How beautiful the cottony subterranean clouds. How comforting the ubiquitous background hum. How gravity-less my detached downward-trending self. How impenetrable to vision the ganglia curtains through which I waltzing grope or, stumbling, somehow slide. Down, down, down. Glide, slide, glide. The edges of the fog grow darker as the Integer wearing my I pushes through a hairy flap into the vast grey grotto where my own need becomes another's and the night sluices away its dross. . . .
“Roland!”
O, who can hear the siren? Indeed, who can hear himself? And who, who, who do you hope to be when you've stalked ever so irreversibly, ever so tritely and tersely, to the bottom of G.K. Grimalkin's well, and that filmy notional veil drops for a spell behind you . . . ?
My eyes flicker open again. I have a longer view, from a higher vantage, than I've ever had before. I don't feel . . . myself: I don't feel myself at all. I feel better, better than I have in years, even if peculiar aspects of my vision—its sharpness in this artificial twilight, its general acuity—has clearly diminished in just the past fifteen minutes.
No bold purring assails my ears. Indeed, the strains of Cassandra Wilson's sophisticated vocals lick them delicately—yea, deliciously—where before only a magnificent purr held sway.
A great weight depresses me, though, a weight that it occurs to me in my freshly alert state to label “dead.” And the motionlessness of the weight, the cessation of its rhythmic need to massage my thighs, seconds the aptness of this adjective, dead.
Beautiful Paige, in a fetching black dress, casts her shadow over the recliner in which I lounge. An appreciative sort of sound tries to form in my throat, but without success. A look of tentative alarm shines upon her face, glowing under her cheekbones and brow, and she reaches fingers as tentative as her concern toward me, alarming me as well.
“Puh,” I say. “Paige.” Although I deserve congratulations for framing this difficult syllable, I earn none. Her fingers touch the weight at my middle, my new middle, and linger there, stroking.
Then she tilts her head: “Roland, what did you do?”
“I b-beg your pardon,” I manage, almost breathless.
“Something's happened to G.K. Grimalkin, something terrible. What did you do?”
“Fell asleep. J-just feel asleep. He did it—put m-me to sleep—clenching and unclenching his claws, and p-p-purring.”
Paige lifts the weight from me and holds it before her in both hands, its grey-and-white bulk hanging before her like a . . . like an obese beaver still in its smoky pelt . . . like a limp organic pendulum.
I love this woman so much that I must act now with more than human cunning. “I didn't kill him,” I say. “I just kept him company d-during his p-p-purring.”
Paige squints into her poor Grimalkin's face, which I cannot see. “He's not quite dead,” she tells me. “Dead weight or no, he isn't dead. His eyes just flickered, he's breathing faint fishy breaths.”
This news alarms me. “He's s-seventeen, and he's had a stroke.”
She sets the feline body back into my lap, gently. “Roland, how do you know that?”
“The stroke? It j-just stands to r-reason.” And I stroke the alleged stroke victim, as tenderly as Paige set him down.
“Not the stroke diagnosis—his age.”
“Well, you must have t-told me.”
“I'd tell you my darling G.K.'s age no sooner than I'd tell you mine.”
“Then I g-guessed, I g-guess.” She regards me with profound skepticism, even as our hands jointly pet the oblivious tom. “Anyway, Paige, he'll never fully recover. He's m-much too old, and the stroke, g-going by his limpness, hit him f-far too hard.”
She leaves off petting her darling and takes my chin between her thumb and forefinger. “I've never heard you stammer before. What's happened here? What's going on?”
I work to speak super-distinctly: “I'm upset, too. I love old Gilbert Keith nearly as much as you do.”
Kneeling beside the lounger, she breaks into a radiant but melancholy smile. “You must: You've even checked to see what his initials stand for.” Her cool fingers comb my cheek. “Now what?” She widens her moist eyes, but does not succumb to tears.
“Think of the kindest solution you can,” I say.
“Sleep, I suppose. Euthanasia.”
“Yes.”
