by Marc Laidlaw
“Have I met you before?” I asked, because it seemed like I must have. But she shook her head. “I’d have remembered you.” Which must have been true because I could never have felt this way about someone I already knew. It was her strangeness that made it so easy to be with her. This was just for tonight: the guzzling fuel; the single, unique and isolated spark; the bonfire that had never blazed like this before, never lifting these exact flames. Nothing ever happened twice—even though the fire was eternally the same.
Her eyes were so deep that I couldn’t pull myself out of them. I put my hands all over her, and she was on me as if she wanted to crawl inside. As we grappled, my vision went past her down the beach, along the shore, to all the other bonfires blazing like this one. Silhouettes dancing around them, figures like stick-people, hardly more than tinder themselves. The smoke rose up and blotted out the starless dark, making it churn and billow so the cast-off firelight had a place to gather and glow back down at us. It was like a scene of invasion, all of us massed at the waterline, waiting—but not to repel the invaders, hardly that.
“Coming,” she said, breathless, urgent, and pushed away from me. “They’re coming.”
As I sprawled back on the sand I knew she was right, our time was over, and I could only be grateful we had had it. The screams were louder than the waves now, and out in the black water, just at the limits of light, the boats were coming in. One to each pyre, they surged forward, sucked in by the tide, but mainly poled in by the boatmen. As they grounded on the sand, we moved in a mob from the warm glee of the bonfires and tried to make ourselves solemn or terrifying as we pulled the passengers from the boats.
It was the usual thing: some never stopped screaming, others were far past that point. A few stumbled and otherwise came along without resisting, but others had to be taken hand and foot and dragged across the sand and all the way up to the gravel. One or two always broke and ran until they saw that there was nowhere to go, and then they collapsed or staggered off into the dark or wandered back into the surf. Some had to be coaxed out of the boats again so the craft could return, empty.
Tonight there was some unexpected entertainment, though. I saw my lover whispering to one of her charges, grinning as she spoke. The girl she was talking to looked so familiar; it might have been herself long before, on the night of her own arrival. Whatever she whispered, it must have been persuasive, because as soon as she finished, the girl from the boat made a shocked face, then ran and threw herself headlong into the fire. She burned there, burned and burned, screaming. While from that mouth I’d been kissing a little while before, visible fumes of laughter poured. The taste of gas on my tongue turned flat and musty. I felt sick but I couldn’t say what had done it to me. There were too many possibilities.
I went over to the bonfire. She tried to stop me when she saw what I was doing, but I shoved her away and waded into the fire and grabbed hold of the burning girl and dragged her out again. Her hair was gone, her skin had charred and fallen in on her bones; a lot of her was simply burned away. She stood shaking and looked at her hands, cooked and raw, then up at me, and last of all at her tormentor.
“Go,” I said. “You’re not ready for this yet. Whatever she told you, she lied. That’s what we do here. We lie.”
As I said this, I felt I spoke the truth, and it was like a touch of flame to the gasoline on my breath. I choked on my words, spitting fire, and it caught in my hair and I felt myself burning all over. It all went dark, oily clouds of blackness fumed around me, and when I opened my eyes I was on my knees and the girl was stumbling off into the shadows, smoking and weeping, heading toward the roadside where the rest of them had gone. I could hear the sound of engines out there, from the trucks with hooded headlamps that came to collect them. The trucks came and went, came and went. The boats pulled away and the waves rolled in, and the pyres burnt themselves out all up and down the shore.
I realized at some point that my lover was crouching next to me, serious now, looking weary and no longer mischievous.
“I only told her what I wished someone had told me,” she said. “That’s all. You shouldn’t have said I lied. I’m not a liar.”
The pyre was almost dead. Soon it would be embers. The trucks had stopped running. Along the shore there were no other lights. Everyone was heading in.
She took my hand but I threw her fingers off. After a while she tried again and I was too tired to repulse her.
“We’ll never meet again,” she said. “You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“So are you coming?”
