Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  The Last Plague Doctor

  Rebecca J. Allred

  We recognize maybe 20 percent of the names of the writers who send us their work. The rest are totally unknown to us and must have their stories speak for them. So it was with Rebecca Allred’s tale—brimming over with evocative medieval imagery woven into an apocalyptic tapestry depicting a reset on the Dark Ages. Unsettling and original, we knew we liked it as soon as we reached the final line.

  Once again in search of a new face, Plague strides into the night, and I with it. I wear a gown pale and blue as moonlight, the memory of a celestial monarch now centuries in her grave, and my own face is concealed behind the mask of my predecessors, its beak long and curved like a reaper’s scythe. The soft scent of fresh lavender—grown in secret beneath artificial light—protects me from the stink of nicotine that has stained my companion’s tattered robes, his nails and too-numerous teeth, and, yes, even his eyes; they stare at me from ragged holes, grinning though his mouth does not. Even now he smokes, the red eye of his cigarette winking at me from behind a veil of spiraling carcinogens with each protracted drag.

  Each of us carries a bag, one for tricks and the other for treats, as we wander alleys lit by lanterns carved from sickly fruit, that glow like the forbidden sunrise, sending Plague’s darkness to cower in thin corners and deep crevices. In this forever night, the houses stand back to back to back, as if huddled together for warmth, shutting out the wind and protecting each anemic flame from its hiemal breath. My dress ripples, transforming from the absent moon into the city’s great lake, silk brushing against my skin like whispered promises.

  “You wore blue,” he says. There is no inflection in his voice, no hint of either pleasure or remorse.

  “It suits my mood.”

  “Why then do you walk with me?”

  “It is my duty.”

  “You owe them nothing.”

  But I do.

  We arrive at the first house. Uneven brick and crumbling mortar, it will not last another season. Plague has spared nothing, contaminating the very matter of existence down to its last particle. When this edifice finally disintegrates, the inhabitants will simply move. There is no shortage of vacancies in this world of waning light.

  He inspects the collection of handmade masks that lie in a semicircle upon the back step. There are four. The first is made of a small, round pillowcase. Stitched to the pale fabric are a pair of black buttons and a fat pink ribbon fashioned to resemble a pleasant smile. I imagine my companion wearing it, and my own mouth fixes into a grim line. As if Plague’s smile could be anything but cruel and portend anything but death—or worse—no matter the face.

  The second is made of plaster, molded to the shape of its creator. It is a painted rainbow of delightful pastels, a relic of days now almost forgotten. Carnivals and candy. Love and joy. Words long unspoken beneath this shroud of perpetual darkness.

  The third is the creation of a younger hand, a cardboard rectangle with pennies for eyes and a thin red slash for a mouth. Is this mask her first? Will it be her last?

  The final mask is that of a younger hand still. It appears to have been created in great haste and with little care. Unsupervised. A mistake. Lacking both eyes and a mouth, the paper bag is hardly a mask at all, but an asymmetric galaxy of glitter and congealing adhesive.

  Plague chooses this final offering and drops it into his bag. I replace the mask with a draught of cyanide from my own and extinguish the lantern, saying a prayer for the soul it represents though all the old gods are dead and no angels remain to carry it forth from this world.

  Behind the door, a woman shrieks as if her throat could voice the anguish of her breaking heart. The handle rattles as it begins to turn, but is quickly silenced by a deeper voice and stronger hand. The voices argue. He whispers of caution and survival. She screams of fairness and cowardice.

  My companion lights another cigarette, and for a moment his face is visible in the flame’s flickering light. It barely resembles the young poet with the golden voice to whom it had belonged just a year ago. Stolen skin stretched tight across bone and flesh, it is a visage befitting an ancient king, but even this pharaoh’s face, hideous to behold, is better than what lies beneath.

  He bends at the waist and, through lips that will never again whisper verse or sonnet, breathes a lungful of lunacy into the keyhole.

  We wait.

  The woman curses and wails. Twice, the deadbolt slides back, and twice it’s thrown hard back into place. Eventually reason wins the night, and beneath a chorus of wretched sobbing and futile whispers of consolation, a baby cries. In a few years, it will be old enough to craft a mask of its own.