“It's Saturday evening. No vet's on call tonight. We can hardly wait until Monday, Roland.”
Her “we” has a propitious ring. “I have a pal, an amateur entomologist who has a stock of chloroform at home. We could take G.K. there.”
“How far is that?”
“The northern suburbs.”
She objects to the distance, to taking G.K. out into the October cold, to having him die somewhere other than her apartment. I note that, given G.K.'s nearly comatose state, I could put him to sleep in only minutes by pinching his nostrils until he painlessly—virtually painlessly—expires. Paige recoils a little at this suggestion. Although I refrain from pushing it, I do point out that she could sit with her palm on G.K.'s head, as his nurse and keeper, until such time as his final shudder signaled his demise.
For five minutes, considering this proposal, she lays her face against the imposter's back; and, with Paige in this position, I exert all my frail male will—my frail, male, human will—to maintain even a modicum of bodily decorum. Although chronologically older than I was only moments ago, I am now a prime procreative specimen.
Paige looks up. “What you must do,” she charges me, “do quickly.”
I lean forward, kiss her forehead, and obey. As I do so, a purr gathers aggressively in my chest. I prudently suppress it, knowing that I won't have to squelch it forever. After all, with my love of loves, I have just embarked upon my tenth and most promising life.
—for my son Jamie, on whose notes this story is based
Michael Bishop's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in almost all the major fantasy and science fiction periodicals: Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Asimov's Science Fiction, Interzone, Pulphouse, Amazing, Science Fiction Age, etc.). His novels include No Enemy But Time, Ancient of Days, Unicorn Mountain, The Secret Ascension (a.k.a. Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas), and Brittle Innings among many others. Currently, he has several literary projects in the works, including a collection of Georgia-based stories, Other Arms Reach Out to Me and a strange thing called A Day in the Life of Annabel Dash.
* * *
MY TRUE LOVECRAFT GAVE TO ME
by Eric Lis
Dear Mr. Kugelmacher,
This letter is to inform you of my resignation. As you know, I have spent the last fifteen years of my life working in your department store, from the age of twelve when I was hired as a stock boy, to my years spent in the jewellery department, to my time in management. I have loved working here, and I am very sorry to leave, but I fear that if I remain any longer, my health and my sanity will be forfeit. Perhaps if I explain the events of the last two weeks, it will become clearer why I have to quit.
It all began some twelve days ago, when Mr. Austin, one of your regular customers, came to the store. Because I happened to be on the floor at the time, I walked over to him to say hello and ask if I could help him. Mr. Austin had something of a manic air about him, and animatedly told me that he had conceived of the perfect holiday gift. I remember smiling at him in a friendly and encouraging manner, as this sounded quite profitable, and assured him that we would almost certainly have whatever it was he was looking for. What did he ask me to show him, you may ask? The Pets Department, of all places. More bemused than perplexed, I walked there with him, where he spent some minutes examining the birds before proclaiming that we did not have the right type. We have a fine selection of birds, as one would expect from your store. . . parrots, budgies, canaries, cockatiels, finches, macaws, and even pigeons that month, but Mr. Austin insisted that only one type of bird would do: a partridge. I immediately saw my error. . . clearly, he was looking for something to serve at a
meal, and not a pet, despite his initial request. Why else would someone wish to buy a pheasant at the holidays? Well, we had no pheasant in stock in our food department, but because he was a long-time and loyal customer, I arranged with Ordering that they would procure him some quails, which he seemed to feel would be sufficiently close. It would be expensive for us to order the twelve quails he says that he absolutely must have, but that is what we do as a quality shop. I later overheard that on his way out, he had stopped in gardening and purchased some twelve Pyrus communis saplings. At the time, I took the recurrence of this number to be a coincidence, but in retrospect, I see this was too much to hope for.
