by Neil Clarke
And Julie was there, all of a sudden. She looked at Giles. “They were all exotics,” she said. “Not blah blah.”
Giles smiled and held out his hand. “One thing is for sure. I would never cut my heart out and give it to someone.”
“Good,” Julie said, taking Giles’s hand. “I would never ask anyone to. Have you seen Coleman’s heart in the acrylic? It’s quite gross.”
Giles smiled at Julie. Coleman didn’t like it. Julie smiled at Giles. Coleman didn’t like it one bit. The thought of all those expensive flowers weighed on Colman and sapped all the bravado he had recently acquired through the martinis. He kept thinking that he could have spent that money on a really nice collection of books.
The thing in his chest thumped again, followed by a faint slithering sound.
“Did you hear that?” Coleman said.
“Hear what?” Julie said.
Coleman took a breath. “Nothing,” he said. It was the stress of the day. The thought of all his savings now gone, and everyone staring at him all the time. He rubbed his temples and wondered if there was somewhere he could lie down.
“You don’t look so good,” Giles said.
“I feel great,” Colman said. “Best day of my life.”
Giles shrugged.
“Really. I’m so happy.” He thought maybe it was the alcohol that made his voice waver.
Julie put a hand on Colman’s shoulder. “Of course you are, Colman. Congratulations.”
I give you my life, my love, my heart. That’s what he had been supposed to say.
“There! Did you see that?” Coleman said.
He stood with his shirt unbuttoned, holding open the flaps so Sandra could see.
The skin of his chest bulged out faintly, like a fast-growing blister, and then just as quickly smoothed out again.
“See what? Coleman, you aren’t listening to me.”
“I’m listening to you.” Maybe he was imagining it. Sandra didn’t see it, after all. “You said you can’t stand living in the city.”
“It’s killing me,” she said. “The endless rain. This apartment is so crowded. All those stupid books.”
She lay on the couch with her arm draped over her eyes.
“We can’t afford a house here,” he said. “And what about my bookstore?”
“What bookstore?” she said. “We could afford a house in the suburbs.”
Maybe it was just the idea of something alive in there that gave him chills. The sensation of something crawling around in his chest.
“I’m miserable here,” she said. “Don’t you care about that?”
“Of course I care,” he said.
“Don’t you love me?” she said.
“Of course I love you.”
He loved his little apartment; the proximity to bookstores and cafes, the ceaseless pattern of traffic alternately stopping and then pulsing forward like blood through veins. He loved the sound of the rain. And he would be so far from Julie.
“When do you want to move?” he said.
She finally lifted her arm, smiled. “I’ll call an agent right now.”
The tip of the thing poked out his nose, made a small circular motion, and then began to lengthen, sliding smoothly out, long and thin and dexterous.
Coleman wanted to scream but found he was completely frozen.
“Coleman?” Sandra’s voice came from the kitchen. “Have you seen my keys?”
The thin tentacle patted the dining room table, poked under a pile of newspapers. Coleman breathed shallowly through his mouth. He hoped he would faint. Or wake up. This couldn’t be happening.
The tentacle rooted under the newspapers, came out holding the ring of keys like an elephant trick at a circus. It rattled the keys in front of Coleman’s face. He opened his hand, and the keys dropped into his palm. The tentacle slid smoothly back inside his nose.
Sandra appeared in the doorway.
“There they are!” She scooped the keys from Coleman’s outstretched hand. “Everything is so hard to find. We really need to unpack.”
The garage door slammed. Coleman still stood with his hand outstretched, unable to move.
“It does appear to be moving around.” The doctor withdrew the probe from the small hole he had made in Coleman’s belly-button. The local anesthetic didn’t completely cover the sensation of a cold metal slipping around inside him.
“Is this normal?” Coleman asked.
“Well, I’ve read about cases like this, although I haven’t seen it personally. When you remove your real heart it leaves room for a different kind of creature to grow.”
“A creature?”
“We can schedule you for surgery next week,” he said.