  Satisfied, Plague turns and glides toward the next flickering light. There is nothing here that interests him, and so the masks remain untouched, the lantern lit. We move on.

  Once, we all wore masks—anonymity granting us permission to pursue our truest desires, free from the consequences of ridicule and judgment. We constructed a counterfeit society in which there were neither husbands nor wives, friends nor enemies, only an endless parade of strangers seeking strangers seeking decadence. And so we sewed and painted and sculpted and shaved, that we might steal and cut and lie and cheat and fuck. Artificial means to experience genuine ends . . .

  Another mask disappears into Plague’s bag, this one sketched onto heavy parchment. It is the face of a man with a bald pate, his cheeks, jaw, and chin obscured by dense whiskers. The artist is a skilled one; the man’s eyes—the only feature clearly visible in the deep shadows of graphite and charcoal—are alive and sparkling, watching me as they descend until darkness finally forces them to blink. I am glad to be free of their gaze, though Plague and I both know this is not the last I’ll see of them.

  Dipping a hand into my own bag, like an anatomist reaching into the body cavity of a prosected corpse, I retrieve yet another instrument of death. This time I leave behind a silver blade before extinguishing the lantern’s dim yellow glow. Smoke escapes its crooked grin like a sigh, as if it had been waiting for me to cure it of the fever burning within.

  “Why do you leave them trinkets?” my companion asks, lighting yet another cancer stick. He places it between his lips in an act of cannibalism.

  “It is custom for the doctor to treat her patients.”

  “You cannot cure death.”

  “Sometimes, death itself is a cure.”

  He grins, but there is no humor in his smile, only malice. It lingers but a moment before slipping from his stolen face, just as the sun slipped into the great lake, never to rise again, when he first crossed its steely waves. It will be hours yet before we return to the lake—to offer sacrifice upon its ancient, misty shore—but its putrid scent, carried for miles on an unrelenting wind, is an inescapable reminder of its presence. The ghosts of those trapped and rotting, feeding what was once part of the sea, permeate even the olfactory isolation of my mask, and I cease to breathe. It is an old habit, one I have yet to unlearn.

  Lips, cracked and bloody, pucker around the cigarette as if it were a straw, and Plague draws up what little life remains in this dark alley. He presses his mouth to the keyhole, exhaling another cloud of sickness and decay.

  There was but the one mask on this lonesome stoop, and so it is no surprise when the house remains silent, already resigned to its fate as a mausoleum. I spare one last glance at the silver blade before departing. Does the occupant know he’s been chosen? Will he accept the aid of my prescribed therapy, or allow the natural history of disease to play out unhastened?

  The natural history of desire is suffering. In time, our masks became our identities, inviting back into our lives the misery and boredom they’d once allowed us to escape. Discontent grew like an occult malignancy, and under cover of darkness, we traded our sins for freedom. Exchanging identities. Never knowing who might have been previously harmed by the faces we so eagerl
y adopted. Never caring who might hold a grudge against our newly minted selves. Never imagining that the death and madness so many sought to imitate walked freely among us.

  Plague watches, his misappropriated face contorted into an expression between intrigue and incredulity, as I rest a bouquet of wolfsbane beside another extinguished flame. The young woman to whom the flowers now belong stares at me through the window. She’s not near the keyhole, but neither is she far enough away. Plague’s vapor drifts across the room, and the girl is seized by paroxysms of sweet, mad laughter. It paints the glass with a fine crimson spray. Even in darkness I can see the terror in her eyes. They flit between my mask’s hard lines and the soft suggestion of deadly blooms recently plucked. I offer an almost-imperceptible nod. It is all the permission she needs, and as I follow Plague toward the next illuminated threshold, a door whispers open and closed behind us, punctuated by the howl of impending hysteria.

  We visit house after house, prayers whispered inside as we pause outside each one like a pair of skeletal fingers moving steadily from bead to bead around a rosary. There is no obvious pattern to Plague’s fancy. He makes his selections seemingly at random. We pass by many homes, leaving the families inside—if not entirely their sanity—intact for another year.

