999

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Were you surprised to see me?” Mary was older than I remembered, and had the beginnings of a double chin.

  “Delighted. But Pops told me you’d gone to Uganda, and you were on your way here.”

  “To the end of the earth.” (She smiled, and my heart leaped.) “I never realized the end would be as pretty as this.”

  I told her that in another generation the beach would be lined with condos.

  “Then let’s be glad that we’re in this one.” She turned to the boys. “You have to take in everything as long as we’re here. You’ll never get another chance like this.”

  I said, “Which will be a long time, I hope.”

  “You mean that you and …?”

  “Langitokoua.” I shook my head. (Here it was, and all my lies had melted away.) “Was I ever honest with you, Mary?”

  “Certainly. Often.”

  “I wasn’t, and you know it. So do I. I’ve got no right to expect you to believe me now. But I’m going to tell you, and myself, God’s own truth. It’s in remission now. Langi and I were able to go to a banquet last night, and eat, and talk to people, and enjoy ourselves. But when it’s bad, it’s horrible. I’m too sick to do anything but shake and sweat and moan, and I see things that aren’t there. I—”

  Mary interrupted me, trying to be kind. “You don’t look as sick as I expected.”

  “I know how I look. My mirror tells me every morning while I shave. I look like death in a microwave oven, and that’s not very far from the truth. It’s liable to kill me this year. If it doesn’t, I’ll probably get attacks on and off for the rest of my life, which is apt to be short.”

  There was a silence that Langi filled by asking whether the boys wanted some coconut milk. They said they did, and she got my heletay and showed them how to open a green coconut with one chop. Mary and I stopped talking to watch her, and that’s when I heard the surf. It was the first time that the sound of waves hitting the beach had ever reached as far inland as my bungalow.

  Mary said, “I rented a Range Rover at the airport.” It was the tone she used when she had to bring up something she really did not want to bring up.

  “I know. I saw it.”

  “It’s fifty dollars a day, Bad, plus mileage. I won’t be able to keep it long.”

  I said, “I understand.”

  “We tried to phone. I had hoped you would be well enough to come for us, or send someone.”

  I said I would have had to borrow Rob’s jeep if I had gotten her call.

  “I wouldn’t have known where you were, but we met a native, a very handsome man who says he knows you. He came along to show us the way.” (At that point, the boys’ expressions told me something was seriously wrong.) “He wouldn’t take any money for it. Was I wrong to offer to pay him? He didn’t seem angry.”

  “No,” I said, and would have given anything to get the boys alone. But would it have been different if I had? When I read this, when I really get to where I can face it, the thing I will miss on was how fast it was—how fast the whole thing went. It cannot have been an hour between the time Mary woke up and the time Langi ran to the village to get Rob.

  Mark lying there whiter than the sand. So thin and white, and looking just like me.

  “He thought you were down on the beach, and wanted us to look for you there, but we were too tired,” Mary said.

  That is all for now, and in fact it is too much. I can barely read this left-handed printing, and my stump aches from holding down the book. I am going to go to bed, where I will cry, I know, and Langi will cuddle me like a kid.

  Again tomorrow.

  17 Feb. Hospital sent its plane for Mark, but no room for us. Doctor a lot more interested in my disease than my stump. “Dr. Robbins” did a fine job there, he said. We will catch the Cairns plane Monday.

  I should catch up. But first: I am going to steal Rob’s jeep tomorrow. He will not lend it, does not think I can drive. It will be slow, but I know I can.

  19 Feb. Parked on the tarmac, something wrong with one engine. Have I got up nerve enough to write about it now? We will see.

  Mary was telling us about her guide, how good-looking, and all he told her about the islands, lots I had not known myself. As if she were surprised she had not seen him sooner, she pointed and said, “Here he is now.”

  There was nobody there. Or rather, there was nobody Langi and I or the boys could see. I talked to Adam (to my son Adam, I have to get used to that) when it was over, while Rob was working on Mark and Mary. I had a bunch of surgical gauze and had to hold it as tight as I could. There was no strength left in my hand.

  Adam said Mary had stopped and the door opened, and she made him get in back with Mark. The door opened by itself. That is the part he remembers most clearly, and the part of his story I will always remember, too. After that Mary seemed to be talking all the time to somebody he and his brother could not see or hear.

  She screamed, and there, for just an instant, was the shark. He was as big as a boat, and the wind was like a current in the ocean, blowing us down to the water. I really do not see how I can ever explain this.

  No takeoff yet, so I have to try. It is easy to say what was not happening. What is hard is saying what was, because there are no words. The shark was not swimming in air. I know that is what it will sound like, but it (he) was not. We were not under the water, either. We could breathe and walk and run just as he could swim, although not nearly so fast, and even fight the current a little.

  The worst thing of all was he came and went and came and went, so that it seemed almost that we were running or fighting him by flashes of lightning, and sometimes he was Hanga, taller than the king and smiling at me while he herded us.

  No. The most worst thing was really that he was herding everybody but me. He drove them toward the beach the way a dog drives sheep, Mary, Langi, Adam, and Mark, and he would have let me escape. (I wonder sometimes why I did not. This was a new me, a me I doubt I will ever see again.)

