400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  The boy kept nodding, a slather of blood on his chin. Suddenly his eyes rolled back and he slumped in a faint, relaxing the rest of his bodily control. The smell worsened only slightly. Dr. Malikudzu backed away, uncapping the rum and dribbling a bit of stasis fluid over the couch—where it could hardly be distinguished from the rest of the slime—while he shook the tiny tag into the palm of his hand. He pinched it by one end and dropped it into the boy’s yawning mouth.

  Instantly young Coover’s jaws snapped shut with such ferocity that his teeth were in danger of shattering. The boy’s throat began to tremble, ripple, and the passage of the tag was marked by the heaving of the chest. There was a lull during which the doctor capped the bottle and slipped it back into his pocket. Then Coover slid from the bed and became a sodden, stinking heap on the floor. A gibbering heap.

  Dr. Malikudzu knocked lightly on the door and Dr. Dowsie opened it. “Had enough?”

  “I think so. The sedatives seem to have taken effect. Keep me posted, will you? I’d like to stop in this afternoon if that’s all right.”

  “He might be in jail this afternoon. I’m trying to see it doesn’t happen.”

  Dr. Malikudzu bit his lip. That would be unfortunate. He didn’t know anyone at the jailhouse who might let him in.

  “Best of luck,” he said.

  “I still don’t understand your interest in this kid,” she said. “What’s he to you?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Sorry, I’ve got an appointment with the Chancellor. Shall we talk later?”

  She shook her head and called a nurse to let him off the ward.

  * * *

  His phone rang at 3:30, as he sat with his collection of little liquor bottles arrayed on the desk before him.

  “Malikudzu? This is Therese Dowsie—”

  “Dr. Dowsie, I was just going to call you. How is our patient? Not taken from our arms yet. I hope.”

  “He’s not going anywhere. There’s no way to restrain him. I think the cops are afraid to touch him.”

  “Why, what’s happened?”

  His heart, which had finally slowed after the events of the morning, now began to beat faster than ever. His dreams were coming true so suddenly!

  “I don’t know exactly what’s going on. He seems to be . . . deteriorating . . . quite rapidly.”

  “Please describe.”

  “Bone structure is liquifying. His skin is mottled, as if something’s sucking up the melanin; looks like someone spilled bleach all over him. And his eyes. . . God, it’s like looking at an octopus. They still blink. They’re yellow. We tried to move him an hour ago and he just sort of . . . sort of oozed out of his clothes and the strait-jacket. He’s still intact, somehow metabolizing, though I don’t think he can breathe. I wondered if you might have any idea how his happened. You seemed so interested in him this morning. It’s become plain to me that this is not a mental problem.”

  “It sounds . . . terrible.” He had almost said “wonderful.” “Shall I come over and have a look?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Glad to.”

  Dr. Dowsie herself was waiting to take him up to the ward. This time, unfortunately, she chose to accompany him into the room. He would have liked time alone with the remains. Perhaps it could still be arranged.

  “I think you should call Gavin Shiel,” he said. “A higher authority seems necessary now. A new stage in treatment.”

  “Treatment?” She looked considerably aged; her words were shrieked. “What can you do for that?”

  She had seen too much at once, without forewarning. He had expected something like this . . . this malign jelly. The two tags had met, given the proper host, and powered by their fusion they were eating what had once been Mr. Coover from the inside out—like earthworms processing soil, they were eating but not destroying him. They were transforming an ordinary old life into an amazing new form. It was wonderful. He prodded at it with his foot, trying to locate the brain center. Abruptly it opened a pair of golden eyes and winked at him.

  “My God, did you see that? I can’t take any more of this.” Dr. Dowsie bolted from the room, forgetting to shut it behind her. He heard her tennis shoes squeaking down the hall.

  Dr. Malikudzu had come prepared. As he stooped toward the mass he said, “Intelligent, aren’t we? More intelligent than Mr. Coover, I’d imagine, hm?”

