Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2

by Nathan Ballingrud

  I step forward and gently push Patrick’s arm down.

  “Are you shitting me?” he says, staring at Johnny.

  “Patrick,” I say.

  “Am I fucking cursed? Is that it? I shot you in the face!”

  The bullet-hole is a dime-sized wound in Johnny’s right cheekbone. It leaks a single thread of blood. “Asshole,” he says.

  Tobias gets back to his feet, his arms stretched out to either side like he’s trying to separate two imaginary boxers. “Will you just relax? Jesus Christ!” He guides Johnny to the little bed and sits him down, where he brushes the blond hair out of his face and inspects the bullet hole. Then he cranes his head around to examine the damage of the exit wound. “God damn it!” he says.

  Johnny puts his own hand back there. “Oh man,” he says.

  I take a look. The whole back of his head is gone; now it’s just a red bowl of spilled gore. What look like little blowing cinders are embedded in the mess, sending up coils of smoke. Most of Johnny’s brains are splashed across the wall behind him.

  “Patrick,” I say. “Just be cool.”

  He’s still in a fog. You can see him trying to arrange things in his head. “I need to kill them, Jack. I need to. I never felt it like this before. What’s happening here?”

  Tobias pipes up. “I had a job for this guy all lined up at The Fry Pit! Now what!”

  “Tobias, I need you to shut up,” I say, keeping my eyes on Patrick. “Patrick, are you hearing me?” It’s taking a huge effort to maintain my own composure. I have an image of wresting the gun from his hand and hitting him with it until his skull breaks. Only the absolute impossibility of it keeps me from trying.

  My question causes the shutters to close in his eyes. Whatever tatter of human impulse stirred him to try to explain himself to me, to grope for reason amidst the bloody carnage boiling in his head, is subsumed again in a dull professional menace. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a goddamn kid.”

  I turn to the others. The bed is now awash in blood. Tobias is working earnestly to mitigate the damage back there, but I can’t imagine what it is he thinks he can do. Brain matter is gathered in a clump behind them; he seems to be scooping everything out. Johnny sits there forlornly, shoulders slumped. “I thought it would be better out here,” he said. “Shit never ends.”

  “The atlas,” I say.

  “Fuck yourself,” Tobias says.

  I stride toward the closed door. If there’s anything I need to know before I open it, I guess I’ll just find out the hard way. A hot pulse of emotion blasts out at me as I touch the handle: fear, rage, a lust for carnage. It’s overriding any sense of self-preservation I might have had. I wonder if a fire will pour through the door when it’s opened, a furnace exhalation, and engulf us all. I find myself hoping for it.

  Tobias shouts at me: “Don’t!”

  I pull it open.

  A charred skull, oily smoke coiling from its fissures, is propped on a stool in an otherwise bare room no bigger than a closet. Black mold has grown over the stool, and is creeping up the walls. A live current jolts my brain. Time dislocates, jumping seconds like an old record, and the world moves in jerky, stop-motion lurches. A language is seeping from the skull—a viscous, cracked sound like breaking bones and molten rock. My eyes sting and I squeeze them shut. The skin on my face blisters.

  “Shut it! Shut the door!”

  Tobias is screaming, but whatever he’s saying has no relation to me. It’s as though I’m watching a play. Blood is leaking from his eyes. Patrick is grinning widely, his own eyes like bloody headlamps. He’s violently twisting his right ear, working it like an apple stem. Johnny is sitting quietly, holding his gathered brains in his hands, rocking back and forth like an unhappy child. My upper arms are hurting, and it takes me a minute to realize that I’m gouging them with my own fingernails. I can’t make myself stop.

  Outside a sound rolls across the swamp like a foghorn: a deep, answering bellow to the language of Hell spilling from the closet.

  Tobias lunges past me and slams the door shut, immediately muffling the skull’s effect. I stagger toward the chair but fall down hard before I make it, banging my shoulder against the table and knocking Tobias’s drug paraphernalia all over the floor. Patrick makes a sound, half gasp and half sob, and leans back against the wall, cradling his savaged ear. The left side of his face is painted in blood. He’s digging the heel of his hand into his right eye, like he’s trying to rub something out of it.

