That only left conspiracy, but I couldn’t imagine how it would be possible.
Nevertheless, my exercise in logic made me feel a little better, and in spite of the voices and in spite of a sleepless night, I got caught up in work and by early afternoon, I realized I’d forgotten all about the tape. That realization reminded me of the tape, of course, and I laughed, and everyone gave me a funny look, and I just shook my head and said, “Nothing. Sorry. Just a thought. Nothing.”
For dinner, I stopped in at the same restaurant where I had had breakfast. Then I went home and wandered around the house picking things up and putting them down again. I turned on the TV.
TV was often my meditation. The challenge was to make a coherent program out of a single utterance or exclamation or exploding building or whatever from each channel. No matter what was happening, you could linger on a channel no longer than a sentence. You had to pay attention, and it took hours to get a meaningful exchange, but once I did get a something meaningful, everything fell into place. The universe became a Buddha smile, and I reached a place of blue clarity. Hours passed, and while I could not remember exactly what the experience had been about, I felt as if I’d accomplished something by the time I stopped and pushed the dirty dishes to one side so I could rinse a glass and pour a couple of fingers of scotch and put a fresh tape on the fancy recording machine in the bedroom. I could have just recorded over the old one, but I wanted to avoid ambiguity. I gulped down the scotch, brushed my teeth and undressed. I switched on the recorder, and got into bed.
“I’m going to sleep now,” I said out loud so I’d have a reference point. I snuggled deeper into the covers and passed through the bed and into a dream in which all the people I had lost to death were back again, but changed. Not exactly zombies, just back and a little different. In the dream I had to make allowances for them. I’d say things like, “You’ll have to excuse her, she’s been dead.” I’d say things like, “The way he moves certainly is not creepy, he was dead only yesterday.” They would all come over to my house where I would feed them and teach them things and they would pretend they didn’t know me and wouldn’t seem the least bit grateful for my help, but I would forgive them because they’d been dead and were now trying to get back into the swing of things.
The next morning I called in sick. Judy, who took my call, wasn’t surprised. “You didn’t look so hot yesterday,” she told me.
I popped open a beer and rewound the tape.
Forward, pause, play. Snort, moan, honk, fart, shuffle, shift, yada yada yada. Forward, pause, play.
“He’s paralyzed,” the woman whispered.
“How can you tell?” the man asked.
“Look at his eyes moving,” she said. “There is a mechanism that paralyzes his body when he dreams. Otherwise he might get up and walk around.”
The man chuckled.
“Careful with that,” the woman said.
“I just need to rest,” the man said.
“You shouldn’t . . .”
“Shush,” the man said.
She sighed. “Okay, make room for me, too,” she whispered. “Careful with the covers. Okay, I’ll take the front. Easy, now, easy.”
“If he wakes up now,” the man whispered, “he’ll be looking right into your face.”
“Hmmm,” she said.
“Can he smell your breath?”
“Hmmm,” she said.
“I’m going to pinch him.”
“Don’t!”
“Just joking,” the man whispered.
Then nothing.
My heart was beating too fast. I listened to the silence and small night sounds until my beer was gone. I crushed the can and stood up and hit the fast-forward button.
The voices didn’t occur on the tape again.
I checked all the windows and all the doors but I knew they were okay. When I got home, I always made a quick tour of the house to make sure there were no intruders lurking. I always locked the bathroom door before getting into the shower. I didn’t go to bed without putting the security chain on. The movies have trained us not to make too many stupid mistakes. I had always felt secure in my own house. I’d lived there for years. I knew every inch of the place.
I went around carefully tapping all the walls looking for secret passages. I knew it was stupid. I just couldn’t think of anything else to do. There was no way anyone could get in when I was asleep. How would they know when I was asleep in the first place?
I needed a second opinion. I had to let someone else listen to the tape. But who could I trust? Maybe a stranger would be better. But how would I get a stranger to listen to a tape and how could I trust what they said?
I knew who should listen to the tape. I had known from the moment I came up with the idea that someone should listen to it. I sat there staring down at my shoes, saying over and over again, “Just do it. Just do it.” Okay. I got up and ran the tape back to the points just before the woman first spoke. I took it out of the machine and put it in a box and wrapped the box and addressed it to Joanna at her office. I didn’t know where she was living.
I wrote a note. “Joanna, please listen to this and tell me what you hear.”
I called the messenger service I sometimes used at work. An hour later the messenger arrived, and I gave him the tape and some money.
There were other things I could do while I waited. I put a fresh tape in the machine. I found a sack of flour back behind my new spices. I could spread it all over the bedroom floor and see if there were footprints in the morning. I opened the bag. But wait. If I spread the flour now, I would probably step in it many times on my way to the bathroom, which reminded me to open another beer. I took the beer and the flour into the bedroom. I put the flour down by the recorder. I would spread it just before bed. Maybe Joanna would have called before then, though. Maybe whatever she had to say would solve the problem.