  The jelly shook faintly, as if in accord.

  “And hardy? Durable? Life, perhaps, everlasting? As difficult to eradicate as cancer itself?”

  He had located brain, heart, liver—other major organs. The lungs seemed to have lost their utility. He extracted a long scalpel and began to stroke randomly at the surface of the thing; it was like trying to slice pudding. The slits closed instantly. He stabbed the brain half a dozen times, executing neat twirling trepanning gestures deep in the cortex, but all without effect. The eyes narrowed, staring more brightly than before. Liver, heart, nothing was harmed by his knife —and in fact he was positive that all the organs were moment by moment becoming less differentiated. This quivering protoplasm was life itself, nothing less.

  “Fire might do you in,” he said, and it gave him such a look that he almost pitied it. “I wish I could carry you away from here to a safe place. With time we might learn to speak to each other. But I’m afraid I’d need a large bucket for that task—something like one of your custodial drums. There isn’t the time. So many experiments don’t quite pan out. Eventually, however, we will succeed. I think that personally my chances are excellent.”

  He bowed slightly, stepping back as the mass extended a pseudopod and flowed toward him, flexing resilient tissue that fell somewhere between muscle and bone in organization and function. He could see it taking on new forms, working out new definitions, discovering itself. He could see how strong it might eventually become. If it lived that long.

  They would kill it, of course. They always did. With fire or water or chemical reagents. The world was hard on foundlings.

  He turned to the exit, left ajar by Dr. Dowsie, but somehow Coover got ahead of him. A thick snaky arm slipped under the door and drew it shut. There was no latch on the inside.

  Dr. Malikudzu regarded the arm with curiosity. It ended in a flat, paddlelike hand from which a dozen wriggling fingers sprouted. Shifting, liquescent, the arm now thrust itself into the air like a fleshy cobra wishing to shake hands. It swayed toward him, thrusting past his half-hearted parry. He was keen to see what it would do.

  What it did was cover his mouth. A scream was out of the question. The cupped palm exerted a slight suction on his lips, drawing them open as it gripped his jaw. Several fingers explored his gums, his tongue, and finally came to rest atop the edges of his teeth. In the center of the room, watching him from a distance, the yellow eyes of the cancer flared. The grip tightened. His teeth snapped together, severing the fingertips inside his mouth. For a moment they lay cold and oozing on his tongue, until arousing themselves, they made quickly for the passages of soft tissue and began their burrowing odyssey toward his heart.

  This journey had begun with cocktails. If only it could have ended half so pleasantly.

  * * *

  “The Liquor Cabinet of Dr. Malikudzu” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Night Cry, Summer 1987.

  GOOD ‘N’ EVIL, OR, THE ONCE AND FUTURE THING

  This is my confession.

  On this 13th day of the Third Moontide of the Smoldering Beagle Year, at the urging of both Professor Tadmonicker and my own troubled conscience, I, Maven Minkwhistle, set pen to paper. Never again will I type a single character; the mere sight of the clumsy old Underwood fills me with self-loathing for the misdeeds I have done, the falsities I have perpetuated in this already too-false world. I pray that this manuscript will not meet with incredulity in a public that has learned to doubt my word—indeed, my very name. It is not an apology, for I know that society finds such fawning to be more offensive than any crime. Nor is it an eleventh-min
ute attempt to polish my reputation with further pleas of innocence. I am more concerned for my father—dear Father! I never wanted it to end like this.

  After all, it was begun for his benefit and carried out with his tacit approval. When the first bit of truth emerged, he smothered it and pressed me to keep on in my misguided way, knowing that he would benefit in some wise from my crimes. But it may have been that he truly did not suspect me. Certainly he never understood my intentions.

