Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I came to with a start and found Annie sitting beside me. I tried to speak and made a cawing sound—my mouth was dry as dust, and I felt a throbbing pain in my lower back and shoulders. She stared at me with, I thought, a degree of fondness, but the first thing she said was, "'Pears I was right about the door."

  I tried to sit up, and the throbbing intensified.

  "I got the bleeding stopped," she said. "But you're pretty tore up. I cleaned you best I could. Used up all my Bactine. But that was a damn dirty thing what sliced you. Could be the wounds are goin' to get infected."

  I raised my head—the beardsley was gone, and the door shut tight. "Where are we?" I asked.

  "Same as before," she said. "'Cept the mountains look bigger. The beardsleys flew off somewhere. Guess they drank their fill."

  "Help me get up, will ya?"

  "You oughta lie down."

  "I don't wanna stiffen up," I said. "Gimme a hand."

  As I hobbled around the car, I remembered the clutch of the beardsley's sail and thought how lucky I'd been. Annie kept by my side, supporting me. I told her about how I'd felt a human vibe off the beardsley in the moments before I killed it, and what I thought that meant.

  "It probably didn't mean nothin'," she said. "You were scared to death. You liable to think almost anything, a time like that."

  "Yeah," I said. "But this was real strong."

  "So what? " she said. "So it was human, so what? Who cares what it means? You ain't never gon' figure it out. Ain't no point in tryin'. Hell, that's one reason I come with you. I couldn't listen to people's harebrained theories no more. I wanted to go where there's somethin' more constructive to do than sit around and contemplate my goddamn navel."

  "You didn't see what I saw," I told her. "You had, you'd be curious too."

  "Fine," she said. "It's a stunnin' development. The beardsleys are human. What's it all fuckin' mean? I won't rest til I get to the bottom of it."

  "Jesus, Annie," I said. "I was just speculatin'."

  "Well, save it! If we survive this ride, maybe I'll be interested. But right now I got more and better to think about."

  I said, "All right."

  She peeked at my shoulders and said, "Oh, God! You're bleedin' again. Come on. Sit back down, lemme see what I can do."

  · · · · ·

  In the morning I pushed open the door and had a look round. The mountains loomed above us. Granite flanks rising into fangs of snow and ice that themselves vanished into fuming dark clouds, fans of windblown ice blown into semi-permanent plumes from the scarps. Back in Yonder, the mountains had seemed huge, but viewed up close they were the roots of a world, the bottom of a place boundless and terrible, a border between trouble and emptiness. Their names, if they had names, would be violent hatcheting sounds followed by a blast of wind. They offered no hint of happy promise. A chill bloomed inside me from a recognition of my folly, of having given up on Yonder and put Annie and myself in the way of far worse. But when Annie came to stand beside me, all I said was, "Looks like it's gon' get cold."

  She stood gazing up at the mountains and said, "Yeah, looks like." She went over to the sleeping bags and dug a down jacket out of her pack.

  On the outside of the car, next to the door, were several gouges that appeared to be scabbing over with filmy black stuff, the golden congealed blood showing through. I glanced at the mountains again and thought I saw a flash of lightning in the clouds,

  "Close the door," Annie said. "We'll be there soon enough. Ain't no use in starin' at it."

  I slid the door shut and sat beside her. "It's just mountains," I said.

  She gave a sniff of laughter. "Yeah, and Godzilla's just tall."

  "I'm sorry. I'm sorry if this turns out wrong. I didn't … It felt right to leave."

  "I ain't gon' blame you. I coulda stayed." Then after a pause, she said, "I'm glad I didn't stay. I couldn't tolerate Yonder no more."

  That surprised me a little, though I'd expected she would come around to admitting it eventually. "We probably don't go way high up in 'em," I said. "Tracks wouldn't get built that high."

  "They ain't real tracks and nobody built 'em."

  "Well, yeah. There's that." I tried to think of something comforting to say. "'Member the Wizard of Oz. How he had this fearsome voice, but he turned out to be a little fat guy and the voice was fake? The mountains are probably like that."