Coleman tried to take deep breaths to calm himself. “Do you have any reading material on this phenomenon?”
“Sure. I’ll send you home with some literature. You can think about how you want to proceed.”
Sandra found him on the doorstep, duffel in hand.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I hate this suburb,” he said. “All the houses look identical. It never rains here.”
“Are you leaving me?”
“I’m going to the hospital. And then I think I might go live in the city for a while.”
“The hospital?”
“I have a thing growing inside me where my heart used to be,” he said. “I’m going to have it surgically removed.”
She gave him a blank look. He handed her the literature.
“This is very strange,” she said finally.
“I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “It says in here the creature can often be very helpful.”
“It’s disgusting,” Coleman said.
“And it says the insurance won’t cover it.”
“Sandra, I need to leave now to make my appointment.”
“Just come inside for a moment and let’s talk about it.”
“What’s to talk about?” he said. His hand on the duffel was sweating. “There’s a fucking creature inside of me!”
“Calm down, Coleman.” She glanced around to make sure no neighbors were out. “Really now.” She leaned in close. “Did you see the cost of the surgery? We can’t afford that.”
“I don’t care what it costs.”
“You’re being selfish. Are you going to take all our savings and spend it on yourself?”
“Well— ”
“You aren’t even thinking about how this might affect me. Remember what we agreed on about making our decisions together?”
He dropped the duffel. Sandra picked it up. “Come inside,” she said. “We’ll work this out.”
The tentacle slid out of Coleman’s ear and opened the door for Sandra.
“See?” she said. “It’s just trying to help.”
The creature was indeed very helpful. Tentacles protruded from Coleman’s nose and mouth and pushed the vacuum cleaner around, did the dishes, found the remote. They picked up his old acrylic heart and put it on the mantel. They protruded out of his pants to unpack boxes, to pick up his piles of dusty old book and drop them in the recycle bin.
One night Sandra asked Coleman to make love to her, and he watched with a mixture of arousal and horror as the tentacle protruded from the tip of his penis and caressed her, brought her to climax. She made noises he hadn’t heard it quite a while. When it was done, he was still aroused, but he didn’t want to touch her. And anyway, she was already asleep.
The next morning he woke up to the smell of coffee and bacon. Sandra hung up the phone when he entered the kitchen, her eyes bright.
“Giles broke up with Julie.” She shrugged. “About time. I never understood what he saw in her anyway.”
She draped an arm over his shoulders, whispered in his ear. “But we’re so happy, aren’t we?”
“Hmmm,” Coleman said. He opened the paper.
A tentacle emerged from his ear and caressed her cheek.
She giggled. He shuddered. Coleman tried not to think about the slithering sensation as he sipped his coffee.
Coleman drank four martinis and then thought about making dinner for Sandra. When the tentacle emerged from his left nostril, weaving back and forth, trying to open the refrigerator door, he grasped it with both hands.
He tugged. It resisted. He pulled and pulled and it stretched out long and thin. It hurt like nothing he had ever felt before as an amorphous sack squeezed out through his nose and plopped onto the kitchen table. It reformed into a translucent blob, pathetic and quivering. Coleman retched. He didn’t feel drunk anymore.
He reached for the phone.
Julie picked up on the third ring.
“It’s me,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’m an empty old man,” he said. “I’m going to die.”
“You’re not old,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“I love you.”
She was silent a moment. “Why don’t you come over?”
He grabbed his acrylic heart from the mantel and hauled his caved-in body to the car. He managed it somehow, using his own hands and feet on the wheel and pedals, surprised that he still knew how, that he had the strength.
He tried to imagine what would Sandra do when she got home and found the creature quivering on the kitchen table. Maybe she would let it go free. Maybe she would lay down her head and mourn its death. He decided he didn’t care.
Julie met him outside her apartment, squinting through the rain at him.
The rain dripped down his nose, under his collar.
“Look at me,” Coleman said. “There’s nothing left but a hollow body. I don’t want to live anymore.”