  “What the fuck was that!”

  I think it’s me who says that. Right now I can’t be sure.

  “That’s your goddamn ‘atlas,’ you prick,” Tobias says. He comes over to where I am and drops to the floor, scooping up the scattered buds and some papers. He begins to assemble a joint; his hands are shaking badly, so this takes some doing.

  “A skull? The book is a skull?”

  “No. It’s a tongue inside the skull. Technically.”

  “What the Christ?”

  “Just shut up a minute.” He finishes the joint, lights it, and takes a long, deep pull. He passes it over to me.

  For one surreal moment I feel like we’re college buddies sitting in a dorm. It’s like there’s not a scorched, muttering skull in the next room, corroding the air around it. It’s like there’s not a man with a blown-out skull moping quietly on the bed. I start to laugh, and I haven’t even had a toke.

  He exhales explosively, the sweet smoke filling the air between us. “Take it, man. I’m serious. Trust me.”

  So I do. Almost immediately I feel an easing of the pressure in the room. The crackle of violent impulse, which I had ceased to even recognize, abated to a low thrum. My internal gauge ticked back down to highly frightened, which, in comparison to a moment before, felt like a monastic peace.

  I gesture for Patrick to do the same.

  “No. I don’t pollute my body with that shit.” He’s touching his ear gingerly, trying to assess the damage.

  “Patrick, last night you singlehandedly killed half a bottle of ninety-proof burden. Let’s have some perspective here.”

  He snatches it from me and drags hard on it, coughing it all back out so violently I think he might throw up.

  Johnny laughs from his position on the bed. It’s the first bright note he’s sounded since his head came apart. “Amateur!”

  I notice that Johnny’s head seems to be changing shape. The shattered bone around the exit wound has smoothed over and extended upward an inch or so, like something growing. A tiny twig of bone has likewise extended from the bullet wound beneath his eye.

  “We need to get out of here,” I say. “That thing is pretty much a live feed to Hell. We can’t handle it. It’s time to go.”

  “We’re taking it with us,” Patrick says.

  “No. No we’re not.”

  “Not up for debate, Jack.”

  “I’m not riding with that thing. If you take it you’re going back alone.”

  Patrick nods and takes another pull from the joint, handling it much better this time. He passes it back to me. “Okay, but you gotta know that I’m leaving this place empty. You understand me, right?”

  I don’t, at first. It takes me a second. “You can’t be serious. You’re going to kill me?”

  “Make up your mind.”

  For the first time since his arrival at my shop last night, I feel genuine despair. Everything to this point has had some precedence in my life. Even this brush with Hell isn’t my first, though it’s the most direct so far. But I’ve never seen my own death staring back at me quite so frankly. I always thought I’d confront this moment with a little poise, or at least a kind of stoic resignation. But I’m angry, and I’m afraid, and I feel tears gathering in my eyes.

  “God damn it, Patrick. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Look, Jack. I like you. You’re weak and you’re a coward, but you can’t help those things. I would rather you come with me. We take this skull back to Eugene, like h
e wanted. We deliver Tobias to his just reward. You go back to your little bookstore and all is right with the world. But I can’t leave this place with anybody in it.”

  Tobias doesn’t seem to be paying attention. He’s leaning back against the bed, a new joint rolled up and kept all to himself. I can’t tell if he’s resigned to his own death or if he’s so far away he doesn’t even know it’s being discussed.

  I can’t think of anything to say. Maybe there isn’t anything more to be said. Maybe language is over. Maybe everything is, at last, emptied out. I still feel the skull’s muted influence crawling through my brain. It craves the bullet. I anticipate the explosion of the gun with a terrible relish. I wonder, idly, if I’ll hold onto myself long enough to feel myself flying.

  The bellow from the swamp sounds again. It’s huge and deep, like the ululating call of a mountain. It just keeps on going.

  Johnny smiles. “Brother’s home,” he says.