  His jaws were real, and sometimes I could hear them snap when I could not see him. I shouted, calling him by name, and I believe I shouted that he was breaking our agreement, that to hurt my wives and my sons was to hurt me. To give the devil his due, I do not think he understood. The old gods are very wise, as the king told me today; still, there are limits to their understanding.

  I ran for the knife, the heletay Langi opened coconuts with. I thought of the boar, and by God I charged them. I must have been terrified. I do not remember, only slashing at something and someone huge that was and was not there, and in an instant was back again. The sting of the wind-blown sand, and then up to my arms in foaming water, and cutting and stabbing, and the hammerhead with my knife and my hand in its mouth.

  We got them all out, Langi and I did. But Mark has lost his leg, and jaws three feet across had closed on Mary. That was Hanga himself, I feel sure.

  Here is what I think. I think he could only make one of us see him at a time, and that was why he flashed in and out. He is real. (God knows he is real!) Not really physical the way a stone is, but physical in other ways that I do not understand. Physical like and unlike light and radiation. He showed himself to each of us, each time for less than a second.

  Mary wanted children, so she stopped the pill and did not tell me. That was what she told me when I drove Rob’s jeep out to North Point. I was afraid. Not so much afraid of Hanga (though there was that, too) but afraid she would not be there. Then somebody said “Banzai!” It was exactly as if he were sitting next to me in the jeep, except that there was nobody there. I said “Banzai” back, and I never heard him again; but after that I knew I would find her, and I waited for her at the edge of the cliff.

  She came back to me when the sun touched the pacific, and the darker the night and the brighter the stars, the more real she was. Most of the time it was as if she were really in my arms. When the stars got dim and the first light showed in the east, she whispered, “I have to go,” and walked over the edge, wal
king north with the sun to her right and getting dimmer and dimmer.

  I got dressed again and drove back and it was finished. That was the last thing Mary ever said to me, spoken a couple of days after she died.

  She was not going to get back together with me at all; then she heard how sick I was in Uganda, and she thought the disease might have changed me. (It has. What does it matter about people at the “end of the earth” if you cannot be good to your own people, most of all to your own family?)

  Taking off.

  We are airborne at last. Oh, Mary! Mary starlight!

  * * *

  Langi and I will take Adam to his grandfather’s, then come back and stay with Mark (Brisbane or Melbourne) until he is well enough to come home.

  The stewardess is serving lunch, and for the first time since it happened, I think I may be able to eat more than a mouthful. One stewardess, twenty or thirty people, which is all this plane will hold. News of the shark attack is driving tourists off the island.

  As you see, I can print better with my left hand. I should be able to write eventually. The back of my right hand itches, even though it is gone. I wish I could scratch it.

  Here comes the food.

  An engine has quit. Pilot says no danger.

  He is out there, swimming beside the plane. I watched him for a minute or more until he disappeared into a thunderhead. “The tree is my hat.” Oh, God.

  Oh my God!

  My blood brother.

  What can I do?

  Edward Bryant

  STYX AND BONES

  Edward Bryant is another writer who wears many hats (though, as Jar as I know, no cowboy hat—though he does live in Denver and was raised in Wyoming). For a long time he has been a respected reviewer for Locus magazine, where his specialty is this field, and he has occasionally—but not often enough—turned out short stories with a technical facility that is to be envied. He is another in the long list of writers who migrated from science fiction to horror, but has never left his roots behind and has managed to make both fields his comfortable home. His early, highly regarded science fiction work such as Cinnabar, a series of linked stories about a future California on a dying Earth, eventually gave way to equally well regarded work in the horror genre, the latest example of which is the following a bone-chilling (yes, that’s a pun, but also a literal description) example of the classic love-revenge tale.

  He dreamed he woke up dead.

  Dead. Crushed. Every nerve pulled excruciatingly away from each muscle and each shattered bone. Awake and dead.

  That was the confusion. The contradiction didn’t occur to him until later. Much later. Now was only the pain.

  Christ, he thought. What’s wrong? It hurt so very much, and the least of the agony was a wasp drilling through his inner ear. He tried to reach to block the sound, but that motion only cranked the pain to a level that nauseated him. He couldn’t raise his arms anyway.

  Not a wasp. No … The noise was the telephone on the bedside table. He grabbed for it instinctively—tried to grab, could not. What was wrong with his arms? He bucked against the mattress, the tan print comforter sliding away from his lower body. Legs slipped off the mattress, feet slapping against the carpet and the slick mess of spilled magazines.

  He smelled something heavy and terrible.

  The sheet stuck to him as his body, levered upright, lurched against the bed table. His left arm swung around loosely, hand smacking the phone. It felt like incandescent steel wire flaring up molten inside his shoulder. He screamed.

  The telephone tumbled to the floor as the handset swung around the base of the banker’s lamp. The receiver jiggled up and down as if the coiled cord were the hemp rope dangling someone newly executed.

  If he could have gotten his breath he might have cried. He heard the modulated wasp buzzing coming from the telephone earpiece. The tone was familiar and angry. He knew who it was. It didn’t matter.

