999

by Al Sarrantonio

  “We’re getting out!” Jerry’s dad shouted, giving Jerry a strange look, and the ropy thing got him in the front yard between the garage and the car. Behind him was Jerry’s mom, with an armful of pillows, and the ropy thing got her too. It got Jerry’s sister, Jane, as she was sneaking away from the house to be with her boyfriend, Brad, down the block. Suzie and Jerry watched the ropy thing jump out of the bushes in front of Brad’s house like a coiled black spring, getting Jane right in front of Brad, just as she reached to hold his hand. Brad turned to run but it got him too, shooting up out of the lawn and over the sidewalk, thin and fast. It whipped around Brad and squeezed him into two pieces, top and bottom, then pulled both halves down.

  Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn’t climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers’ house and pull the Myers’ baby from the second-story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers’ house’s foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.

  “This is just like—” Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice. “I know,” Suzie said, hushing him.

  When they looked back at the Myers’ house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy who looked like Billy Carson.

  The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.

  The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.

  The ropy thing continued its work.

  They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry’s dad’s binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.

  “I’m telling you it’s—” Jerry said again.

  Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: “—just like my father’s trick.”

  * * *

  They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.

  They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing’s passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic’s ceiling and walls.

  “Do you think it’s happening everywhere?” Jerry asked.

  “What do you think?” Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad’s battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.

  He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.

  “Everywhere …” Jerry whispered.

  “Looks that way,” Suzie answered.

  “It can’t be …” Jerry said.

  Suzie ate another cracker.

  Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. “But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn’t real!”

  “It seemed real at the time, didn’t it?” Suzie asked.

  Jerry continued to sob. “He was always playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry pit had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!” He looked earnest and confused. “He was always doing things like that!”

  “You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn’t you?” Suzie asked.

  “Yes! But—”

  “Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real.”

  Jerry was frantic. “But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground, and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and suck them into its pulsating jelly body—”

  He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. “It wasn’t real!”

  “You believed.”

  “It was just a trick!”

  “But you believed it was real,” Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. “Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real.” She looked up at him. “Maybe that’s why it hasn’t gotten us—because you did it.”

  She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.

  “Maybe you did it because you love me,” she said.

  Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. “I do love you,” he said.

  They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers’ house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens’ next door to the Myers’. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood’s dogs and cats.

  Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antenna. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn’t even know their hosts’ names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.

  Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.

  “Everywhere,” she said.

  * * *

  As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place, of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.

  There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.

  They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.

  Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled anymore. His eyes became hollo
w, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.

  Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, “Make me stop believing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get the ropy thing out of my head.”

  Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry’s ears.

  “Nothing in there but wax,” she said.

  “I don’t want to believe anymore,” Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.

  “It’s too late,” Suzie said. Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.

  “Then I want to die,” he whispered.

  Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.

  It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.

  Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.

  Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.

  Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.

  A few pale snowflakes fell.

  “I want it to end,” Jerry whispered hoarsely.

  He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.

  “I … want it to stop,” he croaked.

  He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child’s body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.

  When he spoke, it was a soft question: “It wasn’t me, it was you who did it.”

  Suzie said nothing, and then she said, “I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you.”

  There was more silence. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the cornfield, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.

  Quietly, Jerry said, “I don’t love you anymore.”

  For a moment, Suzie’s eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.

  “Then there’s nothing left,” she said.

  Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.

  The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.

  And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.

  Gene Wolfe

  THE TREE IS MY HAT

  This is a true story: I once heard a fellow editor say he would quit his job and become Gene Wolfe’s unpaid valet just so Wolfe could continue, without distraction, to write the kind of stories he writes.

  Man, oh man, how’s that for a testimonial?

  I get the feeling that editor isn’t alone.

  Since he burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with stories like “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” Gene Wolfe has been one of the treasures of that field, as well as the related fields of fantasy and horror to which he sometimes lends his talents. His longer work is best represented by his Severian the Torturer books, which at this time number four; they have been omnibused in The Book of the New Sun. His writing is literary, perfumed with allusion, special, and unlike any other writer’s.

  For us he has produced a special piece with an odd title that will make all the sense in the world once you’ve read the story.

  30 Jan. I saw a strange stranger on the beach this morning. I had been swimming in the little bay between here and the village; that may have had something to do with it, although I did not feel tired. Dived down and thought I saw a shark coming around the big staghorn coral. Got out fast. The whole swim cannot have been more than ten minutes. Ran out of the water and started walking.

  There it is. I have begun this journal at last. (Thought I never would.) So let us return to all the things I ought to have put in and did not. I bought this the day after I came back from Africa.