  Patrick looks toward the flag-covered doorway. “What?”

  Tobias holds his hand aloft, finger extended, announcing his intention to orate. His eyelids are heavy. The joint he’d made for himself is spent. “There’s a hell monster. Did I forget to tell you?”

  I start to laugh. I can’t stop myself. It doesn’t feel good.

  Johnny smiles at me, mistaking my laughter for something else. “It appeared the same time I did. Toby calls it my brother.” He sounds wistful.

  Patrick uses the gun barrel to open the flag a few inches. He peers outside for a few moments, then lets it fall closed again. He looks at me. “We’re stuck. The boat’s gone.”

  “What? He left us?”

  “Well… it’s mostly gone.”

  I take a look for myself.

  The airboat is a listing heap of bent scrap metal, the cage around its huge propeller a tangled bird’s nest. Our guide’s arm, still connected to a hunk of his torso, rests on the deck in a black puddle. The thing that did this is swimming in a lazy arc some distance away, trackable by the rolling surge of water it creates as it trawls along. Judging by the size of its wake, it’s at least as big as a city bus. It breaches the surface once, exposing a mottled gray hide and an anemone-like thistle of eye stalks lifting skyward. The thing barrel-rolls until a deep black fissure emerges, and from this suppurated tear comes that stone-cracking bellow, the language of deep earth that curdles something inside me, springs tears to my eyes, brings me hard to my knees.

  I scramble weakly away from the door. Patrick is watching me with a sad, desperate hope, his intent to murder momentarily forgotten, as though by some trick known only to me this thing might be banished back to its home, as though I might fix this scar that Tobias George, that mewling, incompetent little thief, has cut into the world.

  I cannot fix this. There is no fixing this.

  Behind us both, locked in its little room, the skull cooks the air.

  *

  It’s the language that hurts. The awful speech. While that thing languishes in the waters out front, we’re trapped inside. It seems to stay quiet unless it’s provoked by some outrage to its senses: an appearance by one of us, or—we believe, since none of us heard the attack on the airboat and our guide—the effects of the skull in the room. As long as we’re quiet and hidden, we seem to be safe.

  “Why would you do that to a man?” Patrick says. We’re all sitting in a little huddled circle, passing the joint around. We might have been friends, to someone who didn’t know us. “Why would you send him a piece of his own dead son?”

  “Are you serious? No one deserves it more than Eugene. He humiliated me. He made me feel small. All those years sending him a cut from money I earned, or doing errands for him, or tipping him off when I hear shit I think he should know. Never a ‘thank you.’ Never a ‘good job.’ Just grief. Just mockery. And his son was even worse. He would lay hands on me. Slap the back of my head. Slap my face, even. What am I going to do, challenge Eugene’s son? So I became everybody’s bitch. The laughing stock.”

  Patrick shakes his head. “You didn’t, though. Truth is we barely ever thought about you. I didn’t even know your name until you knocked over that poker game. Eugene had to remind me.”

  This is hard for Tobias to hear. He stares hard at the floor, the muscles in his jaw working. He looks at me. “See what I mean? Nothing. You just have to take it from these guys, you know? Just take it and take it and take it. It was one of the happiest days of my life when that kid finally got wasted.”

  He goes on. We have nothing but time. He robbed the poker game in a fit of deranged anger and then fled south, hoping to disappear into the bayou. The reality of what he’d just done was starting to sink in. He’s of the vermin class in criminal society, and vermin come in multitudes. One of his vermin friends told him about this shack where his old granddaddy used to live. He gets a boat and comes out here, only to find s surprise waiting for him.

  “The skull was in a black, iron box,” he says, “sitting on its side in the corner. There’s a hole in the bottom the box, like the whole thing was meant to fit around someone’s head. It had a big gouge in the side of it, like someone had chopped it with something. I don’t know what cuts through metal like that though. And inside, this skull… talking.”

  “It’s one of the astronauts,” Johnny says.

  I rub my fingers in my eyes. “Astronauts? What?”