I shook my head. I squeezed her hand. I watched her turn toward the sea and trudge out through the surf.
The instant she was gone, I got up and ran after her, but the water clutched my ankles and the waves pushed me back. I waited on the shore, waited there in the dark, staring after her, waiting to see if she would return.
After a while the bonfires blazed at my back, and the boats came in again and again, but she was never in them.
* * *
“Bonfires” copyright 2013 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Nightmare Magazine, April 2013.
THE FRIGID ILK OF SARN KATHOOL
The wizened and sagacious wizard Sarn Kathool had put behind him all the whims and errant passions of youth, and in his estimation it was time the Earth did likewise. He had seen an end to the warm spring days of Hyperborea’s juvenescence, and knew the coming age of glaciation would unavoidably end this early flowering of man’s innate capacity to fling forth what all agreed were the highest achievements of civilization (never counting those ruins of prehuman megaliths occasionally excavated from the ancient lava fields of Voormithadreth as anything more than the uncouth, accidental conglomerations of mindless ophidians). Humankind’s autumn was inarguably upon it; winter would be harsh for the species; and Sarn Kathool squandered no opportunity to instruct his captive acolytes and inform his squirming visitors that none but he were prepared for the grinding doom that at this and every moment bore down upon them from the northern reaches of Polarion: a demonic glacier.
The sage’s servants nodded mutely—even those who still possessed their tongues—while his voluntary visitors quickly found a reason to absent themselves, leaving the old mage, with his shocked white brows and thin ichthyic whiskers, lost in what they took to be rheumy recollections of a youth they supposed he fantasized as idyllic.
In this, however, Sarn Kathool’s peers were mistaken. His youth had been a harsh and in most respects miserable one, in which any advantage he had gained for himself came only with the greatest expenditures of energy, dedication, perseverance and the steadfast application of a ferocious intelligence. Much of the authority he now wielded was his by virtue of having outlasted his rivals. This was a source more of worry than of nostalgia, or even of pride; for the great colleges of arcane investigation were poorly staffed and even more meagerly attended, and no longer matriculated skilled gleaners of esoterica with anything like the force and variety he had taken for granted in his youth. Few graduated from the remote monastic eyries of the Eiglophian Mountains, and cold were the kitchens of the Mhu Thulan lamaseries.
Sarn Kathool had witnessed the near total decline of civilization, and of man’s civilizing urges, in the course of his lifetime—a paltry few generations on the scale of men less practiced at managing their mortality. And seeing now the relentless, remorseless approach of the glacial age, he felt that the burden was on him to arrest and if possible, reverse humanity’s declining course. The ice would be his unwitting ally—which was well, as it had come to Sarn Kathool from various accounts that those who opposed the advancing sheets of crystalline cold rarely profited thereby.
His plan was to embrace and accept the course of nature, and navigate to an ideal destination of his choosing, rather than allowing blind fate to steer the species. It had been foretold in multiple oracular utterances, and in his own febrile visions, that the great demonic glacier would level the rich Hyp
erborean landscapes like a razor dragged across a whiskered cheek. Where mighty mountains crumbled and gave way before the blinding advance of frost, flimsy human structures stood no chance. No monuments of the great Hyperborean kings would survive to dazzle distant ages beyond the ice’s reign; few memories would persist even in oral form.
But there was one thing Sarn Kathool relied on to survive the ravening chill, and that was man himself: vulnerable as an individual, but wily and adaptable as a race. Therefore he bent his still keen intellect on devising a scheme for the improvement of the species. The ice would give humankind the chance for reinvention. Sarn Kathool conceived a new beginning, a new race, with all the depravity, evils and ills of this degenerate age bred out of it for good!
No one understood better than Sarn Kathool the audacity and enormity of such a proposition, but his finances were equal to the endeavor. He planned to invest every last pazoor in his creation, and no matter the extravagance of the undertaking, he intended to use all of his resources to their utmost.
