time is tide and the beating of …

  You taste iron.

  … of a heart, Ballou. And if you were to wade into that tide and swim away, swim in any direction …

  Hot warmth courses down your nostril.

  You fall to your knees, the water breaking across your lap.

  I can swim there.

  Water slack and silver with a diffuse light. The green-and-silver surface becoming clear, like a mirror, dotted now with one, with two, red blooms. Red blooms like those the Doctor had lifted from the jar with his deathly-white hand.

  Joined by a third, as the blood strikes the water before being swept away.

  * * *

  He sits in the sand for many hours before they find him.

  To Gene Wolfe

  About the Author

  David Herter lives in Seattle, Washington. You can sign up for email update here.

  Copyright © 2015 by David Herter

  Art copyright © 2015 by Wesley Allsbrook

  Bodies are only beautiful when they aren’t yours. It’s why Nev had fallen in love with bodies in the first place. When you spent time with the dead you could be anyone you wanted to be. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t want to have long conversations about it. They were vehicles. Transport. Tools. They were yours in a way that no living thing ever could be.

  Nev stood at the end of the lower city’s smallest pier with Tera, his body manager, while she snuffled and snorted with some airborne contagion meant to make her smarter. She was learning to talk to the dead, she said, and you only picked up a skill like that if you went to some viral wizard who soaked your head in sputum and said a prayer to the great glowing wheel of God’s eye that rode the eastern horizon. Even now, the boiling mass of stars that made up the God’s eye nebula was so bright Nev could see it in broad daylight. It was getting closer, the priests all said. Going to gobble them up like some cancer.

  Why Tera needed to talk to the dead when Nev did just fine with them as they were was a mystery. But it was her own body, her slice of the final take to spend, and he wasn’t going to argue about what she did with it.

  “You buying these bodies or not?” said the old woman in the pirogue. She’d hooked the little boat to the snarling amber head of a long-mummified sea serpent fixed to the pier. In Nev’s fascination with the dead body, he’d forgotten about the live one trying to sell it to him.

  “Too rotten,” Tera said.

  “Not if we prepare it by day’s end,” Nev said. “Just the big one, though. The kid, I can’t do anything with.”

  He pulled out a hexagonal coin stamped with the head of some long-dead upstart; a senator, maybe, or a juris priest. The old folks in charge called themselves all sorts of things over the years, but their money spent the same. He wondered for a minute if the bodies were related; kid and her secondary father, or kid and prime uncle. They were both beginning to turn, now, the bodies slightly bloated, overfull, but he could see the humanity, still; paintings in need of restoration.

  “Some body merc you are!” the old woman said. “Underpaying for prime flesh. This is good flesh, here.” She rubbed her hands suggestively over the body’s nearly hairless pate.

  Nev jabbed a finger at the empty pier behind him; she arrived with her bodies too late—the fish mongers had long since run out of stock, and the early risers had gone home. “Isn’t exactly a crowd, is there?” He pushed his coat out of the way, revealing the curved hilt of his scimitar.

  She snarled at him. It was such a funny expression, Nev almost laughed. He flipped her the coin and told Tera to bring up the cart. Tera grumbled and snuffled about it, but within a few minutes the body was loaded. Tera took hold of the lead on their trumpeting miniature elephant, Falid, and they followed the slippery boardwalk of the humid lower city into the tiers of the workhouses and machinery shops of the first circle. While they walked, Falid gripped Nev’s hand with his trunk. Nev rubbed Falid’s head with his other hand. Falid had been with him longer than Tera; he’d found the little elephant partly skinned and left to rot in an irrigation ditch ten years before. He’d nursed him back to health on cabbage and mango slices, back when he could afford mangos.

  Tera roped Falid to his metal stake in the cramped courtyard of the workshop. Nev fed Falid a wormy apple from the bin—the best they had right now—and helped Tera haul the body inside. They rolled it onto the great stone slab at the center of the lower level.