  Johnny leans in, grateful for his moment. He tells us that there are occasionally men and women who wander through Hell in thin processions, wearing heavy gray robes and bearing lanterns to light their way. They are invariably chained together, and led through the burning canyons by a loping demon: some malformed, tooth-spangled pinwheel of limbs and claws. They tour safely because they are shuttered against the sights and sounds of Hell by the iron boxes around their heads, which gives them the appearance of strange, prison-skulled astronauts on a pilgrimage through fire.

  “I recognized the box,” Johnny says. “This is one of those guys. The box was broken, so I guess something bad happened to him.”

  “Where is it?”

  Tobias shrugs. “I threw it out in the bayou. What do I need a broken box for? I started asking for things, and it sent them. The rock, the shard of bone.”

  “Hold on. How did you know to ask it for things? You’re leaving something out.”

  Tobias and Johnny exchange a look. The burning embers in the back of Johnny’s head seem to have gathered more life: little tongues of flame spit into the air from time to time, as though a small fire has kindled. The extending bone around his head has grown further, opening out as though a careful hand has begun to fashion a wide, smooth bowl. The bone growing from his face has grown little offshoots, like a delicate branch.

  Patrick picks up on their glance, and retrieves his gun from the floor, holding it casually in his lap.

  “Everything that’s brought here has a courier,” Tobias says. “That’s how Johnny got here. He brought the bone. And there was one already here when I found the skull. It told me.”

  “It?”

  “Well… it was a person at first. Then it changed. They change over time. Evolve.”

  Patrick gets it before I do. “The thing in the water.”

  “Holy Christ. You mean Johnny’s going to turn into something like that?” I look again at the fiery bowl his head is turning into.

  “No no no!” Tobias holds out his hands, as if he could ward off the very idea of it. “I mean, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that’s only because the other one never went away. I think it’s the proximity of the skull that does it. There was one other courier, the girl who brought me the rock. I sent her away.”

  “Jesus. Where?”

  “Just… ” He waves, vaguely. “Away. Into the bayou.”

  “You’re a real sweetheart, Tobias.”

  “Well come on, I didn’t know what to do! She was just—there! I didn’t know anybody was going to be coming with it! I freaked out and told her to get out! But the important t
hing is I never saw any sign that she changed into anything. I haven’t seen or heard anything from her since. You notice how the plants get weird as you get close to this place? It’s gotta be the skull’s influence.”

  “That’s not exactly airtight logic, Tobias,” I say. “What if it’s not just from the skull? What if it comes from them too? I could tell something was fucked up about Johnny as soon as I saw him.”

  “Well I’m taking the fucking chance! If there are going to be people coming out, they need to have a chance at a better life. That’s why I got Johnny here a job. He’ll be far away from that skull, so maybe he won’t change into anything.” He looks at his friend and at the lively fire that’s crackling inside his head. “Well, he wouldn’t have if you guys hadn’t fucked it all up. I’ve got this all worked out. I’m going to find them jobs in little places, in little towns. I got money now, so I can afford to get them set up. Buy them some clothes, rent them out a place until they can start earning some money of their own. A second chance, you know? They deserve a second chance.”

  He’s getting all worked up again, like he’s going to break down into tears, and I’m struck with a revelation: Tobias is using this skull as a chance to redeem himself. He’s going to funnel of people out of Hell and back into the world of sunlight and cheeseburgers.

  Tobias George may be the only good man in a fifty mile radius. Too bad it’s the most doomed idea I’ve ever heard in a life rich with them. But there are several possibilities for salvaging this situation. One thing is clear: Eugene cannot have the atlas. The level of catastrophe he might cause is incalculable. I need to get it back to my bookstore and to the back room. There are books there that will provide protections; at least I hope so.

  All I need is something to carry it in.

  I know just where to get it.

  “Patrick. You still want to bring this thing to Eugene?”

  “He’s the boss. You change your mind about coming?”

  *

  “I think so, yeah. Tobias, we’re going into the room.” He goes in gratefully. I think he feels in control in this room in way that he doesn’t out there with Patrick. It’s almost funny.