From the tip of his tower, set well back in the interior of Mhu Thulan, Sarn Kathool could peer out with a spyglass on a clear, still day and see the proud although abandoned spire of the sorcerer Eibon at the edge of the distant sea. Eibon had vanished from Hyperborea just ahead of a scourge of religious persecution cunningly avoided by Sarn Kathool, who diplomatically kept fanes to both Yhoundeh and Tsathoggua symmetrically installed in the depths of his own citadel.
He daily observed the rituals and offerings appropriate to each god, to ensure that no deity would thwart his aspirations. This also meant he could not count on either one for assistance. To prefer one over the other, to beg a favor of bat-featured Tsathoggua while spurning the elk goddess Yhoundeh, was to invite catastrophe. Therefore magic could play no part in his designs. He turned instead to the far more arcane study of technology, long out of favor in Hyperborea, even though its first seeds had sprouted there, as demonstrated by the occasional discovery of vast clockwork cities beneath the crawling sands of the aural reaches.
Far and wide he sent his scouts and acquisition experts, to retrieve volumes from the rare tome repositories of Mu and the archives of Atlantis; and gradually his own library, already overflowing with rare manuscripts of illuminated pterodactyl skin and vast books cased in yellowed horn of mastodon, became Hyperborea’s most concentrated seat of scientific learning. The incenses and enchanted braziers, reeking of tradition and ceremony, were put aside for strange polished lenses, outré fuming glassware, miles of curved tubing that kept the glasswrights of Commorium busy for years on end. Along with books and secret manuscripts, there flowed into his vast manse a steady procession of youths, bought from orphanages, salvaged from the streets, acquired from slave traders either by exchange of coin or the wholesale raiding and looting of transport ships. Multitudinous were the experts and specialists in Sarn Kathool’s employ, putting all their ingenuity to work on his behalf, while never suspecting the role they played in his grand vision of humanity’s great purification, preservation, and restoration, in hand with the great cold cleansing.
Fighters, merchants, mariners, moneylenders, healers, magistrates, sharp-dealers, assassins—all occupations figured in his plan. For at heart it was simply a matter of people. The Hyperborean people were his responsibility, and he felt it deeply; they were what he sought to preserve, after all; they were reason enough to persevere.
Sarn Kathool was a keen observer and lover of people; and in a way, late in his life, he found his true calling as collector and creator of the same. The techniques of breeding, the basic principles of hybridization and the concentration of desirable traits within a population, along with the elimination of those undesirable, were known to all but the most willfully ignorant. By such rules were fine aurochs bred into prized stock, through generation upon generation of gradual improvement. The ferocious dimetrodons, so popular as guardians of the wealthiest estates, had been bred through the ages for their lurid sails of toxic pigmentation and their loud sibilant bark. The same principles could be seen at work in human breeding. But never before had anyone thought to apply them with the relentless rigor and enthusiasm of Sarn Kathool.
He selected only the sturdiest females from among his growing stock, and those unworthy of refinement he established as their handmaidens and servitors. A similar program was instituted among the males, although toward an entirely different end. The males were set to fighting and rivalry, with all manner of duplicity and martial cunning encouraged, so as to thin the ranks as efficiently as possible and inculcate the most effective predators. The females were not set at each other in open combat, but the winnowing process was no less rigorous. Sarn Kathool reviewed them daily and received the reports of their overseers, in order to evaluate which possessed the most desirable demeanor, the greatest evidence of compassion—the qualities, in short, that one would wish the mother of the coming race to possess.
When the determination had been made, and Sarn Kathool had selected the most promising virgin, she was given a strong narcotic draught and carried immediately to his laboratory, where Sarn Kathool set to work at the heart of an extravagant mechanism fashioned of ranked lenses which permitted him to peer at the inner workings of the corpuscles and animalcules that drove the animate engines of fleshy creatures and vegetative life alike. More, the mechanism was an intricate manipulator of these cells, with meshed gears and serried levers declining into ever finer forms, so that the wizard’s gross physical gestures were translated across great chasms of scale, permitting him to flex a frail index finger and thereby score a precise incision over the surface of an organelle, deploying an edged instrument a thousand times as fine as an ice-flea’s proboscis. With a delicate touch, the ancient sage delved into the prenatal labyrinths of the chosen maid, and therein made infinitely delicate adjustments to the ranks of half-formed homunculi that waited to be summoned forth in service from their mother’s womb.