  He is a good man, as I will vouch. He raised me to the best of his ability, single-handed in this endeavor after my mother died of the Laughing Sickness when I was still in swaddling clothes. We lived with several other of his tenants in our ancestral home on Downer Street, where I received acceptable tutoring at his hands. My father was a self-taught man and his education was a bit of patchwork, rather threadbare and bound to come unraveled if you nagged at it for too long; yet he was full of enthusiasm for history, and for literature in particular. Because I loved him and wanted to please him in any way that I could, I allowed myself to become infected with this obsession of his. My servility was unconscious, of course; much as I ran to fetch the beanbags which he tossed for our amusement, so I learned to read the fragmentary texts that lined the tottering shelves in his library. And it was here, on those long and lonely days when father labored in the streets, hawking his “Smokable Weeds” and “Restorative Spices Suitable for the Treatment of Mutant Gout, Twisting Fits, and Cumulative Genetic Damage,” that I discovered the old authors of Prior History.

  What wonders I uncovered in these ancient, charred tomes! The very pages, redolent of mold and nitrogen, recalled the lofty-spired cities of legend, so unlike our squat towns. I fell in love with this collection of stray, unconnected pages, salvaged from ruins that had long since lapsed into the alkaline mud of their own ashes. For me, these few thousand lines of text, these brittle pages brimming with mystery, were as vast and fantastic as the world humanity had burned to the ground. My father’s shelves seemed another Wonder of the World—a veritable Hanging Library of Babel!

  The reading public will understand my love for these works; have they not shown, by their very willingness to be duped, how much we all prize those masters and masterpieces lost in the Turbulation, known only by reputation and a few fragments of prose? Who can forget his first encounter with the timeless, tireless phrases of Sindy Sheldonyx, Jacques Collins, Lousi L'Amorgue, the sage Garfeld, Herold Rubbins, and the Master himself—Strapon Thing?

  My father adored this man and his work. At the core of his library were two prized relics, which my father on occasion, after a draught or two of his home-brewed absinthe, had been seen to put to his lips as he knelt intoning their contents, which he knew by heart. They were two treasures delivered from the roaring destruction that had obliterated every library, every book-rack, and reduced each shopping mall to a ring of fire.

  They were authentic pages from the Master’s works, deemed such by the literary experts of our day, including Professor Tadmonicker. My father had long since had them impregnated with preservative chemicals and mounted them between sheets of transparent plastic, the better to withstand his reverent kisses and the fevered friction of his worshiping palms.

  I remember well the day he brought them down from the locked chest on the highest shelf. His face was aglow with pride; his white whiskers trembled like the mandibles of the pallid pulp-eating beetles that were his bane.

  “Maven, my boy,” he said, “this is a very special day for you. A day of great honor! I know you have read every word on these shelves, have committed them to memory like your old father before you. But I hold here two pages of value unmatched, which you have not seen. Touch them lightly, read them slowly. For these, my only son, are the words of the Master!”

  Cool was the touch of those plaques to my hands, yet the words within them seemed to burn like black fire. I nearly reeled backward from the force of the scriptures. Scriptures, I call them (and I am not the first), because such was the holy purity of those lines that they spoke directly to my soul, singing of a world forever lost and a heritage that would last until eternity. “Men fear time,” it is written. “But time fears Strapon Thing.” In the few square inches of legible text between the grey spots of mold which had nearly claimed these precious sheets before Professor Tadmonicker’s lamination arrested their voracious spread, I saw revealed such insight into the human condition that my mind began to spin. It was too much! I was hurled forcibly from my body and drifted into a sightless realm composed purely of words. In my swoon, I imagined I could hear the Master speaking the words of his tale....

  As my fit passed, I realized that it was my father’s voice I heard. He had caught the plaques as I fell, and now he stood in the shaft of light from the study’s single window, chanting such of the text as was visible. I lay as one in a trance, hardly believing my ears, fearing that I must have died and gone to join the plentiful souls of the dead; for surely, no living man could have written such words. I hardly knew them as meaningful syllables. They seemed like cosmic music to me then.