  Nev shrugged off his light coat, set aside his scimitar, and tied on an apron. He needed to inspect and preserve the body before they stored it in the ice cellar. Behind him rose the instruments of his trade: jars of preserved organs, coagulated blood, and personal preservation and hydrating concoctions he’d learned to make from the Body Mercenary Guild before they’d chucked him out for not paying dues. Since the end of the war, business for body mercs had been bad, and the guild shed specialist mercenaries like him by the thousands. On a lucky day, he was hired on as a cheap party trick, or by a grieving spouse who wanted one last moment with a deceased lover. That skirted a little too closely to deceptive sexual congress for his moral compass. Killing people while wearing someone else’s skin was one thing: fucking while you pretended to be someone they knew was another.

  Tera helped him strip the sodden coat and trousers from the body. What came out of the water around the pier was never savory, but this body seemed especially torn up. It was why he didn’t note the lack of external genitals, at first. Cocks got cut off or eaten up all the time, on floaters like this one. But the look on Tera’s face made him reconsider.

  “Funny,” Tera said, sucking her teeth. She had a giant skewer in one hand, ready to stab the corpse to start pumping in the fluids that reduced the bloat. She pulled up the tattered tunic—also cut in a men’s style, like the trousers—and clucked over what appeared to be a bound chest.

  “Woman going about as a man?” Nev said. Dressing up as a man was an odd thing for a woman to do in this city, when men couldn’t even own property. Tera owned Nev’s workshop, when people asked. Nev had actually bought it under an old name some years before; he told the city people it was his sister’s name, but of course it was his real one, from many bodies back. He and Tera had been going about their business here for nearly five years, since the end of the war, when body mercenaries weren’t as in demand and old grunts like Tera got kicked out into a depressed civilian world that wanted no reminder of war. When he met her, she’d been working at a government school as a janitor. Not that Nat’s decision regarding the body he wore was any saner.

  “You think she’s from the third sex quarter?” Nev said, “or is it a straight disguise?”

  “Maybe she floated down from there,” Tera said, but her brow was still furrowed. “Priests go about in funny clothes sometimes,” she said. “Religious thing.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking how much you hate going about in women’s bodies,” Tera said.

  “I like women well enough,” Nev said, “I just don’t have the spirit of one.”

  “And a pity that is.”

  “She cost money. I might need her. What I prefer and what I need aren’t always the same thing. Let’s clean her up and put her in the cellar with the others.”r />
  A body mercenary without a good stash of bodies was a dead body mercenary. He knew it as well as anyone. He’d found himself bleeding out alone in a field without a crop of bodies to jump to before, and he didn’t want to do it again. Every body merc’s worst nightmare: death with no possibility of rebirth.

  Tera cut off the breast binding. When she yanked off the bandages, Nev saw a great red tattoo at the center of the woman’s chest. It was a stylized version of the God’s eye nebula, one he saw on the foreheads of priests gathering up flocks in the street for prayer, pushing and shoving and shouting for worshippers among the four hundred other religious temples, cults, and sects who had people out doing the same.

  Tera gave a little hiss when she saw the tattoo, and made a warding gesture over her left breast. “Mother’s tits.”

  “What?”

  “Wrap her up and—”

  The door rattled.

  Nev reached for his scimitar. He slipped on the wet floor and caught himself on the slab just as the door burst open.

  A woman dressed in violet and black lunged forward. She wielded a shimmering straight sword with crimson tassels, like something a general on the field would carry.

  “Grab the body,” the woman said. Her eyes were hard and black. There were two armed women behind her, and a spotty boy about twelve with a crossbow.

  Nev held up his hands. Sometimes his tongue was faster than his reflexes, and with the face he had on this particular form, it had been known to work wonders. “I’m happy to sell it to you. Paid a warthing for it, though. I’d appreciate—”

  “Kill these other two,” she said.

  “Now, that’s not—” Nev began, but the women were advancing. He really did hate it when he couldn’t talk his way out. Killing was work, and he didn’t like doing work he wasn’t paid for.

  He backed up against the far wall with Tera as the gang came at them. Tera, too, was unarmed. She shifted into a brawler’s stance. He was all right at unarmed combat, but surviving it required a fairer fight than this one. Four trained fighters with weapons against two without only ended in the unarmed’s favor in carnival theater and quarter-warthing stories.