The very next day, Mr. Austin returned. He had a haggard look to him but the same manic energy. I again greeted him and asked what I might help him with, and to my confusion, he again asked to see the pets department, and the birds. He became extremely agitated after looking through the wares. Without explaining what he was looking for, denying only that he was looking for more quails, he asked me to take him to the food department once more. When we got there, he asked if he could order Streptopelia turtur. Imagine my shock! Here was this gentleman asking our food department to order doves for him. Well, this simply would not do. I asked if he might be happy with some pigeons, and he considered it and said he would need twenty-two of them. I confess I was speechless! Sensing that perhaps logic was not Mr. Austin's first priority, I led him to the book department, where I took up an encyclopaedia and looked up Streptopelia turtur to see if I could find something similar we might provide him, and to my good fortune, the solution was in the book department itself. I sent him home with twenty-two copies of Down in the Bottomlands and imagined—indeed, hoped—that I had seen the last of him.
The very next day, however, Mr. Austin was back. He looked haggard and dishevelled, as though he had not slept, and it appeared that he might be wearing the very same clothes which, on reflection, he had worn to the store the previous two days. This time, I made certain I was the first employee to reach him, not to say hello, but for fear of what new strangeness he would ask. My fears were allayed, fortunately, when he said simply that he was here to order some chickens. This made sense, at least. . . quails, even twelve of them, would not feed a large dinner, as I had decided Austin planned to host for the holiday. Even when he said he required thirty of them, I merely smiled, and nodded, and ensured that he paid in advance, and hustled him out of the store as quickly as possible. On his way out, though, Mr. Austin paused, as though deep in thought, and asked us if we sold blackbirds. I apologized and said we did not, and to lighten the moment, asked if perhaps he wanted four and twenty of them baked into pies. He replied that no, raw would be fine, which somehow left me chilled to the marrow. He did not return the next day, but did the day following, his clothes torn, his face covered in scratches, and several black feathers stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Seeing that he was drawing stares from other customers, I hurriedly took him to the jewellery department, sold him the forty gold rings he insisted on purchasing (and very nearly clearing out our stock, might I add), and sent him off home as quickly as I possibly could.
From this point on, the situation rapidly degraded. I made certain that I was by the main entrance every day at precisely the same time, so that when Mr. Austin arrived, as he invariably did, I could meet him and bring him around to the side of the store where he would not upset the other customers. To tell the truth, though it goes against my every instinct as a merchant, I very nearly sent him away when he showed up on that sixth day, reeking and dirty, asking us to provide him with no fewer than forty-two live geese, but he paid in cash, and who am I to say how many birds he needs to feed his guests during the holidays? Perhaps he is preparing food for a hundred men, I thought, or donating fifty meals to orphanages. Conscious of everything you had taught me, sir, I persuaded him to accept frozen geese together with eight cartons of eggs, took his money and sent him home. Before he left, I suggested that he come meet me at the side door for any future purchases he wanted to make, to which he agreed happily.
The next day, we were closed for the Sabbath. I came to the store and waited in the cold outside the locked entrance, just in case, but Mr. Austin did not present himself. I returned home, and my day had no further disturbances to my peace and quiet until I sat down with the evening paper, on the fifth page of which was a story about the carcasses of birds that were being found around the town. Blackbirds a few days ago, all the swans in the park this morning. Surely this had nothing to do with Mr. Austin, I told myself, but I did not truly believe. How much longer could it go on, I asked myself?
When we opened the store again on Monday, Mr. Austin arrived at the same time as always. He had changed clothes since I last saw him, though he wore his Sunday best and I suspect he had been wearing it since at least the day before. I was quite prepared for some ridiculous bird-related request, but he instead placed an order with our catering service, for forty-two waitresses to serve coffee at his holiday dinner. This I arranged happily, thinking perhaps his sanity was returning. When he returned the next day asking if we could provide live dancers for his dinner, flabbergasted, I committed the gravest sin of the shop-keeper, and sent him off to another merchant. I do not know where he ended up going, but I checked the paper the next morning in case the carcasses of any young ladies had been found in the parks, and to my relief there were no such stories. The next day, Mr. Austin did not come to the store, and I both hoped and feared that he has decided to take all future business elsewhere. I know now that he was merely busy with other matters. As the papers of that eleventh morning reported and as you no doubt heard yourself, that day saw a string of suicides, some thirty of the town's most respected bankers and businessmen throwing themselves from their offices within hours of each other. Some speculated that there had been a crash of some secret underground stock market, but I feared another explanation.