  "Dorothy and the Scarecrow," she said dispiritedly. "That's us, all right." She worked a hand in down among the clothes in her pack and pulled out a deck of cards. "Wanna play some gin?"

  So we ate jungleberries to calm our nerves and played cards as the train ascended into the mountains, going over the Wall. We played for a dollar a point, double for gin, and after a while we began to joke and laugh, and for the most part forgot about the wind, which had started howling around the car, and the cold that was gradually seeping inside. Annie kicked my butt for the first hour, but then I had a run of luck and went up several hundred dollars. I dumped the next game to bring us closer to even, and as I shuffled and dealt the cards, I thought of other rides we'd taken both separately and together, beat-up and fucked-up, drunk and stoned, sick and afraid, and how it seemed all that had been preparation for this ride up into wherever. Maybe it had been a form of preparation, maybe the world was so painstaking and intricate in its wisdom that part of its process was to prepare those who failed it for a wild ride into an unknown land. But Annie was right. True or not, it was useless knowledge. It was the kind of thing you did not need to live. The arguments of doctrine and the study of philosophy, they might or might not have validity, but the only functions they served were either to exercise the mind or, if pursued to excess, to blind you to the bitterness of life and keep you from the more joyful practices necessary to withstand it.

  "Hey," said Annie, beaming. "Guess what?"

  "What?" I said.

  She spread out her hand for me to see. "Gin!"

  · · · · ·

  Midway through the game, I had to piss, and when I cracked the door to do so, I found we were rolling slowly through a whitish fog so thick I could barely make out the wheels of the train. Apparently we were down in some sort of declivity, shielded from the wind, because it was howling louder than ever. I thought it must have been breaking off enormous ledges of snow—audible above the howling were explosive noises such as accompany avalanches. Half-frozen, I finished my business and ducked back inside.

  "What's it like out there?" Annie asked.

  "Like a whole buncha nothin'. Got some serious fog." I sat back down, watched her deal. "We must be down in a pocket."

  Done with dealing, Annie studied her cards, glanced at me, and said, "Your turn."

  I picked up my hand, made a stab at arranging it. "Fog's not even driftin'. You'd think with all the wind, it'd find some way to blow a little bit down where we are."

  "Got any threes?" she asked, and laid down a three.

  I started to pick up the card, changed my mind, and drew from the deck. "Maybe it ain't all wind. Maybe it's somethin' else goin' on that sounds like wind."

  "C'mon, Billy," she said. "Play a card. Even if it's the last thing I do, I'm gonna beat you silly."

  There came a noise, then. A shriek … except it didn't come from any throat. It was more an electronic note edged with bursts of static, and it was loud—loud as a police siren suddenly switched on behind you. We dropped the cards, scrambled farther away from the door, and as we did, the shriek sounded again and a brilliant white flash cut a diagonal seam across the door, like someone was outside and swinging a magnesium torch at the car. The heat that came with it had that kind of intensity. The walls of the car rippled, the floor humped beneath us. For a fraction of a second, the seam glowed too brightly to look at, but it faded quickly, and we saw that a rip had been sliced in the door, leaving an aperture about six inches wide and three feet long. I heard distant shrieks, identical to the one I'd initially heard, and thereafter a tremendous explosion that
reminded me in its magnitude of dynamite charges I'd set when working highway construction the summer after high school. Whatever the car was made of—skin, metal, plastic, a combination of things—its torn substance had been somehow sealed, cauterized, and there was not the slightest seepage of golden blood. We heard more explosions and shrieks, but when after a few minutes nothing else struck the car, we went over to the rip and peered through it. Annie gasped, and I said, "Jesus …" Then, both inspired to act at the same time, we slid the door wide open so we could get a better look at where we were bound.