She put a hand on his arm. “What about your bookstore?” she said.
“It’s an unrealistic dream,” he said.
“Is that what Sandra told you?”
He lowered his head.
“I don’t think it is unrealistic,” she said.
He felt the edges of his inside wound tighten just a little, start to pull together. Maybe it would fill in. Maybe the creature had not taken all of him. He stood up a little straighter.
“You broke up with Giles,” he said.
“He was a jerk.”
“I could have told you that.”
The rain pattered lightly on the leaves of the jasmine bush near the walk.
“I’ve missed the rain,” he said.
“I’ve missed the old Coleman,” she said. “That crazy guy who bought dusty old books and piled them all over his apartment.”
“Did I really do that?” he said.
He felt tears on his cheeks. He thought about saving and saving until he could afford the first few months rent on a store, about finding those books he had treasured so much as a child. Maybe Julie would want to help him with the bookstore. It suddenly didn’t seem so unrealistic anymore.
She took the acrylic heart from under his arm. “I wish you could put it back in,” she said.
He smiled at Julie, at the rain, at the city. “It will grow back,” he said. And he knew it was true.
About the Author
Corie Ralston has been a fan and writer of science fiction since the fifth grade, when she wrote her first story about a giant, time-travelling humanoid potato. She is glad to say that her writing has improved considerably since then, and she is very proud to be a contributor to Clarkesworld. She has been published in several other venues, including a writing contest sponsored by a synchrotron (light-reading.org/LightReading/MainCompetition.html), which might seem a little obscure until you know that she also works at a synchrotron. That particular story starred a giant, space-faring humanoid slug, so maybe she hasn’t changed so much through the years after all. You can find out more about her at sff.net/people/cyralston/.
White Charles
Sarah Monette
The crate arrived at the Parrington on a Wednesday, but it was Friday before anyone mentioned it to me. Anything addressed from Miss Griselda Parrington, the younger of Samuel Mather Parrington’s two daughters, was automatically routed to Dr. Starkweather’s office, regardless of whose name she had written on it. I was, in truth, intensely grateful for this policy, for Miss Parrington most often addressed her parcels to me. She felt that we were “kindred spirits”; she considered me the only employee of the museum with the sensitivity and intelligence to appreciate her finds. Considering that she had inherited all of her father’s magpie-like attraction to the outré and none of his discernment, her opinion was less flattering than one might think. I endured some teasing on the subject, though not nearly as much as I might have; in general, the curators’ attitude was one of “there but for the grace of God.” They were even, I think, rather grateful, if not to me precisely, then at least for my existence.
Miss Parrington’s packages were inevitably accompanied by letters, sometimes quite lengthy, explaining what she persisted in referring to as the provenance, although it was no such thing. “I found this in a lovely antique shop in Belgravia that Mimi showed me,” conveyed no useful information at all, since nine times out of ten she neglected to provide any further clues to Mimi’s identity, and on the tenth time, when we managed to determine that “Mimi” was Sarah Brandon-Forbes, wife of the eminent diplomat, a polite letter would elicit the response that Lady Brandon-Forbes had never been in any antique shop in Belgravia in her life. The bulk of Miss Parrington’s letters described, lavishly, what she believed the provenance to be, flights of fancy more suited to a romantic novelist than to even an amateur historian. But the letters had to be read and answered; Dr. Starkweather had been emphatic on the subject: they were addressed to me, therefore it was my responsibility to answer them.
It was perhaps the part of my job I hated most.
That Friday, when I found the letter in my pigeonhole, I recognized Miss Parrington’s handwriting and flinched from it. My first instinct was to lose the letter by any means necessary, but no matter how tempting, it was not a viable solution. Dr. Starkweather saw through me as if I were a pane of glass; he would not be fooled by such an obvious lie. There was, therefore, neither sense nor benefit in putting off the task, unpleasant though it was. I opened the envelope then and there, and read the letter on the way back to my office.