The day before the holiday, there was again no sign of Mr. Austin. This upset me more than if I had seen him, as up to now, the least upsetting of his activities seemed to occur on days when he came to the store. Indeed, that night, the news reported that during the day, several clubs and coffee houses were attacked by individuals no one seemed able to identify, leaving a trail of property damage and injured youths, and some twenty-two young musicians were reported missing. The progression of numbers, of course, matched exactly, and the next day, another twelve musicians were unable to be found. The pattern had come full circle, and I believed that whatever final horror Mr. Austin had been building towards would culminate that night. From our delivery department, I obtained Mr. Austin's home address, and as the sun set I drove to his spacious brown-wood Victorian manor. There was a strange chill about the place even beyond the normal winter's cold, and as I crept towards the house, strange lights danced in the windows. I approached as close as I dared, sneaking up to the great bay window so that I could look in on the ballroom. I cannot fully describe the horrors I saw in that room . . . the unearthly flashes of colour, the strange energies in the air, the greyish frost which was forming on the insides and not the outsides of the windows . . . I did not count, but from patterns of Mr. Austin's numbers I knew that I saw thirty-four men playing pipes and drums and some seventy-six dancing women. I could hear the strange sounds their instruments made and it was no sound I would call music, but rather a sound akin to the wailing of the damned. Above it all towered that which I shall never forget, a veritable mountain composed of the corpses of all manner of birds, some still obviously frozen and others clearly having long-since begun to rot, and the whole pile was moving, moving under its own power, as though the pile of dead flesh was some horrid living thing! I watched, numb and unable to take my eyes away from the scene, as the meat-thing grasped poor Mr. Austin in one glistening appendage and tore him to bits with its countless beaks, all while the musicians played and the women danced a dance that I am sure did not originate on this world, bending their limbs in places where they had no joints.
>
I have only scattered flashes of memory of what happened next. I had brought with me from the shop several large canisters of gasoline and some magnesium flares. I must have smashed down the great bay window and thrown in the gasoline, because my next memory is running breathless away from the house, the heat of roaring flames at my back, and screams of the burning meat-thing echoing, not in my ears, but in my very skull, drowning out not merely all noise but the very idea that any other noise could exist. I remember casting a single glance behind me and seeing the meat-thing writhing in flames in what I hope was agony, bizarrely counter-pointed by the musicians and dancers who, though aflame, continued their own merry party oblivious, the dancers falling only when they had not enough muscle left to hold them up, the musicians still moving their hands up and down even though their drums had burned away. I think, I hope, I pray that I saw the meat-thing fall, not to rise again. The next thing I recall, it was the next morning, and the sun was streaming in through my bedroom window. As you no doubt read in the papers, more than seventy people died in a great fire which consumed the home of Mr. Austin that night, and the police could not explain why they found evidence of accelerants but that no one had tried to flee the holocaust, even though every door and window seemed to have been unlocked.
And so, sir, I hereby resign. I believe that if I return to your store, I will spend every day for the rest of my working life fearing, perhaps even expecting Mr. Austin to walk through the front door again, eager to make some new purchase. I see horrors everywhere I look now, and I shall never be able to erase the sight of the burning meat-thing from my memory. I have seen the horrors which lurk beyond. Furthermore, I cannot come to work for you again, having broken two of the sacred rules of our profession: I stole merchandise, and I perhaps killed a valued regular customer (I honestly do not believe that being merely torn apart ended his life, you see). Thus, confident that you will not believe a word that I have written here, I thank you for your years of employing me, and I bid you a fond farewell.
Weird Tales, Volume 352 Page 12