  What I saw I need to describe carefully, slowly, though I seemed to see and absorb it all at once. We were barreling along a snow-covered valley, featureless except for boulders that jutted up here and there, a rift that ran straight as a highway between rows of mountains, a diminishing perspective of giants, brothers to the ones ranged along the plain. They were set close together, without any linkage between them, no ridges or shoulders that merged one into another, and this placement made them seem artificial, a landscape that had been created without the restraints of inorganic logic. Cliff faces of black rock broke from their icy slopes. Beneath the smoky clouds that shrouded the peaks, the sky was alive with bright flying things—blazing golden-white, they might have been sparks shaped into the raggedy images of birds. They wheeled and whirled and curvetted everywhere, sounding their electric voices. There were so many, it amazed me that they did not constantly collide. Every now and then a group of several hundred would form into a flock and arrow down to strike the cliff faces, disappearing like a beam of light into a void, and thereafter, following the briefest of intervals, an explosion would occur, producing not fragments of rock and gouts of fire, but violet rays that streamed off toward the end of the valley in the direction we were headed. I had the feeling that I was watching the operation of a vast engine designed to create those rays, but what the rays were fueling—if that's what they were doing—was so far outside the scope of my experience, I had no way to interpret it.

  Once when I was drunk in Kalispell, flush from the sale of some copper wire I'd stolen from the freight yard there, I wandered into a souvenir shop and became interested in the mineral samples they sold. What especially caught my eye was a vial of black opals immersed in water, and after studying them for a while, glossy black stones that each contained a micro-universe of many-colored flecks of fire, I bought them for fifteen dollars—I would have stolen them, but the clerk had his eye on me. At the far end of the valley the land gave out into a place similar to those depths embedded in the stones, a blackness that appeared one second to be bulging toward us, and the next appeared to be caving in. Countless opalescent flecks trembled within it, and whenever the violet rays penetrated the blackness, it would flicker as with heat lightning and for an instant I would have a glimpse of something that had been obscured. The glimpses were too brief for me to identify the thing, but I had a sense it was a complicated branching structure, and that it went a long way in … Another explosion, and I realized what had happened to the door of our car. As the explosion occurred and a violet ray spat forth, the spark birds closest to it went swerving out of control and tumbled from the sky. Several came swerving low above the train before righting themselves and rejoining the others.

  We gazed at the scene until the cold drove us back inside the car, and then we sat huddled together without speaking. I can't say what was in Annie's mind, but I was more awestruck than afraid. The scale of the mountains, the strangeness of all else—it was too grand to breed true fear, too foreign to inspire other than wonder, and too startling to allow the formation of any plan. Hobos, for all their degenerate failings, have an aesthetic. They're scenery junkies, they take pride in traveling through parts of their country few have ever seen, and they memorialize those sights, whether storing them in their memories or creating more tangible mementos, like SLC with his wall of Polaroids. Sitting around campfires or in squats, they'll swap stories about the natural beauty of the world with the enthusiasm of kids trading baseball cards. Now Annie and I had a story to top anybody's, and though we had no one to tell it to, as if by reflex, I polished the details and dressed up the special effects so if I ever did get the chance, I'd be ready to let the story rip. I was kept so busy doing this—and maybe Annie was, too—I didn't notice the train was slowing until we had dropped more than half our speed. We went to the door, cracked it, and peered out. We were still in the valley, the mountains still lifted on either side, the spark birds were still wheeling in the sky. But the opaline blackness that had posed a horizon to the valley was gone. In place of it was a snow-covered forest beneath an overcast sky and, dividing the forest into two distinct sections, a black river that sprung up out of nowhere and flowed between those sections, as straight in its course as that of the valley between the ranked mountains. It was clear the train was going to stop. We got our packs together and bundled up—despite the freakishness of the forest and river, we figured this was our destination, and were relieved to be alive. When the train came to a full stop, we jumped down from the car and set off across the snow, ducking our heads to avoid the wind, which was still blowing fiercely, our feet punching through the frozen crust and sinking calf-deep.