  Here he stops to collect a rubber imprint of a woman with green eyes. I leave a vial of liquid, equally green, in its place.

  We move on.

  Next, he plucks three identical masks carved from white marble—perhaps in hopes they will not float—and places them into his bag, leaving a fourth to suffer in isolation. The revolver I place beside the smoldering candle has four rounds in its chambers. I cannot help myself.

  Plague’s bag is nearly full now; eleven masks chosen from countless thousands occupy the leather satchel my companion drags behind him like a sack of disembodied heads. One more and we can return to the lake, finish this awful business for another year.

  “You choose,” he says when we arrive at the next house.

  Two masks lie on the threshold, pale, smiling faces against a grimy, ashen backdrop. Shadows glide across the smooth porcelain in a pagan dance fueled by firelight. I am loathe to end it. There is but one item left in my doctor’s bag, and so I offer a solution I’ve waited an eternity to propose.

  The first to die was the banker’s son. His body lay naked, save for a mask, in the center of town, a single word—a directive—carved in crooked, bloody script onto the pale flesh of his chest. When the mask was removed, it was discovered that beneath the false ipseity he’d adopted, the young man’s true identity had been stolen, peeled away to yellow cartilage and glistening bone. Only his eyes remained, reflected in their glassy surface a nightmare visage that would drive any man to murder.

  Next was the grade school teacher, her tanned breasts a canvas for repeated directives. Authorities warned us to be wary of strangers, but we were—all of us—strangers. Strangers becoming ever more strange as we continued to swap, to change, to hide behind false faces made ever more real as whispers of a madman in a pallid mask infused us with fear like a slow poison.

  A librarian. A physician. A nameless vagrant. None were safe from the identity thief’s mad obsession. Eleven victims in all, faces filleted and tossed into the lake, before the directive finally became law and we were all forced to unmask.

  But it was already too late.

  We arrive at the great lake. Once part of a vast ocean—a fact reflected in its very name, unspoken since it swallowed the day—it reeks of salt and illness and decay. Beneath its cold, still surface, the sun smolders, orange like the tip of Plague’s cigarettes. Kneeling before it, a congregation of the dead weeps.

  Plague removes the masks from his bag one at a time. First comes the mess of glitter and glue, followed by a grim cross-stitch. He places them in the water at the lake’s edge, where they float for a moment, suspended in the sallow brine like bits of pollen, before the wind carries them to the center of the lake, and they sink to the bottom like stones. Next are the marble triplets—they float just fine. Then there are the rubber woman with the green eyes and the young girl to whom I’d given flowers. Faces floating gently like autumn leaves, before being dragged beneath the surface as if by an invisible leviathan. One by one, the lake claims them all. Last comes the charcoal rubbing of the man with the living eyes.

  “Wait,” I say, snatching the mask from my companion’s delicate grasp.

  The face is unfamiliar, but the eyes . . . They are the same as the banker’s son’s. The same as the teacher’s. The doctor’s. In the negative space, between smudged fingerprints and penciled arcs, the pallid mask’s expressionless visage watches through borrowed eyes.

  I step to the water’s edge and cast this last face into the waves, repeating the past. Eyes fixed on eyes fixed on me, I watch as it sinks into the yellow depths. Something brushes against my arm. Looking up, I see the boy to whom the glitter-and-glue mask had belonged. He carries the draught of cyanide in one pudgy hand. Tears streaming down cheeks forever robbed of their ruddy complexion, he wades into the lake. I stand. Turn. The others are arriving.

  One after another, they glide past me, instruments of death clutched in ghostly hands and tears to feed the abysmal lake leaking from the corners of clouded eyes. All but the man with the coarse beard; his tears flow from eyes burning with fever and madness. He carries the silver blade, but his hands—the fingers stained black from countless hours practicing his craft—have retained their substance. He presses rejected suicide into my open palm and whispers, “Physician, heal thyself,” before joining the others at the bottom of the lake.