“Oh, yeah,” I’d say. “That’s it. Boy, is my face red. I should have thought of it myself.”
I could do something else, too, but it would take more courage. I could leave them a message. The danger in that was that they didn’t seem to know that I could hear them. What would they do if they found out? I was completely helpless in their company. Maybe I shouldn’t let them know that I knew. I was a kind of eavesdropper, really. Maybe they wouldn’t like it.
They might find out anyway. One of these nights, they might notice the tape machine. And surely if I spread flour all over the floor it would tip them off.
The day passed. I ate stuff from cans for lunch. I got no reply from Joanna. I must be pretty far down on her priority list these days.
I couldn’t find anything else to eat for dinner so I skipped it. There was still beer, but not too much.
I meditated with the TV for a few hours but never could achieve meaning. Around eleven I decided I really would leave them a message. It was night again and too quiet and bedtime and I had to do something. I tore a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote, “Who are you?” in big bold letters.
Now what? Should I pin it to my chest? What if they didn’t find it? I wadded the paper up and tossed it in the trash.
I could write really big letters on the wall.
I dug through kitchen drawers but found nothing I could use to make big letters. I checked the bathroom. Women never leave a place without a trace. Maybe there would be a lipstick. There wasn’t. So much for generalizations.
I had pink stomach stuff but it looked too runny, and I had colorless roll-on deodorant, so the wall wouldn’t sweat, but you’d have to smell the country fresh letters to puzzle out the message.
Ah ha. An old old bottle of tincture of merthiolate. Good god, I bought that before I met Abby. What was the expiration date? Most of the label was gone, but it looked like 1980. I had put the stuff on countless cuts. It still had a nice sting to it. This was one of those products that one bottle lasts you a lifetime. The company had probably gone out of business.
I stood on the b
ed and, using the little plastic applicator, started my message again on the wall. Rats. The applicator was too small. It would take forever. I poured merthiolate into my hand and smacked my hand onto the wall and dragged it down and up and down and up in a big dripping orange double-u. Okay. The rest went pretty quickly.
Who are you?
If they looked at me, and I seemed to be pretty much all they did look at, they could not fail to see my message.
My hands were orange. The orange stain wouldn’t come off with soap and water. To hell with it.
How about the flour?
Okay, okay. But do it carefully. Get undressed first. Start at the bathroom door and work your way back to the bed. Yes, like that. When you get to the bed just toss the empty flour sack out of the bedroom and get into bed. That’s it. Nothing could move across there without leaving a mark. Good. Good. Goddamn it, you forgot to pee.
I plopped down on the bed. I tossed the empty flour sack over the side. I took a deep breath. Then I walked straight across the flour to the bathroom. One straight path. I would use the same one coming back. Anything off that path would be my visitors.
Except that after I used the bathroom and carefully walked back to the bed, I realized I would need one more path to the dresser so I could turn on the recorder. Okay, one more. I walked to the dresser, turned on the machine, and walked back to the bed. Two paths. Footprints going in both directions. I got into bed.
I stared up at the ceiling, feeling like an absolute idiot. I would have to get up and make another path if I wanted to turn off the light. I got up and walked to the light switch and flipped it off. Then I made my way back in the dark. I knew I was not keeping a straight path. And as I walked, it occurred to me to wonder how they would see my message in the dark. I had probably ruined the wall for nothing. I stopped and closed my eyes to think about it. If they could see me, they could probably see the wall, but what about the orange letters? Would orange letters be visible to ghosts who could see in the dark? Maybe it would be like red light to fish. You put a red light in your aquarium and the fish all think it’s night and you can watch them and they don’t know you’re watching.
I opened my eyes and stumbled forward and saw the street glow through the bathroom window and realized that I’d gotten way off the path back to the bed. The flour seemed mostly pointless now.
I turned, and then stood peering through the dark at the bed. It didn’t look entirely empty. Those shapes could be my pillows. The slight movement I saw, like the quivering of a horse after a good run, might be just the kind of thing you see in the dark. I took a step back.
“Aren’t you coming to bed,” she said.
I cried out.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Joanna?”
“I heard the tape of you snoring,” she whispered. “Kind of a strange apology, but what the hell. Come on, hop in. It’s late.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. She put her cool hand on my shoulder. I crawled in beside her. She pulled me in close.
“Is that really you, Joanna?” I asked.
“Of course, it isn’t, you moron,” the man behind me said.
#
From Ray Vukcevich‘s Meet Me in the Moon Room a collection of 33 strange and wonderful short fictions.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in January 2001.
TERRY DOWLING
Terence William (Terry) Dowling (born 21 March 1947), is an Australian writer, freelance journalist, award-winning critic, editor, game designer and reviewer. He writes primarily speculative fiction and dark fantasy though he considers himself an "imagier" - one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called "among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path (one mapped ahead, it is true, by Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard and Jack Vance.
