Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  He was late to mathematics; all the while the willow switch was stinging across his hands, he was looking out the window, where the tide was coming in.

  He grew distracted. He watched the sea when he should have been at study; he looked at little trees until he swore he could see the branches curling in.

  He kept the story folded in half inside his jacket pocket. When he was nervous, he touched his lapel until he could feel the paper pressing back.

  During science, they looked at anatomies of insects and frogs and fish and birds, the skin peeled back like the skin of a fruit, everything carefully labeled.

  He drew seals, bones and muscles and blubber cradling a pocket of organs. Beside them came drawings of men, the groups of muscles that powered the arms and the abdomen.

  At night, he cut them each in half and set them side by side.

  (Such a thing could be, he thought, if Nature was clever; he tried to determine how high the little mermaid had cleaved herself in two, before she could walk.)

  Sometimes he looked out the windows of the library and said the words over and over to the glass, his lips barely moving, watching a figure in a slate-gray dress walk the narrow path that wandered too close to the sea.

  But he wasn’t afraid, watching her; if the waves rose and claimed her, he would run down the rocks and dive into the sea, and seek her until he found her.

  He imagined pressing his mouth to her mouth until she breathed; he thought, Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

  The atlas sits on her desk, beside her globe.

  It’s safe there, of course; none of the boys see much thrill in pilfering a text.

  If Matthew wants to study in the room after the others are gone, who cares enough to stay behind? Who cares enough to watch him turning pages, examining the chains of islands to be sure he can recall them?

  His notebook fills up with mermaids in ink. He knows more of the true shapes of things than the men who made the maps, and his sirens have a breath of life.

  They have marlin tails and seal tails; their hair spreads out across the surface of the water as they gather around the bodies of the drowned.

  (He never draws the shipwrecks; the ships don’t matter, the ships are gone.)

  All the mermaids have hair like seafoam; their lips are parted.

  When she sees them, her hands tremble.

  (She wants, for an awful moment, to reach for a knife and cut until she’s cleaved in two.)

  You can’t do this, she writes in the margin. She writes, as small as she can, They were warnings; I told you, you would run mad.

  The drawings are too close to life; her face is stamped on every one.

  He leaves it on her desk two days later.

  He’s drawn a page so thick with waves the page is nearly black. Amid the storm, a mermaid—empty and white—has embraced a sailor with dark hair.

  His limbs are loose in hers; he’s stopped struggling; it’s too late.

  (Outside, when she looks, he’s standing on the path to the sea, watching her window.)

  She writes, This is not for you.

  (The waves are too dark to write anything on; she writes it across the body of the mermaid, a tattoo that swallows up her torso, her hair, her open mouth.)

  The Deep

  Once, a mermaid fell in love with death.

  Men fell from a ship in a storm. The mermaid caught one up in her arms, pressed her hand to his screaming mouth to feel the warmth of his lips. After he stopped struggling, she swam among them all, closing their eyes with the tips of her fingers, their lids so thick that she could no longer see their eyes.

  She kissed their hands; she carried each of them as far down as she dared, watched them sink into the dark water with their legs trailing like seaweed behind them and their faces sleeping, sleeping.

  They carried pink halos with them, where her nails had curled into the skin and drawn blood.

  The mermaid could not forget the faces of the drowned men; their faces kept sleep at bay, they drove her mad, and she knew she would find no peace until she could release all the suffering of men.

  And she said, “Very well.”

  She swam until her home was far behind her. She followed storms wherever they touched the water, and gathered the dead gratefully into her arms, and sent them to the depths with her salt kiss on their mouths.

  When there are no storms, or when those who die have not grief enough, she swims as close to shore as she dares, and tastes the salt tears on the air, and waves all mourners welcome in the sea.

  She has been searching since; I can see her beckoning me from my window, as I tell you this.

  The last story is written in haste, in a schoolroom in a moment of quiet, and pressed between the pages of an atlas.

  She wants to warn him, Don’t follow, don’t follow, but her hands betray her, and the story stops.

  (Nothing she says will keep him away from the water, now. He has an interest in dead things, and his hair gleams like the hair of a drowned man.)

  On the beach she strips down to nothing, walks into the waves.

  (The tide is going out; the sea is pulling at her with every step.)

  Against the rocks, the waves crash and shatter like bodies; hair like seafoam, white as bone, sharp as the water calling you home.

  Don’t follow, she thinks, just before the water closes over her head.

  Miss Warren’s disappearance caused a little uproar in the school.

  She could not be found. There was nothing in her room to suggest she had lived there at all, save the atlas. At first there was some little scandal as if she’d eloped, but then they all remembered she was plain.

  Matthew was not surprised to find her missing; he was only surprised she had gone alone.

  (He had gone down to the edge of the water. One lace cuff had gotten trapped in the rocks. It lived in the pocket of his jacket, between a story that had warned him and a story that told him what had happened.)

  For two days, he counted time. He did not weep. He was not afraid of little partings.

  (He knew what she was; he had always liked dead things.)