  The train had pulled up at the end of the line; the tracks gave out beyond the last mountain, about a mile and a half, I judged, from the edge of the forest. The ground ahead of us was gently rolling, the snow mounded into the shape of ocean swells, and the forest, which looked to be dominated by oaklike trees with dark trunks and heavy iced crowns, had a forbidding aspect, resembling those enchanted and often perilous forests illustrated in the children's books that the old Billy Long Gone had turned to now and then, wanting to read something but unable to do more than sound out a few of the words. When we reached the engine I took the can of spray paint Pie had given me and wrote on the side:

  "Wanna add somethin'?" I asked Annie.

  She studied on it, then took the can and wrote:

  "A test, huh?" I took back the can and stowed it.

  "I been thinkin' about it," she said. "And that's what I figure it is. It just feels that way."

  "Here you always talkin' 'bout you can't stand theories, and now you got one of your own."

  "It ain't a theory if you're livin' it," she said. "It's a tool for making decisions. And from now on I'm lookin' at all this like it's a test." She helped me rebuckle the straps of my pack. "Let's go."

  We had walked about two-thirds of the distance between the end of the tracks and the forest when one of the mounds of snow on our left shifted and made a low grumbling noise, like something very large waking with mean things on its mind. It was so sudden an interruption to the winded silence, we froze. Almost immediately, another mound shifted and grumbled … and then another.

  "Run!" said Annie, unnecessarily—I was already in motion, not quite running but moving as fast as I could, plunging ahead, my legs going deep into the snow. There was no wonderment in me now, only fear. We thrashed our way through the snow, the wind cutting into our faces, while all around us were shiftings and ugly animal rumbles. We angled toward the left-hand section of forest, a point not far from where the black river sprang from beneath the earth. The trees seemed to inch nearer, and as I glanced behind me to gauge how close pursuit was—if, indeed, something was in pursuit—I tripped and fell. Annie screamed at me to hurry. As I staggered up, fighting for balance, I saw that several of the mounds had risen to their feet. They were heavy-bodied, slothlike, big as delivery vans, with long silky white hair shaggying their thick legs and backs. The hair fell into their faces, which were mushed-in, startlingly human except for their extremely wide mouths. Their eyes, half-hidden, were bright and violet, the same exact shade as the rays that erupted from the cliff faces. One started toward me, waddling slowly, but gaining momentum, and I plunged forward again, my breath steaming out, heart pumping, trying to will myself ahead and into the shadowed avenues among the trees. Even at top speed, apparently, the slothlike creatures
were slow, and I thought we were going to make it. But at the edge of the forest, just as I stumbled almost breathless beneath a low-hanging bough, Annie grabbed my jacket and hauled me to a stop.

  "The river!" She said, gasping. "We gotta go for the river!"

  "You're outa your mind!" I tried to shake her off, but she clung to me.

  "It's a test!" she said. "Like back in Yonder … the mountains looked like the worst option. But we got through 'em. Now the river looks like the worst. That's the way out. I know it!"

  The nearest of the sloths was a couple hundred feet away, and about a dozen more were edging up behind him, all grunting as they came, sounding like stalled engines trying to turn over. I started to run again, but Annie kept a hold on me and dragged me down to my knees beside her.

  "Godammit, Billy!" She shook me. "They can follow us into the forest! But the river … maybe they won't go there!"

  The logic of that penetrated my panic. I dragged her up and we went lurching, half-falling, ploughing toward the bank. But on reaching it, I hesitated. The way it ran straight, like a long black sword laid flat across the land, its point invisible beyond the horizon, dividing everything from nothing. The Styx. Charon. Mythic images of death crowded into my brain. The water was flowing up fast from wherever it came. Snow crusts fallen from the bank floated on it. Cold as it looked, I doubted we'd last more than a minute or so. Beneath the surface were glitterng points that reminded me of the beardsley's eyes. The slothlike creatures lumbered near. Their mouths were partially obscured behind fringes of hair, but they were wide enough to swallow us both without stretching. The shine of their violet eyes stained the snow in front of them, as if they were nothing but energy inside, no guts, no bones, just a furnace of violet glare. Their footfalls made no sound. Freeze or get chewed. It was not an easy choice.