  Once, we all wore masks, fulfilling every desire, shielded from the bitter aftertaste of consequence. We broke the laws of God and man. Committed sins of the flesh and of the spirit, poisoning our bodies and our minds. We were consumed by sickness.

  But there was one who sought to cure us of our disease. One who found among forbidden tomes an antidote for the ichor coursing through our veins. One who wore no mask.

  At last, it is my turn.

  Plague lifts his hand, skin shiny as wax paper wrapped tight around spider-thin digits, and removes my disguise. For a moment the fragrance of lavender still lingers, and then I can smell him. The nicotine, yes, but that too is nothing more than camouflage. Beneath it writhes the stench of an infirm sea—the death scent of the lake amplified unto infinity—its lifeless tides pulled in an endless tug-of-war by a pair of merciless moons.

  Free from the hooked beak and mirrored lenses, my true face gazes upon the world I have wrought. As with those I sacrificed to immunize the herd, only my eyes remain. Beneath the glassy orbs—blue like the forgotten moon, blue like my dress, blue like the antithesis of gold—a pallid mask of fleshless bone grins.

  Plague drops the mask at our feet. He leans forward, pressing his lips to my absent mouth and exhales one last cloud of smoke. It fills my lungs, my heart, my mind. Death and Madness. Doctor and Plague. Separate but unequal sides of the same diseased coin, locked in a terminal embrace. It lasts a lifetime.

  Reluctantly, I withdraw, weeping, as the others have wept. But Madness cannot claim that which is already dead. Centipedes, maggots, and beetles slither from dry orbits in place of tears. They drop to the ground where they are crushed beneath Plague’s thundering rage.

  I am unfit for sacrifice.

  Plague’s own mask disintegrates, revealing the festering horror beneath—the horror I summoned when the world was young and the sun and moon still hung in the sky. Gilded wings unfold, stretching and expanding until they blot out the heavens. I spread my own, blacker than the night, blacker even than the stars that watch in silent discontent. Silver blade still in my hand, I strike out—once, twice, three times—severing Plague’s golden plumes.

  He shrieks. Curses me. Tumbles to the ground, undone. But Death cannot claim that which is eternal. Plague flees across the lake, borne upward b
y the tears of the dead, banished from this land, back to his forgotten kingdom. So furious is he that Plague’s new face, risen from the depths, slips past the defeated king, unnoticed. I pluck it from the brackish water, unsurprised to discover that it is the bearded man with the omniscient eyes.

  My doctor’s mask is gone, sucked beneath the lapping waves of the great lake that now hisses and vomits daybreak. I will not follow. Instead, I press empty skin to exposed bone. One last identity to safeguard against a relapse of Plague’s lunatic reign. Purged of his influence, the city shivers, eager to begin its convalescence, and I stride empty-handed into the brilliant rays of the resurrected sun.

  Sinkers

  Dan Waters

  Dan Waters attended a Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp and dazzled the instructors with his acerbic wit and confident style. He went on to create a successful YA series that keeps him very busy, but he occasionally writes short fiction. His story, which follows, could also be called “Knuckleheads Have Feelings Too!” In a totally unique fashion, Waters investigates the concept of what the afterlife could be or not be. He descends through limbo, heaven, and a dark place that could be hell. His tongue-in-cheek style had us giggling, but eventually saying, “Oh . . . shit!”

  They had put away twenty-one cans of Golden Anniversary three-bucks-a-six-pack beer between them before jumping the rail at Oxoboxo Bridge. Numbers twenty-two and twenty-three were cracked and in their hands, while number twenty-four (which would have been seventeen if it hadn’t previously slipped out of Chuck’s shaking hand) rolled around with a few of its empty brothers in the backseat. Eddie, who was riding shotgun, liked pitching the empties out the window at parked cars or the stop signs that Chuck sped past. Chuck didn’t go for that sort of juvenile shit; he just threw them over his shoulder, as one tosses salt for good luck.

  Their hyperdrive euphoria remained the few moments that the car was airborne. The Nova had a powerful engine and Chuck had taken the corner pretty fast and they could really feel the speed rev in their veins. The feeling disappeared when they hit the water, the black lake rushing up at them like the night sky swallowing daylight.