  On the morning of the third day, there was a storm; sheets of rain battered the windows and hid the shore from view.

  He woke when it was still dark.

  He wrote across the body of the sailor, Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

  He carried the book tucked close at his side, all the way down to the sea.

  © 2013 Genevieve Valentine.

  Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the Crawford Award; her second novel, Glad Rags, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in anthologies including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, Federations, After, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com.

  The Herons of Mer de l’Ouest

  M. Bennardo

  NOVEMBER 1761

  A loon called this morning, loud and clear in the cold hours before dawn, but it was not that which woke me from my sleep.

  As I opened my eyes, the bay and the beach were wrapped in heavy blackness, invisible clouds shutting out any hint of starlight above. For a moment, I lay in my lean-to, breathing heavily under the shaggy bison skin blanket.

  The back of my neck still tingled with the touch that had woken me—light and soft, like the caress of my wife when she wanted me to put more logs on the grate. But she has been gone these two years, and in that time there has been no other. I am alone here, and have been for months.

  Out on the water, the loon called again—her high, mournful keening sounding like the weary howl of a lost wolf. I had thought the loons had all flown already, south to warmer climes. For here it grows colder every day, and soon winter will pin me to this chilly beach.

>   I do not know the exact date today, for I have not kept careful count, but it must be November by now. Neither do I know precisely where I am, save that I am far beyond any claims of Nouvelle-France, over the stabbing peaks of the Montagnes de Pierres Brilliantes in the watershed of some west-flowing Missouri of Nueva California, which I take to be the Rio Santa Buenaventura that the Spaniards have long sought.

  I call this wide expanse of water Bais des Cedres, but it may yet prove an interior sea. If I do find an outlet, it will not be until spring. And then I will know at last that I have charted the rumored Mer de l’Ouest—that great bulbous basin of the sea which Nolin marked on the map he stole from De l’Isle, and which must be the last leg of my two years’ wanderings, the terminus of what will prove to be a Northwest Passage, which will lead me finally out, to die, on the océan Pacifique.

  Moments later, the loon called several times more, rapidly and angrily, her voice sounding strange in the shifting curtains of mist—first near, then far, then near again. I have never heard a loon cry with such alarm, save once when my canoe chanced to separate a mother from her young, so I peered from my lean-to out into the biting air of the night, watching for intruders.

  There was nothing save the dim white tops of the low waves as they rolled in from darkness and obscurity. Wave after wave, lapping in regular beats, just as it has always done, in all the months I have stopped on this beach.

  But then there was something else.

  On the tip of a prominence to the west of my camp, something moved. At first, it was barely visible through the screen of trees that crowded the spit. But soon, it had rounded the point into open view, and was sliding down the near side toward me, following the contour of the beach where it met the waves.

  I could see it clearly enough now, but still it had no form or shape. It was simply a glow—simply the glitter of the sand and the mist where some light or energy passed, bright and eerie enough to raise the hairs on my neck as I watched. On and on, the patch of light crept along, cold and quiet, rapidly spilling across the flat beach and up toward the treeline above, until even the sand at the opening of my lean-to began to glitter, a mere arm’s length away.

  Then, with swift suddenness, a sharp ray of light pierced my eyes from the inky bosom of the bay, dazzling and half-blinding me.

  Dark again, the sharp ray gone—but its echoes still blotting out everything in the darkness. I could not be sure of what I saw, could not be sure of the long black shape that seemed to pass in the water below my lean-to, trailing close after the light. But my ears were not dazzled, and plainly I heard the faint dribble of water as a paddle broke the surface of the water—then the creak of a bowstring, and the soft low hiss of a hunter who spies his prey.

  The light had moved some distance down the beach, and had caught the yellow-green glow of a deer’s eyes. There it hung as the animal stood transfixed to the spot, a silhouette in black shadows and red fur above the still-glittering sand.

  Then something dark and thin shot through the light, and the animal staggered suddenly as if struck by a blow. Foundering to its knees, it disintegrated into thrashing hooves and arching neck. Splashes followed and something dragged the dying deer out of the lantern glow toward the bay. For I understood everything now—the light was a lantern on a canoe, shined by hunters to dazzle deer and wapiti that strayed close to the shore.

  For an instant only, I saw the hunter himself as he bent over the stiffening legs of the deer—a black shadow, hunched and distorted in the dim yellow glow, but the shape plainly, incongruously visible all the same.

  And as I watched, I knew—whatever it was, it was not a man.

  Instead, my eye followed the lines of the shape, and clearly I saw the head and neck and wings of an enormous prowling heron, seven feet tall at least, towering over the carcass of the deer amidst the flickering lamplight, and glaring down the beach—head and eyes leveled coolly in my direction.

  Then the deer was pulled away into the water, and the lantern blinked out, and all was dark again.

  In the first light of morning, I followed the waterline and saw none of the splay-toed marks of heron’s feet I expected. But instead, cut sharply into the frosty sand, I found a single smooth oval—unmistakable for what it was, the fresh and clear print of a man’s leather moccasin.