It was a superbly representative specimen, running to three pages, close-written front and back, and containing absolutely no useful information of any kind. She had been at an estate sale—and of course she neglected to mention whose estate—she had recognized the name Carolus Albinus as someone in whom her father had been interested, and thus she had bid on and purchased a job lot of fire-damaged books, along with a picture she was quite sure would prove when cleaned to be an original Vermeer. She had not so much as opened the crate in which the books were packed, knowing—she said coyly—that I would prefer to make all the discoveries myself. But I would see that she was right about the Vermeer.
I propped my throbbing head on my hand and wrote back, thanking her for thinking of the museum and disclaiming all knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. I posted the letter, dry-swallowed an aspirin, and returned to the round of my usual duties. I gladly forgot about Miss Parrington’s crate.
I should have known better.
On the next Tuesday, I was standing in Dr. Starkweather’s office, helplessly watching him and Mr. Browne tear strips off each other over a casus belli they had both already forgotten, when we were startled by a shriek from the direction of the mail room. Dr. Starkweather raced to investigate, Mr. Browne and myself close behind, and we found Mr. Ferrick, one of the junior-most of the junior curators, sitting on the floor beside an open crate, his spectacles askew and one hand pressed to his chest.
“What on Earth?” said Dr. Starkweather.
Mr. Ferrick yelped and shot to his feet in a welter of apologetic half-sentences.
“Are you all right?” said Mr. Browne. “What happened?”
“I
don’t know,” said Mr. Ferrick. “I was opening the crate and something—it flew into my face—I thought— ” He glanced at Dr. Starkweather’s fulminating expression and sensibly did not explain what he had thought.
A closer look at the crate caused my heart to sink, in rather the same way that reading the Oedipus Tyrannos did. “Is that, er, the crate from Miss Parrington?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Ferrick, puzzled.
“Oh good God,” said Dr. Starkweather in tones of utmost loathing, probably prompted equally by Miss Parrington and me.
“She said she, er . . . that is, she didn’t open the crate. So it probably— ”
“A bit of straw,” Dr. Starkweather said, seizing a piece from the floor and brandishing it at us. “You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf, Mr. Ferrick?”
“Yes, Dr. Starkweather,” Mr. Ferrick said, blushing.
“Good God,” Dr. Starkweather said again, more generally, and stormed out, Mr. Browne at his heels already girding himself to re-enter the fray.
I saw an opportunity to let Dr. Starkweather forget about me, and stayed where I was. Mr. Ferrick edged over to the crate as if he expected something else to leap out at him; it was with visible reluctance that he reached inside.
“What did you think it was?” I said.
“Beg pardon?”
“The, er, whatever it was that flew into your face. What did you think it was?”
“Oh. I’ve been spending too much time in Entomology,” he said with a grimace. I waited while he lifted out a book so blackened with smoke that it was impossible to say what color the binding had originally been. “It looked like a spider,” he said finally, tightly. “An enormous white spider. But Dr. Starkweather was right. It was just straw.”
“Make out an inventory,” I said, “and, er, bring it to me when you’re done.” And I left him to his straw.
Mr. Ferrick’s inventory included several works by Carolus Albinus, one by the alchemist Johann de Winter, three by the pseudonymous and frequently untruthful Rose Mundy, and a leather-bound commonplace book evidently compiled by the owner of the library—a deduction which would have been more satisfying if he had signed his name to it anywhere. One of the Carolus Albinus books was rare enough to be valuable even in its damaged condition: the 1588 Prague edition of the De Spiritu et Morte with the Vermeulen woodcuts said to have driven the printer mad. The rest of them were merely good practice for the junior archivists. I heard from Mr. Lucent, who was friends with Mr. Browne’s second in command Mr. Etheredge, that the “Vermeer” was no such thing and was sadly unsurprised. The crate and straw were both reused—I believe in packing a set of canopic jars to be shipped to San Francisco—and that was that. Another of Miss Parrington’s well-meaning disasters dealt with.