  He needed help and so he sank to his knees attempting to align his face with the receiver.

  “—the fuck are you doing, jerkweed?” the tinny voice was saying. “Too early for you? I told you last night I was coming over today to pick up my stuff.”

  His voice caught on a sob. “I need help,” he gasped out. “Please.”

  Silence. Then the tenor of her voice changed. Curiosity and alarm replaced the fury with the suddenness of a carousel projector clicking ahead to the next slide. “Danny? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t move.”

  “You’re paralyzed?”

  “No, no. My arms. They don’t work. And it hurts,” he said. “It hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “Is this a goddamn trick?” she said. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes,” he said, voice catching on a sob he couldn’t help. “Louisa, I swear to God something’s really, really wrong.”

  “I’m on my way,” she said.

  “You got your key?” Danny said. “I can’t unlock the door.”

  “I’ve got the key,” Louisa answered. “I was gonna sharpen it like a razor and cut your balls off.” Her voice sounded perfectly controlled. “I’m leaving now, baby. Hang on.”

  Danny heard the click as she set down her phone. He listened as the computerized phone company warning came, then the ear-rasping alert tone, finally silence on the line. Even if he used his teeth, there was no way he could hang up his phone.

  He tried to sit up straight on the edge of the bed, wishing he were anywhere else, anyone else.

  What’s happened to me? he thought. Was he whining? Of course he was whining. It hurt too damned much to be brave.

  In the twenty minutes it took for Louisa to drive over, he managed to stagger downstairs to the kitchen. It was a cold, cold January morning and something had obviously happened to the heat. A few wisps of warmth emanated from the register just inside the kitchen. He stood there quietly, aching, attempting to soak up what furnace air he could.

  He heard the front door open and close.

  “Danny?” she called.

  “In the kitchen.”

  He listened to the steps approach. He wanted to shut his eyes. Louisa poked her head through the kitchen doorway and surveyed him, eyes wide, head to feet. “Danny, sweetie, you are a mess.” Her voice sounded sincere but amazed. She wrinkled her nose.

  He knew how he appeared, standing naked save for his soiled briefs, back against the register, hands dangling in front of him with the thumbs locked together, liquid excrement drying in thin rivulets down his legs to the floor. Louisa shook her head. She involuntarily reached out toward him. As soon as her fingertips touched his arm, he cried out. She jerked back. “It hurts that much?” He nodded, jaws clenched. “You called a doctor?” He shook his head. “No,” she said, “I guess you really couldn’t.” Louisa looked up at him from her five-feet-even vantage, chocolate eyes serious beneath the pixie-cut raven bangs. “First thing, maybe get you cleaned up a little?”

  He nodded. “It’s gotta help. Then call Dr. King.”

  “Call Dr. King now,” she said. “Bath’ll wait.”

  “Phone’s upstairs,” he said. “I couldn’t hang it up.”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Louisa said soothingly. “Don’t you worry.”

  She followed him up the stairs. The cats were nowhere to be seen. He didn’t blame them.

  In the bedroom she unwound the receiver cord from around the lamp, then stood contemplating the bed. “We gotta get that cleaned up quick. Doctor’ll wait. No one’ll be able to live in this house with that stink.”

  “My briefs and the sheets,” he said. “Just seal ‘em in a plastic garbage bag and set them out in the trash. The comforter’s expensive—maybe you can throw it over the picnic table in the backyard and let it dry. Then put it in another bag and I’ll have it dry-cleaned.”

  She nodded and gingerly rolled the down comforter into a loose cylinder. “Bags in the kitchen?”

  “In the broo
m closet.”

  In a few minutes Louisa was back with black mylar bags into which she matter-of-factly stuffed the soiled sheets. “Those too.” She pointed at his briefs.

  “They aren’t much,” he protested. “But it’s cold up here.”

  “They’re gross,” she said evenly. “After you’re clean you can wear a nice warm robe.”

  He tried to put his thumbs beneath the waistband. He couldn’t. “What about Dr. King?”

  She grabbed the waistband and skinned the briefs down his legs. “I changed my mind again. The doc can wait. You need some attention first.”

  There were two bathrooms in the house, both on the second floor. Only one had a tub and shower. Danny stepped into the tub and braced himself as she twisted the water knob. Nothing happened. “No pressure,” she said. “No water at all.”

  “I should have let the faucets drip last night,” he said. “I’ll bet the pipes are frozen.”

  “Downstairs too?”

  He started to shrug. Stopped. “It may be okay down there.”

  “I’ll check. You stay here.” In a minute she yelled from the foot of the stairs, “Water’s running down here. I’ll be up in a second.” Actually it took quite a few seconds, but she started her own solo bucket brigade of saucepans full of steaming tap water.

  He yelled as the first half gallon of what felt like scalding water cascaded down his back.

  “Don’t be a baby,” she said. “You’re just cold. I’ve checked the temperature. It’ll be all right.” Louisa poured another panful, then wet a washrag and began to scrub him down. After the first few shocks, he had to admit the water felt good. With his hands locked thumb to thumb in front of him, he stared down at the brown eddy swirling in the drain. He felt more water, more scrubbing. Eventually the draining water ran clear.