He is Australia's most awarded writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He is author of Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach (the Tom Rynosseros saga); Wormwood, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, and Blackwater Days; and co-editor of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF and The Essential Ellison.
Dowling's stories have appeared locally in such magazines asOmega Science Digest, Australian Short Stories, Aphelion, Eidolon, and Aurealis and anthologies as diverse asDreaming Down Under, Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction, Alien Shores, The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories and The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Overseas publications include The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Ténèbres, Ikarie, Event Horizon, and Japan's SF; and appearances in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Horror.
The Lagan Fishers, by Terry Dowling
In the first week of September, a lagan bloom appeared in the south meadow below Sam Cadrey's kitchen window, and that was the day it felt real at last.
Something glinting in the morning sunlight caught his eye as he stood making coffee—dislodged hubcap, plastic drum lid, discarded garbage bag, he couldn't be sure—something close to the road but definitely on his property. When he hurried down to see what it was, there was no mistaking the glossy quatrefoil of tartarine pushing up through the lucerne like an old bore cover made of fused glass. He kicked at the shell of opalescent stuff, beat on it a few times, then stood wondering how much his life would change.
Sam knew his rights. They couldn't take his farm back, he was sure of that. When that small container of mioflarin—MF—illegally buried in the Pyrenees had leaked in 2029, poisoning so much of Europe, then the rest of the world, he'd become that rare and wondrous thing, a true global hero: one of the twenty-two volunteers sent in to cap it, one of the five who had survived Site Zero and made it out again. Sam had freehold in perpetuity, and the World Court in Geneva had decreed that lagan blooms were land-title pure and simple. Sure, there were local magistrates, local ordinances and local prejudices to reckon with, but the Quarantine was officially over, the last of the embargoes lifted—both made a laughing stock by the sheer extent of the bloom outbreaks and their consistently benign nature. A disfigured, forty-nine-year-old MF veteran and widower on a UN life pension had recourse to legal aid as well. Looking down at the four-lobed curving hump of the bloom, Sam knew he was king of all that he surveyed and that, in all probability, his kingdom would be an alien domain for the next year or so.
Within fourteen minutes, orbiting spysats had logged it. Within forty, Mayor Catherine was in her living room with their local Alien Influences Officer, Ross Jimmins, to log the official registration, and a dozen lagan fishers were at the end of his drive waiting to bid for trawling rights. Protection agents and insurance reps were at his door too, offering assistance against the usual: everything from highly organized looters to salting by disgruntled neighbors. But Sam was a UN vet. Within the hour, there were two AIO lagan custodians at his front gate wearing blue arm-bands, and the usually strident hucksters pacing up and down the gravel drive had become unusually courteous.
"How soon before the hedges form?" Sam asked Mayor Catherine, sounding both cautious and eager, still not sure about the whole thing. Catherine was the closest thing to a rocket scientist Tilby had, a handsome, middle-aged woman with steel-grey hair, looking the perfect, latter-day nasa-chik in her navy-blue jumpsuit. The NASA look. The imprimatur of discipline and professional responsibility. Who would have thought?
"It's still three to four days," she said, taking the AIO notepad from Jimmins and adding her verification code. "Latest count, fourteen per cent of blooms don't hold. Remember that, Sam. They sink back."
"That's not many though," Ross Jimmins said, reassuring him, wishing Sam well with every puff on his lagan-dross day-pipe. The pipe was carved from lagan horn, a length of hollowed lattice from a "living" hedge. As well as the wonderful fragrance the slow-combusting dross gave of
f, somewhere between gardenia and the finest aromatic tobaccos of the previous four centuries, there was a welter of other positive side-effects, and the molecularly atrophying horn itself scattered its own immune-enhancing dusting of euphorines on the warm morning air.
"It is like some intelligence is behind it," Sam said, looking out through the big view window, and knew how inane it sounded coming from him, the Tilby Tiger, the great skeptic.
Catherine gave a wry smile. "It's good to have you back in the world. We lost you there for a while."
"At least Jeanie didn't see me like this." Sam had resolved he wouldn't say it, but there it was.
The Mayor looked off at the fields and hills, out to where a tiny orange bus was bringing more science students from the local high school to do a real-time, hands-on site study of early bloom effect. "Jeanie didn't and it's not what I meant, Sam." She changed her tone. "So, what are you going to do about it? Lease it out?"
Sam was grateful. "You think I should? Let them wall it off, rig up processing gantries? Put storage modules down there?" Stop me seeing it, he didn't add.
"Best way. Nothing is lost but spindrift through the flumes. You get the hedges; they get the lagan. There's no poaching and none of the hassles."
"You representing anybody?" Sam asked. He'd always been a wary and even harsh critic where the lagan was concerned. It had always been someone else's experience, the reality of others, thus easy to comment on. This had changed him—what was the quaint old fin-de-siècle saying?—had made it "up close and personal."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 87