  No, the day I got out of the hospital—I remember now. I was wandering around, wondering when I would have another attack, and went into a little shop on Forty-second Street. There was a nice-looking woman in there, one of those good-looking black women, and I thought it might be nice to talk to her, so I had to buy something. I said, “I just got back from Africa.”

  She: “Really. How was it?” Me: “Hot.”

  Anyway, I came out with this notebook and told myself I had not wasted my money because I would keep a journal, writing down my attacks, what I had been doing and eating, as instructed; but all I could think of was how she looked when she turned to go to the back of the shop. Her legs and how she held her head. Her hips.

  After that I planned to write down everything I remember from Africa, and what we said if Mary returned my calls. Then it was going to be about this assignment.

  31 Jan. Setting up my new Mac. Who would think this place would have phones? But there are wires to Kololahi, and a dish. I can chat with people all over the world, for which the agency pays. (Talk about soft!) Nothing like this in Africa. Just the radio, and good luck with that.

  I was full of enthusiasm. “A remote Pacific island chain.” Wait …

  P.D.: “Baden, we’re going to send you to the Takanga Group.”

  No doubt I looked blank.

  “It’s a remote Pacific island chain.” She cleared her throat and seemed to have swallowed a bone. “It’s not going to be like Africa, Bad. You’ll be on your own out there.”

  Me: “I thought you were going to fire me.”

  P.D.: “No, no! We wouldn’t do that.”

  “Permanent sick leave.”

  “No, no, no! But, Bad.” She leaned across her desk and for a minute I was afraid she was going to squeeze my hand. “This will be rough. I’m not going to try to fool you.”

  Hah!

  Cut to the chase. This is nothing. This is a bungalow with rotten boards in the floors that has been here since before the British pulled out, a mile from the village and less than half that from the beach, close enough that the Pacific-smell is in all the rooms. The people are fat and happy, and my guess is not more than half are dumb. (Try and match that around Chicago.) Once or twice a year one gets yaws or some such, and Rev. Robbins gives him arsenic. Which cures it. Pooey!

  There are fish in the ocean, plenty of them. Wild fruit in the jungle, and they know which you can eat. They plant yams and bread-fruit, and if they need money or just want something, they dive for pearls and trade them when Jack’s boat comes. Or do a big holiday boat trip to Kololahi.

  There are coconuts too, which I forgot. They know how to open them. Or perhaps I am just not strong enough yet. (I look in the mirror, and ugh.) I used to weigh two hundred pounds.

  “You skinny,” the king says. “Ha, ha, ha!” He is really a good guy, I think. He has a primitive sense of humor, but there are worse things. He can take a jungle chopper (we said upanga but they say heletay) and open a coconut like a pack of gum. I have coconuts and a heletay but I might as well try to open them with a spoon.

  1 Feb. Nothing to report except a couple of wonderful swims. I did not swim at all for the first couple of weeks. There are sharks. I know they are really out there because I have seen them once or twice. According to what I was told, there are saltwater crocs, too, up to fourteen feet long. I have never seen any of those and am skeptical, although I know they have them in Queensland. Every so often you
hear about somebody who was killed by a shark, but that does not stop the people from swimming all the time, and I do not see why it should stop me. Good luck so far.

  2 Feb. Saturday. I was supposed to write about the dwarf I saw on the beach that time, but I never got the nerve. Sometimes I used to see things in the hospital. Afraid it may be coming back. I decided to take a walk on the beach. All right, did I get sunstroke?

  Pooey.

  He was just a little man, shorter even than Mary’s father. He was too small for any adult in the village. He was certainly not a child, and was too pale to have been one of the islanders at all.

  He cannot have been here long; he was whiter than I am.

  Rev. Robbins will know—ask tomorrow.

  3 Feb. Hot and getting hotter. Jan. is the hottest month here, according to Rob Robbins. Well, I got here the first week in Jan. and it has never been this hot.

  Got up early while it was still cool. Went down the beach to the village. (Stopped to have a look at the rocks where the dwarf disappeared.) Waited around for the service to begin but could not talk to Rob, he was rehearsing the choir—“Nearer My God to Thee.”

  Half the village came, and the service went on for almost two hours. When it was over I was able to get Rob alone. I said if he would drive us into Kololahi I would buy our Sunday dinner. (He has a jeep.) He was nice, but no—too far and the bad roads. I told him I had personal troubles I wanted his advice on, and he said, “Why don’t we go to your place, Baden, and have a talk? I’d invite you for lemonade, but they’d be after me every minute.”