  After a time my father replaced the plaques in their chest, locked the box, and returned it to its place of honor above our heads. Then he turned on me a knowing gaze, half a smile, and crouched on the floor beside me.

  “I know what you must be feeling, boy,” he said, putting a hand on my brow. “Such a loss, all those voices, in the Turbulation. And his was the greatest of them.”

  I found my voice at last. “Father... Father, where did you find those pages?”

  He nodded, thinking back toward darker days. “Hm. Once it was possible to find such things in the markets; they were little valued, except as tinder. I shudder to think of how many complete works of Thing and Cartbland were lost in the fires of illiterate gypsies, thousands of lines of classic prose going to warm a botulous can of creamed corn.... I found one tucked into a telephone directory, if you can believe that. The other was folded in half and glued with mucilage to the last page of an ancient insurance calendar. No human hands had done it, of course—it was the random chaos of the Turbulation, the same force that drove sewing needles into marble pillars, buried corks in steel girders, and sent cotton balls rocketing through the walls of bank vaults. But Chaos was kind to me on the days when I found these treasures. I was no older than you at the time. Even so, I had heard tell of these works; I had seen other fragments in the Museum. I thought I recognized them as the words of Strapon Thing, and I was soon proved correct. A distinguished head of the College studied them for several months, and then announced that they were missing pieces of two great works, Pet Seminary and Salem’s Lost.”

  “The Museum?” I asked, starting to my feet. “You mean, there are more like these? Father, will you take me? Won’t you show me, please?”

  “Ah, my boy, I have weeds to sell and tonics to distill. You must be patient. Soon we will go, I promise you that. And it would hasten things, you know, if you helped me with my work. I am getting slow and crabbed these days; it pains me greatly to stoop and pick the weeds I need from the sidewalks and the vacant lots. Why don’t you come and help me for awhile? It is time you learned a trade.”

  Eventful day! The sight of those pages acted as a catalyst, bringing immense changes in their wake. For even as my father tried to coax me into his profession, I was already thinking of another shop I had seen down the row. There was a sign in the window, advertising for an apprentice. A typewriter shop, it was, where the ancient engines were refurbished, repaired, and pressed back into the service of mankind. I realized that I would never be happy unless I could live day to day with the sight of the black, unchanging characters of the Nigglish language beneath my nose. And so, defying my father (but gently, so as not to wound his pride in his own profession), I presented myself that very afternoon at the shop of Dorky Coxset.

  Old Coxset’s shop was dark and musty, smelling of dust and machine oil. Everything in the place seemed lightly furred with clumps of greasy lint, much like the
innards of the machines he restored to working order. Coxset walked with a perpetual hunch from bending too long over the bowels of his clanking, toneless instruments. The old gentleman proffered a blackened, oily hand and listened politely to my enthusiastic bid for his instruction. I explained that I had always loved the printed word and that no other occupation would serve me so well as typewriter repair.

  “Well, now,” he replied, after a moment’s thought, “I know you from the neighborhood and you’ve always seemed a likeable boy enough...but this work is not as glamorous as you might suppose. An apprentice rarely touches a typer ‘til he’s been at the trade for three years, and sometimes four. First you must learn to repair the old ribbons and sew new ones from strips of cloth; then there is the mixing of inks from oak gall and the inking of those ribbons, and the winding of them on spools. There’s much reaming of tiny hieroglyphs in dim light, which will give you the poor eyesight of a mool by the time you are my age; add to that plentiful tightening of springs and a small bit of brightwork to be polished on occasion. Yes, it will be a good long while before you venture into the workings of the actual machine.”

  I assured him that I understood this perfectly. Merely the presence, the ineffable aura of print, would carry me through years of unrewarding toil.

  “It’s not completely unrewarded,” he said. “In return for your services, if all goes well and you prove compatible, I’ll give you a slight stipend—not much at first, mind. And in my spare time, little as there is of it, I’ll also teach you how to type. Would you like that?”