By methods of manipulation now as lost to us as the graven records of Sarn Kathool’s experiments, the maid was then induced to carry several of her inborn homunculi to term, to parthenogenetic birth, and the issue of this birth was then herself surrounded by her slightly less perfect sisters, and raised among only those influences certain to inspire the flowering of the finest feminine instincts. The girls were kept in secluded chambers, where every sensory experience was carefully designed in advance by Sarn Kathool, in accordance with a strict regimen of his devising. When this maid had ripened to the perfect and prescribed age, then just like her mother before her, she was brought to the workroom, where Sarn Kathool labored over her with pride and not a little dread, for great was his sense that time was running short, and deep was his fear that he would not complete his life’s greatest accomplishment in time to do the Earth any good.
For through all his labors, the demon ice advanced. From Polarion the blue green sheets crept at a rate previously inconceivable, singing with a low ominous moan that never faltered as the monstrous crystals formed. As the ice clawed ever closer to his tower, laying claim to all the cities of the realm, and began to sizzle and quench even the four blazing craters of Voormithadreth, the glacial sheets emitted weird emergent surges, casting subauroral flickerings brighter than the sun—so that even at midday, the summer skies surged and sang with a haunting glow that had been associated previously with none but the midnights of midwinter. Soon, he knew, it would all be midwinter—winter with no end, ice with no edges. And he bent himself to the minuscule razors and gleaming armatures with renewed dedication and purpose.
What gave him some hope of success was the progress he had made with the males of the experiment. In contrast to the maids, he selected the finest fighters, the most wicked and deceitful, and from them removed their half-formed homunculi. Ice here played its first role as partner. For upon removal from the male fighters, he placed each homunculus in a crystalline vial, which itself he set in a block of ice hollowed for the purpose of preservation. Here it waited in a frigid
stasis while he summoned one of the rejected maids and prepared her womb to receive the warrior’s spawn. The maiden’s own progeny were scoured so that there could be no possibility of contamination, and then the male homunculus was implanted. Unlike a child conceived by normal means, the offspring of these efforts were not a mixture of mother and father. The males were purely male—bred for speed, size, aggression, violent disposition, tenacity, utter fearlessness, ruthlessness, cunning. Sarn Kathool knew which qualities he wished in a protector, and such were these. For Sarn Kathool’s plan was deep and complex, and extended through the ages. He had few illusions about the world that was likely to greet his progeny.
As the ice thickened around the base of his spire, his shipments of new subjects slowed to a trickle and then failed completely; but he scarcely noticed, for by now he was fully stocked on specimens; he had all he needed. He was many generations into his plan, locked in a deadly race with the advancing glacier, which moved with a restlessness that betrayed its demonic spirit, closing white claws around his tower like an evil god seizing Earth’s last scepter.
His daughters, the mothers of all future men, were pure and noble and worthy—worthy to receive the final gift that he would give them. They were the ideal bearers of Sarn Kathool’s own seed—for this it was that he intended. Parthenogenesis only to a point, and then a final conjunction, in which his own homunculi would make the short journey from Sarn Kathool’s loins to the waiting womb and the receptive, incomplete homunculi of the perfectly created maiden. And in her womb, their offspring would sleep, utterly frozen, the glacier’s greatest power used to thwart and undermine its depredations. And in the ultimate thaw, whenever after unaccountable ages it would come, that child would commence to grow…and Sarn Kathool himself, merged with this specimen of perfect motherhood, would live and lead the way in that future age—the first of a perfect breed that he himself would continue to refine after its creation.