  DECEMBER 1761

  If my reckoning is true and December has now come, then it is now the second winter since I shook the wretched dust of Lac Supérieur, the canting voyageurs, and the Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson all from the soles of my feet.

  For had I not come back from laying the company’s traplines to find my wife, a Salteaux Chippewa, fled into the forest with my infant son? Did I not follow her along the trail that led to her father’s village among the Anishinaabeg until I found her bones strewn among underbrush, where wolves and worse had thrown them?

  But enough. That memory does not bring her back. And here, though I have fled far enough from the lying tongues of men, I fear I may have found things even more damned instead.

  I made the discovery as I entered a wide clearing, at least two hundred yards across, empty of all trees except a sparse collection of ancient thick-trunked oaks. A carpet of dead, brown ferns as high as my knees covered the ground below, dried leaves bowed under the light falling of snow that dusted them.

  The place was charming in its way, or at least different from the endless woods of wrinkled red cedars and lichen-spotted hemlocks that otherwise ringed the bay. Rattling my snares loosely in my hand, I crossed—eyes alert for the million little disturbances that mark the trails of hares, of foxes, of mink.

  But only ten yards across, my foot kicked something under the ferns, and it rolled end over end to stop among the roots of an oak. Bending to pick it up, I found myself holding the ribcage of a small deer. Smooth white ribs showed through the accumulated dirt and patches of still-clinging fur. Carelessly, I threw it aside.

  The woods are full of such things, and more than once I have squatted on a trail, only to slowly realize that the last remains of some animal are splayed horrifically about me. It all eventually blends with the earth itself—dirty bones, patches of fur, hooves, antlers, teeth.

  But there, in that oak clearing, I was not squatting on the remains of one deer. Instead, looking about, I saw there must have been a hundred animals slain there—a thousand—more! I had only to put my foot into any clump of ferns to turn up some grisly remnant of the slaughter.

  I kicked up beaver skulls and shattered turtle shells, far from any water. Then disintegrating rabbit skins, the fur falling out in great tufts. The parts of small deer were everywhere—the usual leftovers after the crows and the ants have done their work. And then there was what, with a sudden flash of horror, I realized must be the still-articulated bones of a human child’s arm.

  I dropped that with a cry, waves of shock suddenly transforming the place around me. Then I looked up to the sky.

  My eyes followed the trunk of one of the oaks up to the bare branches that spread against the white winter sky like cracks in the firmament. And there, silhouetted in black, I could see the loose ovoid webs of nests balanced precariously—herons’ nests, in tree after tree, everywhere surrounding me, two dozen of them in the clearing or more.

  But the nests were wrong. They were large—much too large by an inconceivable factor. Where there should have been four or five in each tree, only one or two seemed to fit.

  By now, all charm had drained from the clearing. It felt instead like some ceremonial place, with the litter of sacrifices strewn about my ankles. No living bird could have built those nests—they must be the handiwork of depraved men.

  I loosened my rifle and unscrewed my powder horn, but nothing stirred in the woods around me. There was no sign of men. Then I saw, at the base of an oak, a huge contorted shape. It was a feathered neck, as thick as my own upper arm, curving up from a crushed riot of feathers and then back down to earth again, where lay the terrible head—the long sla
shing beak, the hollowed and rotten eye sockets, the obscene bulge of its gullet.

  Shivering, I stepped closer, but the bubble of the nightmare refused to burst. With trembling hand, I plucked a feather from the wreckage. It extended the length of my forearm and longer—and this was a baby, some fledgling that had fallen from its nest above before it was able to fly. I stepped back and looked again from tree to tree, then at the remains of the dead animals around me.

  Instinctively, I crossed myself—but the evil-feeling chill only deepened.

  FEBRUARY 1762

  Though I had hoped never to see them again, the hunters of last November have returned. Indeed, I would rather never have thought of them at all—or of that terrible oak clearing. I had hoped to spend the winter minding my traplines in quiet solitude, and then to depart alone again in the spring.

  It is February now, I think—not yet spring. And in the past months, even I could not escape noticing what I know is wrong about these woods. It is nothing definitive, and all easily ignored by a pigheaded man who wants to be blind. But there is the profound emptiness and quietness, the absence of so many smaller game animals, and the strange scratchings on stumps that I know are not the work of bears or cougars.

  Having seen all that, it should have been no surprise to me that the hunters would return.

  They came by canoe, and my first sight of them was out amid the mist of the bay—that same great heron shape, head cocked in hunting stance, standing terribly in the prow of the canoe as it silently glided past the tip of the prominence in the golden glow of sunset. And the unnatural size again—man-sized or more.

  My heart turned to ice but still I looked, and I saw the canoe was paddled by four other figures—apparently herons themselves. It was in looking at those four, who moved so much like men, that finally the illusion was broken and I saw that the heron was not any real heron at all, but rather a man in monstrous bird dress, worn for God knew what reason.

  How long had it been, before today, since I had seen another man? Six months, at least—but for two full years now I have avoided all as much as possible. That I knew now I had to deal with humans and not some monstrous birds was not, to me, much of an assurance or improvement.